Monday, March 30, 2009

a little more about the bricoleur and how structuralist approach might provide the B2B CRM / CEM roadmap

the academic structural linguist describes their world using a few terms, their version of our specialized jargon then come into play. Four key ones for my purposes: syngtagm, paradigm, synchronic, diachronic.

The "syntagm" is our equivalent of "a sentence."

The "paradigm is "sorta like" the elements in each sentence, the cat chased the mouse (being the simplest example).


Individual elements are said to have syngtagmatic and paradigmatic relationships with one another.

"Synchronic" means (forgive me, if you already knew), of course, "at the same time"

"Diachronic" means "across time."

Obviously,(and without invoking Shroedinger's Cat) things alter across and during time. (For that last bit, read The Garden Of Forking Paths by Borges).


How the structuralists of the 1930's then put these framing theoretical concepts into place is most easily explained by these two individuals' usage.
The Russian folklorist Vladimir Propp used these concepts to describe elements in a his investigation of how the various elements of plot change  across folkloric retellings of an individual story. While, if we refer back to Levi-Strauss, his determined "desired end-state" would be to collect all the myths of each kind, on a file card, and cross reference them by element. (do I dare describe a multi-dimensional datacube?). Levi-Strauss hoped to discover "reality."

as Customer experience and customer relationship management reaches the strategists and CEO's, our suggestion is that this structuralist framework opens an entirely new, thorough and proven mindmap and roadmap along which to travel.

Our roadmap thus will look across the entire enterprise, using multi-dimensional, analytic tools and qualitative and quantitative research. One way in which to envision the results of looking at the functional areas under investigation would be to visualize a series of matrices, which overlap and identify dots (in my dot-to-dot game metaphor) , which then need to be connected and woven into the fabric of the mosaic we are creating.

Which gets me back to "bricoleur, who in addition to being a handyman, a tinkerer, is also a mosaic maker. Whew!

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