I’ve written a lot about identity, and in a few cases talked about some “elements” of what we consider identity about our selves, whether people, organizations, businesses, or communities. I’ve also used terms like “core identity” and “peripheral identity” – the former being associated with metamorphosis and altering transformations, the latter with all other types of aspirations and transformations.
Finally, here, I want to get serious about what comprises identity. I’ve toyed with a number of elements, even creating a hierarchical list that I showed in one post, but the problem was it was just a set of items, with no structure other than what I felt like were more core to less core. That has long been a cue for me to develop a real framework, as I wrote about in a Strategic Horizons Thoughts post, “Just a List of Stuff”.
Interestingly, though, I already had a framework for it, and knew it was there, but resisted using it! It didn’t include terms that I thought were key elements of identity, and it was developed not for people but for businesses to think about their identity, so that in terms of authenticity they could work to be perceived as true to themselves in their customers’ eyes. But friend and colleague Kim Korn, my coauthor of Infinite Possibility: Creating Customer Value on the Digital Frontier, uses this framework in his own work, and convinced me it was the one to use here. He then helped me think through it in a way that would apply to not only businesses but people, organizations, and communities. Realize that what I describe here aren’t elements of identity (a term I’ve used before), as if they were all independent components that could be together, but rather aspects of identity, for they intersect, combine, merge, and even meld into each other, often without bright lines between them.
I won’t reveal more, but just let you read it below. This section will go in the chapter on understanding aspirants and aspirations, along with the Types of Aspirations framework (Part One and Part Two), along with discussions on categories of aspirants, transformation catalysts, and the Regeneration Matrix, which will be redone significantly.
Joe
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All transformations entail a change in identity.
Aspects of Identity
All transformations entail a change in identity.
Which is strange, if you think about it, for identity comes from the Latin idem, meaning “same”, closely related to “identical”. The Oxford English Dictionary’s first definition is “absolute or essential sameness”, with the second– “The sameness of a person or thing at all times or in all circumstances”. Meaning that a person or thing – by definition! – cannot change in identity![i]
And there is a sense in which you are the same person you were a decade ago, as a youth, a child, even at birth. Some essence of you has not changed. For instance, the expression “You can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy” (often said disparagingly of others, and often with pride about oneself) speaks to unchanging identity.
What we’re really talking about is a change in self-identity.
What we’re really talking about with transformation offerings, being fundamentally individual (as discussed in chapter 1), is a change in self-identity. How you, as an individual, identify your being, whether it be as a person, organization, business, or community. This concept of a “sense of self” is the way in which Psychology Today defines the term:
Identity encompasses the memories, experiences, relationships, and values that create one’s sense of self. This amalgamation creates a steady sense of who one is over time, even as new facets are developed and incorporated into one's identity.[ii]
I love how therapist and professor Suzy Ross expresses it, as “all the ways you can complete the statement ‘I am. . . .’.”[iii] How many ways can you complete this identity statement? Dozens, scores, hundreds, probably thousands of ways if you thought about it long enough.
A transformation occurs when you can complete the statement, “I was X, now I am Y”
A transformation, then, occurs any time you can complete the statement, “I was X, now I am Y”.[iv] The “Y” in this transformation statement of how you now think about your identity is therefore often expressed with adjectives: “I am thin”, “I am fit”, “I am disease-free”, “I am generous”, and so forth. (You can easily imagine what “X” words would precede these in a transformation statement.) But it might also be nouns: “I am a gardener”, “I am a sailor”, “I am a vegan”, “I am an optician”, “I am a medalist”. Note that in English the five suffixes on each of those words – -er, -or, -an, -ian, -ist – turn words into what are known as “agent nouns”, words that express an action or agency related to the primary word.[v] People often use agent nouns to express identity.
Of course, there are many ways we can complete the transformation statement in ways that do not signify lasting change or that regard trivial matters – “I was tired, now I am energized”, “I was cold, now I am warm”, “I was reading, now I am watching TV”. As we saw with ordinary experiences that do not rise to the level of economic experiences, such ordinary, prosaic changes do not rise to the level of economic transformations.[vi] They are changes in state, not changes in being.
For those statements that do denote lasting, significant change in being, however, it is always some aspect of identity that changes. It is therefore advantageous to understand these aspects when it comes to designing, developing, and guiding transformational offerings.
This framework employs interrogative inquiry to discover and define the aspects of identity. In logic and philosophy this holistic set of seven questions goes way back, at least to Aristotle who talked of “the seven circumstances” for understanding the nature of any object of inquiry.[vii] The answers to these questions – who, what, where, when, why, how, and in what way – define or characterize the object in question. Note how that final, least familiar, question – in what way – seeks to understand and address the harmonization of the other six aspects into one integrated whole. It enables opportunities to strengthen the understanding of the question under investigation as well as its external circumstances (everything that lies outside of the object of inquiry).
In applying the interrogative inquiry here, the seven aspects of identity for any individual entity are:[viii]
Essence: Who are you at your core?
Heritage: When did your current identity form?
Values: How is your identity manifested?
Purpose: Why do you exist?
Attributes: What do you do in the world?
Path: Where are you going?
Way of Being: In what way do you live out your identity in the world?
Note that these are not elements of identity, as if they were all independent components, but rather aspects of identity, each one being a distinct view of identity as a cohesive whole.
These aspects apply not only people but of organizations, businesses, and communities.
These aspects and their defining questions work for the identity of not only people but of organizations, businesses, and communities. It’s worthwhile examining your individual self to understand your self-identity. So many of us lead unexamined lives, and so often don’t even know why we do what we do. And that is certainly true for organizations, businesses, and communities as well. I guarantee that if you do, arenas of aspirations will open before you.[ix]
Recognize again that every transformation you guide happens within one of these aspects of identity, and usually across multiple aspects. But understanding the distinctions of each one provides the basis for understanding your customers’ aspirations, and then guiding their transformations.
The Aspects of Identity table below shows the formulation of each identity-seeking question and its answer, which I then discuss in detail below. Working through this inquiry process reveals and clarifies the identity of any transformation aspirant.