| It's very similar to the career-focused work carried out in the field of personality type. I used to go to organizations and interview members, and then help describe to them where their arrow was going to consistently land, based on the favored personality-perspectives of those who worked there. You'd quickly get a picture of how everybody worked together, and then it'd click. Boom, "if there's a way to paint a target right about...
here, so to speak, definitely do it." That kind of thing. It was interesting to me because the work often showed a very sharp relief around the concept of "core self" and "projected persona". A lot of people run fantasy businesses and effectively hallucinate what it is they do, or offer. This feels like a tremendous mission to them of course, and it provides important energy. But you had to be very careful about telling people that the persona--or the "who I want people to think I am / we are" was by definition generally less available in terms of raw productivity energy. This would tend to kick the logic stool out from underneath their value proposition. Then they automatically think, "of course, so life has to be boring." IOW if you were telling an architectural illustration firm, established and profitable after years of hard work, that they were basically a political advocacy organization by default, and probably couldn't _not_ be that if they tried--that was not really something you could just come out and say to everybody. So to this day I'm very familiar with orgs out there that are hired for architectural illustration or whatever, and then the topic of political maneuvering comes up, and the client suddenly pulls them in closer, and later keeps asking for illustration work in the future, because...well, probably because they like the huge discount they get on political strategy! That the vendor doesn't want to look at their own work this way is not the client's problem, and the accompanying under-valuing of their services definitely seems to be a covert benefit. |