Fractal of 7 (Principles 4-7)
From internal focus to external locus
Why is California overwhelmed by regulation? Why does Florida handle Hurricanes so well? What is it about China that creates such beautiful synchronization? What makes San Francisco so special and so messed up? All those answers and more are in these final 4 archetypes. Read on!!
The 4th fractal represents a pivot point from internal focus to external focus—looking within myself or in my group shifts to looking outside to influence, interact, or align.
Archetype 1 is naively selfish—it is fascinated with the world from its own point of view. There may be an external goal as they try to invent something, but even then, the underlying drive is to understand. Once they have the idea in hand, they’re likely to move on to the next one. Of course, if they’re manifesting perfectionism, they’ll take a little longer to move on. It is humility itself: it is so fascinated with the world, it doesn’t self-examine, except as another one of its many subjects of exploration.
Archetypes 2 and 3 are focused in on the internal relationship within their own social groups. They care who’s in and who’s out and how each person relates to the group. Their own group dynamics are the core of their fascination.
Archetype 4 shifts its focus to what’s happening on outside of their own group and each successive archetype moves farther toward those on the outside. At this point in the sequence, they are stable within themselves and have a sense of belonging that makes the internal dynamics less of a focus. They’re ready to move out into working with something beyond themselves.
4th Chair: Exhorter/Influencer, the Principle of Influence
The key focus here is on Influence, but the goal is to communicate reality: the nature of cause and effect. This is the “Look at Me!” phase of early childhood, but there’s a dynamic in that stage that is easy to miss. Of course they want to get noticed, but their real motivation is to share what they have just discovered about the reality of the world with someone else. Influencers are storytellers, individually, and meaning-makers corporately. The goal of any good story is the moral: communicating the consequences that follow a course of action. Stories that fail to do so fall flat. They are the most persuasive of the architypes but rarely have to rely on manipulation or coercion because they are able to show consequences, yet they leave the choices up to their audience. Of course, in crafting a story for someone else, they quickly learn that the presentation itself can either help or hinder the flow of the story. Because of this, they are more interested in appearances than any other archetype. Of course, the focus on the sensory nature of the expression can degrade into its own goal—the attention seeking facet of the “Look at me!” stage.
LA, Paris, and Amsterdam are influencer cities, as is New Amsterdam—New York, particularly Manhattan. They can get big and are often wildly successful, but there’s probably one in your neck of the woods too. In Central Florida, Winter Park fits that mold. Influencer communities are hard to miss. They are big on image to the point of being flamboyant. Cultural diversity is common, yet each culture retains its own distinct identity.
Because the presentation is important, there’s a high level of consistency in what gets built and a lot of centralized planning and regulation to make sure it stays that way. Developing in an Influencer community—like California—is excruciating. The community is expansionist, almost as an effort to expand its own internal audience. Businesses tend to grow opportunistically, rather than build step by step, with a fair amount of risk tolerance, almost to the point of gambling. Sensory experiences with an emotional impact are a huge part of their pattern—good food, falling in love, fragrance, beauty, fashion. Sensuality—dopamine hits—are typically normalized, with little thought of the potential for predatory behavior.
5th Chair: Giver/Agent, the Principle of Stewardship
Stewardship feels like an archaic concept, but it’s really no different than the idea of agency: managing someone else’s resources for their benefit. One critical nuance is that this stewardship emerges out of a heart for multigenerational abundance, both to those in the group and those outside it. It is the next step in social impact: setting the community up to create value both inside and outside of it over the long term. To be able to serve others, they have to be self-sufficient, which makes them very independent. There’s an inherent win-win goal at play. Internal resources are carefully managed so there is abundance for generosity and trade. They make sure they have resources backlogged to take advantage of new opportunities, but not in a predatory way. Their goal is to build value in others to for their own long term benefit. This is the developmental stage where kids learn to work hard to get what they want—whether it’s good grades or a pitching trophy. People who manifest this archetype want to be good and be seen as good—salt of the earth folks. Systems in this archetype are great at managing resources in order to provide value. They’re not great at innovation, but they’re careful enough to be good at incubating new life in its earliest fragile stages, whether that’s a baby or a new business venture. They will backlog resources to handle any foreseeable crisis.
Florida is a classic giver state. The budget is balanced every year and any extra tax revenue creates a tax holiday for the next year. Any emergency could wipe out all that has been set aside, so they have contingency plans for every likely disaster—we don’t plan for a blizzard, but there are tax holidays every year for hurricane prep. We tend to tell FEMA when we need them after the storm, but usually handle most of our emergencies with little or no help.
That’s also part of why Florida is so welcoming. The people that come become a part of the asset base, and we’re not afraid to require people to be responsible for themselves so that they will be an asset, not a liability. Diversity is not just tolerated, but honored for its differences. Gainesville and the University of Florida are giver communities. The invention of Gatorade is a great example. A nutrition professor noticed how the football players sagged later in the game as they sweated out their electrolytes, so he made sure they didn’t. Then the University, who owned a big part of the resulting patent, created a bankroll from it that still helps fund university operations and more research. Japan is also a giver country: their personal savings rates are a wonder to see and their ability to steward beauty over centuries is legendary.
