01
Archetypal family
Who shares your underlying orientation?
The Medicine You Carry
01
Two Different Kinds of Relationship
The 15 leadership archetypes cluster into five archetypal family triads. These triads bring together three roles that share a deeper orientation, even when their work takes very different forms.
Think of an archetypal family as kinship. These are the archetypes most likely to recognize something of themselves in one another. Their attention keeps returning to a similar part of the human task.
02
Collaborators
Whose abilities create the strongest working chemistry with yours?
These two maps can overlap, but they are not the same. A collaborator may belong to your archetypal family, or they may come from a very different part of the framework. Archetypal family describes resonance. Collaboration describes what becomes possible when different medicines work together.
02
The FiveArchetypal Families
01 / 05
The Emergence - Pioneering Triad
The Wayfinder+The Disruptor+The Movement Maker
This family is oriented toward change that has not yet become established.
01
The Wayfinder
perceives a direction before the path is obvious and begins reading the terrain.
02
The Disruptor
interrupts the beliefs, customs and systems preventing change from taking hold.
03
The Movement Maker
turns personal conviction into shared commitment and coordinated action.
The Wayfinder sees where we might go. The Disruptor challenges what keeps us where we are. The Movement Maker gathers enough people and collective force to begin changing reality. Together, they help a possibility cross the threshold from the margins into public life.
02 / 05
The Healing Triad
The Healer-Integrator+The Space Holder+The Wisdom Carrier
This family is devoted to how human beings heal, integrate and move through the passages that change us.
01
The Healer-Integrator
works directly with the wound and supports people in healing themselves.
02
The Space Holder
tends the container, the threshold and the conditions that allow transformation to unfold.
03
The Wisdom Carrier
brings the teachings, practices and long memory that help us meet suffering without being defined by it.
Each one understands that healing is more than the removal of symptoms. It is a return to relationship with the body, with life and with the deeper wholeness that has never been lost.
03 / 05
The Bridging Triad
The Synthesizer+The Ancient Futurist+The Unifier
This family restores conversation where something important has become separated.
01
The Synthesizer
bridges ideas, disciplines and seemingly unrelated bodies of knowledge.
02
The Ancient Futurist
bridges time, bringing older forms of intelligence into conversation with emerging science, culture and technology.
03
The Unifier
bridges people, helping those shaped by different experiences and worldviews find the common ground on which an honest conversation can begin.
The medium changes, but the instinct is shared: find the relationship that fragmentation has made difficult to see.
04 / 05
The Living Transmission Triad
The Storyteller-Mythmaker+The Inspirator+The Transmitter
This family understands that culture is shaped by what moves from one person to another through story, beauty, resonance and embodied wisdom.
01
The Storyteller-Mythmaker
gives experience language and helps people understand the stories shaping what they believe is possible.
02
The Inspirator
awakens aliveness, beauty and the desire to protect what makes life worth living.
03
The Transmitter
gives lived insight a form that can travel through a body of work, teaching or creative transmission.
All three carry something that cannot be reduced to information. They help meaning become felt and remembered, then give it a form through which it can keep moving.
05 / 05
The Regenerative Culture Triad
The Sacred Steward & Earth Guardian+The Artisan+The Weaver
This family is concerned with how a life-sustaining culture is actually lived: through our relationship with land, the art, design and craft through which culture takes form, and the ways we care for one another.
01
The Sacred Steward & Earth Guardian
tends the land, the waters and our responsibilities to the more-than-human world.
02
The Artisan
gives culture form through art, design and craft, shaping what people can see, hear, use and inhabit.
03
The Weaver
strengthens the relationships and distributed systems of care that allow community to become dependable.
Together, they root regeneration in place. They remind us that culture is not only a story we tell. It is what we build, what we protect and how we live together every day.
03 · In collaboration
The Strongest Complementary Collaborators
Archetypal families describe a shared orientation. Complementary collaborators bring capacities that may be very different from your own. They help your work travel further and keep you from trying to carry every dimension of it alone.
These are the strongest collaborative constellations currently named on each archetype page:
Synthesizer
Storyteller-Mythmaker
Movement Maker
Wayfinder
Wisdom Carrier
Space Holder
Storyteller-Mythmaker
Healer-Integrator
Wayfinder
Movement Maker
Healer-Integrator
Storyteller-Mythmaker
Space Holder
Sacred Steward & Earth Guardian
Wisdom Carrier
Movement Maker
Wisdom Carrier
Ancient Futurist
Wayfinder
Disruptor
Movement Maker
Unifier
Movement Maker
Storyteller-Mythmaker
Weaver
Ancient Futurist
Wisdom Carrier
Transmitter
Unifier
Disruptor
Healer-Integrator
Transmitter
Synthesizer
Ancient Futurist
Space Holder
Weaver
Unifier
Weaver
Unifier
Space Holder
Inspirator
Storyteller-Mythmaker
Movement Maker
Artisan
Storyteller-Mythmaker
Inspirator
These constellations do not need to be symmetrical. They describe what most strengthens the primary archetype's particular work. Each page also names additional collaborators whose gifts may become important in different contexts.
04
How This Relates to theGreat Turning
The archetypal families and Joanna Macy's Three Dimensions of the Great Turning are different maps.
The families describe the deeper orientation an archetype shares with two related roles. The Three Dimensions describe where that archetype's work most directly contributes to the larger transition from an industrial growth society toward a life-sustaining culture.
An archetype can belong to one family while serving more than one dimension of the Great Turning.
05
How to Use This Framework
01
Personal reflection
Your archetypal family can help explain why certain roles have always felt familiar.
02
Reading your results
Your primary archetype names the gift you most naturally carry. A supporting archetype from the same family may deepen that orientation. One from another family may bring a very different quality into how your primary gift is expressed.
03
Finding your collaborators
Your collaborators can reveal whom you may need beside you to bring the work fully into form, so you are not trying to carry every dimension of it alone.
04
Team building
Members of your archetypal family may understand one another instinctively, but a strong team also needs complementary gifts. Do not mistake resonance for completeness.