Evidence Tool
Archetypal Field Diagnostic
A deep cultural exploration that reveals the collective meaning system beneath visible behaviours. The Archetypal Field Diagnostic uses structured image elicitation, coherence scoring, and a mirror session to help leadership teams work with tensions that conventional culture surveys rarely reach.
Why it matters
Sometimes the culture survey says everything is fine, and everyone knows it is not.
Transformations can stall without open resistance. Structures can change while behaviour stays the same. Engagement results can look acceptable while the organisation carries unresolved stories, disowned tensions, and identity conflicts that quietly shape what people dare to do.
The core idea
Systemic Agility reads the visible operating system: how the organisation decides, coordinates, learns, and adapts. The Archetypal Field Diagnostic works one layer beneath, on the meaning system that explains why the operating system behaves as it does.
What it reveals
A structured way to surface what the organisation believes about itself.
The diagnostic asks selected informants to describe the organisation through images and scenes. Those images are retained verbatim, scored for coherence, compared across informant groups, and translated into maps that show where meaning is integrated, split, fragmented, or load-bearing.
Collective narrative
Reveal the recurring images and stories through which people understand the organisation, its purpose, its clients, its people, and its future.
Undiscussable tensions
Surface weaknesses, contradictions, dissent, and disowned material without attributing them to named individuals.
Coherence and fragmentation
Identify where the meaning system is shared and usable, where it is under tension, and where intervention would be premature.
Structural weight
Distinguish symbolic material that is central to how the organisation moves from material that is interesting but not decisive.
Developmental trajectory
Compare how informants perceive the organisation across decision making, feedback, risk, conflict, and meaning over time.
Intervention clues
Connect symbolic patterns with practical development work: purpose, dissent, leadership myths, market truth, feedback, client relationships, and care.
Meaning system
Thirteen organisational figures are explored through image-based prompts.
The protocol explores the organisation across three families of recurring figures. The prompt asks for an image first, not an explanation, so the material comes from the symbolic field before it is rationalised.
Corporate figures
Vision, brand identity, and disowned material: what the organisation is for, how it presents itself, and what it does not look at.
People figures
Inspiring figures, strategists, mentors, contributors, innovators, and undermining forces: the human patterns that carry or disturb the system.
External figures
Clients, market, partners, suppliers, and wider ecosystem: how the organisation imagines the world around it and its place within that world.
Coherence & consensus
The value is not only what people say. It is whether the field agrees.
Each figure is read through two complementary signals: mean coherence and agreement. Two organisations can have the same average coherence but completely different patterns of consensus, hierarchy split, or fragmentation.
Why this matters
Images are subjective, but subjectivity is not noise. When many informants independently produce compatible images, the pattern becomes a collective signal. When views split by level or function, the split itself becomes the diagnostic finding.
Shared and integrated
High coherence and high agreement. A usable anchor for change.
Coherent but stratified
High coherence and low agreement. Often a sign that different levels or groups live in different cultures.
Shared tension
Low coherence and high agreement. A workable condition because the material is already collectively visible.
Fragmentation
Low coherence and low agreement. Work first on figures that hold enough agreement to support movement.
How it works
A six-to-eight week read, followed by development work when the organisation is ready.
The diagnostic uses a defined system boundary, stratified informant selection, semi-structured interviews, centralised scoring, practitioner interpretation, and a mirror session with the leadership team.
01
Contract and define the boundary
Align with the sponsor, define the organisation or business unit to be read, and agree what will and will not be attributable.
02
Design the field sample
Select 12 to 20 informants across hierarchy, function, tenure, and relevant groups. Below eight informants, consensus metrics are not issued.
03
Elicit images and perceived trajectory
Interviews follow a fixed prompt protocol. Images are recorded verbatim in the language spoken, with temporal ratings across key developmental dimensions.
04
Score centrally
Controlled translation, coherence scoring, agreement statistics, structural weighting, and artifact generation are handled by a centralised scoring service.
05
Interpret and mirror
The practitioner formulates hypotheses, then returns the field to the leadership team through a carefully held mirror session.
06
Design intervention and re-read
When the client chooses to continue, development plays are selected and progress can be checked through a re-read after 12 to 18 months.
Artifacts
Five artifacts make the invisible field discussable.
The quantitative apparatus earns the right to be in the room. The anonymised images themselves are what often create movement.
Coherence Map
Positions each figure by coherence and structural weight, creating a prioritisation map for where work should begin.
Consensus Panel
Shows mean, dispersion, and agreement per figure, including splits by hierarchical level where relevant.
Constellation Map
Maps reinforcing and inhibiting relations between figures so leaders can see why direct intervention may fail.
Perceived Trajectory
Shows how informants perceive movement across decision, feedback, risk, conflict, and meaning-related capacities.
Narrative Dossier
Groups anonymised images by figure, preserving the organisation’s own language as the most persuasive evidence.
Movement indicators
Defines what would count as progress at the next read, so symbolic insight can become developmental action.
Mirror session
The field is returned, not judged.
The mirror session is where the diagnostic becomes an organisational event. The practitioner does not tell the leadership team what its shadow is. The organisation’s own images are put in the room, with enough containment for the team to work out what it is looking at.
Useful when you need to
- Understand why a transformation is stuck without visible opposition.
- Work with tensions that surveys and workshops have not reached.
- Reconnect brand identity, purpose, people, clients, and ecosystem.
- Create a shared language for material that was previously undiscussable.
Development plays
The diagnostic points to practical organisational work.
After the mirror, the development plan can draw from a play library indexed to the patterns found in the read. The aim is not interpretation for its own sake, but movement in the organisation.
Purpose and identity
Reconcile vision and brand identity when the organisation knows what it says it is but no longer knows what it is for.
Dissent integration
Create legitimate channels for disagreement when challenge appears as sabotage, cynicism, or disowned material.
Hero to steward
Move from individual heroics toward distributed decision rights and scalable responsibility.
Market truth
Restore the organisation’s capacity to look at clients, competitors, and market reality without flinching.
Feedback redesign
Separate developmental and evaluative feedback when more feedback is being produced but less learning is happening.
Care and accountability
Recalibrate systems where kindness substitutes for honesty and unspoken material accumulates.
Claims & safeguards
A deep method needs disciplined boundaries.
The diagnostic surfaces symbolic and narrative structure. It does not replace validated culture instruments, predict performance, assess individuals psychologically, or produce data for selection, promotion, or performance decisions.
Non-negotiables
No subgroup result is reported below the agreed threshold. No figure is attributed to a named individual. Informants are briefed on consent, confidentiality, scoring, withdrawal rights, and data retention before fieldwork begins.
Start a conversation
Make the organisation’s hidden meaning system visible enough to work with.
We can help you use the Archetypal Field Diagnostic when conventional culture work has reached its limit and the organisation needs a deeper mirror for meaningful change.