Applied identity at the worksite

An Applied Identity Review is easy to mistake for career advice. Sitters arrive with a position description and an unspoken hope that the sitting will tell them whether to stay. That is not the work. The work is to analyse how an identity is being spent in that field: which name the roster prints, which accent is flattened on the telephone, which trade identity survived a plant closure only as a story told at lunch.

The field is a room

We ask the sitter to name the rooms of the worksite, not the org chart. A staff kitchen can spend an old name more stubbornly than a letterhead. A loading dock can hold a nickname that the office never heard. A parent-teacher night can hand back an identity the classroom had already put down.

Once the rooms are named, we look at the identity being spent in each: kept, performed, hidden, or refused. The written review is a map of those spendings. It will not recommend a resignation. It may make a resignation, or a staying, clearer because the spending is no longer vague.

Papers that belong to work

Useful pages include a badge, a roster, a letter of appointment, a name-plate photograph, an email signature the sitter cannot bear to send. Policy manuals are usually dead paper. They describe the field the institution claims, not the field as walked.

Two colleagues should not share a sitting. A shared sitting collapses into who did what in a meeting. Book two reviews, or book a canvas if the worksite is only one station in a longer journey.

After the half-day

Sitters sometimes ask us to send the review to a manager. We will not. The review is written for the person in the chair. If they wish to quote a line in a grievance or a farewell speech, that is their paper. The studio will not appear as a witness to a workplace dispute.

If the worksite is only the latest station, and the older ones are pressing, the Identity Journey Canvas is the longer form. The review can wait; it should not be stretched into a life story in a single afternoon.