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The Research Behind the Framework
The Creative Archetypes Profile is a psychometric instrument built on thirty years of doctoral research into how creativity actually works — across individuals, cultures, organisations, and history.
The Framework: Why These Three Archetypes — And Not Others?
The model derives from a synthesis of creativity science, Jungian symbolic theory, anthropology, neuropsychology, and cultural history.
The Sage, the Explorer and the Trickster are not arbitrary categories. They were not chosen for their symbolic resonance or cultural familiarity, though they have both.
They emerge inevitably from a single foundational question:
What does every genuinely creative idea — in any field, in any era, in any culture — actually need to be?
The answer is three things. Always three things.
Every creative idea must be valuable — worth something to someone, produced with sufficient expertise and craft to meet the standard the field demands. This quality requires deep knowledge, technical skill and lived experience. It is embodied by the Sage.
Every creative idea must be new — original rather than merely derivative, cross-pollinated rather than self-referential, capable of bringing novelty the field it enters. This quality requires openness: curiosity, tolerance for uncertainty, and the humility to be genuinely changed by outside influence. It is embodied by the Explorer.
Every creative idea must be counterintuitive — surprising in its logic, resistant to the obvious answer, willing to go where consensus says not to. This quality requires oddness: the courage to stand against convention, the irrationality to trust instinct over pure calculation, and the capacity for non-linear thinking. It is embodied by the Trickster.
Remove any one of the three and the idea may still be interesting. It will not be genuinely creative. Valuable but predictable is competence. New but worthless is novelty. Counterintuitive but ungrounded is eccentricity.
The archetypes are not a typology imposed on creativity from the outside. They are what creativity is made of, given symbolic form.
The Researcher
I'm Dr. Michael Bloomfield, the founder of Kermanu. An anthropologist with a PhD from the University of East London, where I also lectured, I've spent much of my career working with some of the world's leading organisations in marketing and cultural insight, including the BBC, Virgin, Deloitte, P&G, Barclays and IBM.
I've taught at Bayes Business School, Brunel University London, the London Interdisciplinary School, the University of Bradford, the University of Brighton, Anglia Ruskin University and Coventry University.
A writer, musician and semiotician, over the last three decades my creative life has converged on a single obsession: understanding creativity itself.
Full Kermanu system: kermanu.com →
Speaking and keynotes: michaelbloomfield.uk
Contact Dr. Bloomfield → michael@thecreativearchetypes.com
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