Character

Character is developed in two senses at once: the Aristotelian sense of a disposition cultivated through repeated practice and visible only over time, and the dramaturgical sense of a role occupied within a larger narrative. The chapter insists on both, and on the difference between either of them and a trait.

It works through settings chosen because they are extreme rather than representative: public order policing, post-conflict governance, and long-run NHS organisational change. Extreme cases strip away the institutional scaffolding that normally makes narrative work invisible, which is exactly what makes them useful.

The organising concept is the meaning void — the interval in which the old shared account has dissolved and the new one has not yet stabilised. What people lack there is not information but a common architecture of interpretation.

1. What is being cultivated here through repeated practice, and what is merely being measured?
2. Which of our tasks are genuinely impossible, and which are only very difficult?
3. Whose account of their own actions does this organisation actually require?
4. What is the emotional sequence people are about to go through, and has anyone told them?
5. Who has no role at all in the story we are telling about the future?

• Meaning void
• Habituation
• Narrative accountability
• Emotion as practical judgement
• Impossible jobs and tasks
• Agency myth
• Prospective emplotment
• Meta-emplotment

• Public order policing and the 2011 disorder
• The 1995 Nicaragua property forum
• NHS transformation

Related lens: Character

Related tools: Change Type Reflection · Narrative Landscape Mapper

Status: paraphrased from the manuscript · author review required