Archetypes

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What the CdI Is

The CdI (Culturodynamics™ Indicator) measures organisational culture at three levels simultaneously. Beneath the six Styles and the five Factors sits a deeper layer: the Foundation, or Cultural Paradigm — eight organisational archetypes broadly derived from four Jungian dichotomies (Orientation, Focus, Decision matrix, and Type based Decisiveness). Where Styles describe what a culture looks like from the inside, and Factors describe the dimensions that produce that culture, Archetypes describe something more fundamental: the underlying narrative pattern that makes an organisation’s culture feel coherent, and worth defending.

A cultural style describes an observable configuration of practice — the effect of how decisions get made, how risk is treated, how tightly procedure is followed. An archetype describes the underlying pattern that makes that configuration feel emotionally coherent — why certain people are held up as examples, why certain language recurs unprompted in how employees describe “who we are”, and why some changes that look straightforward on paper meet disproportionate resistance. A change initiative can be well designed at the level of structure and incentive and still fail, because it implicitly asks the organisation to act against its own dominant pattern.

Archetypes are best understood as settled patterns rather than fixed properties — an organisation does not possess a single archetype the way an object possesses a mass. Given sufficient change — a change in leadership, a survived crisis, a strategic pivot — an organisation’s pattern can shift, while retaining traces of the one before it. Despite their stability, it has been shown that archetypes do shift in accordance with stages on organisation life cycle.

The Eight Archetypes

The CdI identifies eight organisational archetypes: For people that know jungian typology, the closest Jungian functions are added for understanding.

[Individual descriptions for each of the eight archetypes to follow — placeholder pending final content.]

• Values (Jungian-Fi)
• Collective (Jungian-Fe)
• Logic Order (Jungian-Ti)
• Decisive (Jungian-Te)
• Strategic (Jungian -Ni)
• Vision (Jungian-Ne)
• Reliable (Jungian- Si)
• Pragmatic (Jungian-Se)