This shows up some in parenting as well. In Japanese culture, children are both treasured, but given both freedom and responsibility at far younger ages than most would think prudent in the West. Schools don’t hire janitorial staff because part of the role of the school is to teach maintenance abilities to the kids—so that’s their job.
There’s a natural pairing between the giver and prophet. Prophets are innovative and givers are able to implement, but they see the world very differently—prophets move fast and break things. Givers move carefully and are big on maintenance. That means the pairing is either spectacular or disastrous. The US and Japan: either Toyota or kamakazi’s, followed by Hiroshima. Germany and the Jews: the European banking system or the holocaust. There is no in-between.
6th Chair: Ruler/Teambuilder, the Principle of Accountability
Traditionally, this principle is listed as freedom, but not the type of freedom we normally think of. It’s the idea of setting the systems up so that people can make the the best choices for themselves and the whole. This is what it takes to make teamwork work. Their ability to produce, hold together, and accomplish a goal is unparalleled. Conformity and rule-keeping are honored at the expense of individuality and innovation. They mirror the servant archetype, but focused on an external goal or task rather than internal nurture. They build lasting systems—large teams that coordinate well over centuries. Ideally, their orientation is towards a goal, but they can get so good at working together, they forget what they’re working towards. If the goal is their own internal welfare, they can turn expansionist and be completely unapologetic about it. They can lapse into competition (winning as their goal) which can devolve into consuming themselves in order to achieve the goal. No other type is as good at predation for its own sake, or as they would see it, “leaving it all on the field to win.” Politics and bureaucracy find their highest expression in this archetype. Leadership is afforded father figure status, which means the masses will willingly enable their own exploitation if their father deems it important for the good of the family. Honor is paramount. This can and does get abused, but the abuse can go both ways. In order to please their leadership, frontline folks can fudge numbers, making data analysis a challenge. Diligent coordinated effort is the hallmark of this archetype.
It’s hard to think about the Ruler archetype without thinking of China and Russia. Like the US and Germany who are both prophet nations, they are very different manifestations a Ruler nation. Who else in the world but China would have come up with the social credit system? From an academic standpoint, their universities are very, very good at statistics and will likely excel at AI systems—more by hook or crook than by real innovation. Similarly, a Russian never does anything without a plan. Is it any surprise that Kaspersky was the best anti-virus for many years? Washington, DC is a ruler city—entrenched in its bureaucracy and often oppressed by its congressional leadership. The opening ceremonies for the 2008 Beijing Olympics provided the West with an unforgettable demonstration of what this type of orchestrated teamwork can accomplish.
Servant and ruler fit together like two puzzle pieces, balancing strengths and weaknesses in both. Ruler needs the nurture that servant can provide, and servant is often content to work within the structures that Ruler creates. However, there are equally natural ways that this pairing can become abusive or enabling.
7th Chair: Mercy/Aligner the Principle of Fulfilment
Relationships, harmony, alignment, and peace are the hallmarks of a Mercy community. It embraces the idea of “good enough” and embodies a spirit of creativity that connects hearts, not minds. Work is done in flow states, at the right time with a high amount of seemingly effortless alignment. There is an emphasis on sensory experiences that are harmonious but pull together a wide variety of tastes, sounds, or smells in surprising ways. They can be tolerant to a fault, with all but the intolerant because they are made for restoration. It is a refuge where the rejected can find a people that are willing and able to see what the value of what made them “weird.” That can mean that they tolerate injustice or predation longer than is wise. They are pacifist to a fault. If the 6th archetype culminates in frenzied, coordinated activity directed toward a common goal, the 7th is the exhale that comes when the work is done or the free floating speed that comes once the spacecraft breaks the bonds of gravity. The first of the archetypes is driven to understand all of the rest. The last, embodies them all, effortlessly through harmonious alignment.
Canada, San Francisco, Portland, and Austin are all Aligner archetype communities. They are well known for their amazing sensory experiences and tolerance. When Portland was laid out, the developers knew that corner lots were the most valuable, so they made the blocks smaller, so that all of them could become corner lots. They have slightly more roadway than most cities, but the smaller, more frequent streets are filled with life. They work with the market trends rather than creating or shaping them. The laid back, collaborative attitudes of Canada and San Francisco are legendary. Aligner communities have been leaders in the diversity and identity movements, which makes them well suited to multinational coordination. However, their passivity keeps them from addressing problematic behavior patterns, which can stunt their business growth and make them hard to live in. Their planning tends towards “pie in the sky” which leaves the development community with risky uncertainty.
Up next:
Over the next few months, I’ll pull out each of the fractal positions and build them out more thoroughly in terms of how to work within each archetypes individually to talk through what it looks like to plan, design, and work in each community type. The goal is to help you understand how to draw out what is best in them. It’s an important consideration as you’re working to shift your community toward something more livable, but just one of many tools, so I’ll probably only hit them once a month. That’s part of why I’ve been doing double posts the last two weeks. I’ll be back to one a week starting next week.
I’ve got a pile of speaking engagements coming up through the rest of the year, so I’ll probably preview what I’m speaking about as time goes along. CNU is only a month away!! Hope to see you there.