About The Exercises
One of the most important aspects of Totemics are the exercises.
Whilst you can read all about the theory and understand what Totemics is all about you may never relate to it.
The exercises are akin to personal analogies. They help people within the organisation firstly understand how they think about the organisation, but more importantly understand how others think about the organisation and their place in it.
Exercises are visual representations that take away the words which can so often be confused and create opposition to thoughts. It is with these visual representation that opinions become ideas.

What is the purpose of the Exercises?
A key purpose of this site is provide sufficient by way of information and guidance so that Totemic
Techniques can be used by all sorts of groups or teams for all kinds of innovative activity.
Reading about Totemic techniques can tell you something about the skills involved but acquiring
them must come from practice. Much like learning to ride a bike, where written instructions however comprehensive will not suffice, you might end up knowledgeable, but could you ride a bike?
Pause and imagine yourself writing a paragraph or two on how to stay on a bike. It will sound complicated, unlikely and risky. Similarly with Totemics, though I have written down a description of the how and the what – be under no illusion – only by doing it will you gain much of any practical use. So here are some brief guidelines and I trust you will have the good sense to try stuff out: don’t be concerned if you feel you only half understood – just think of the bike riding business!

You will find two Totemic Routines to practice:
First up – there is an introductory exercise – The Three Paintings Exercise is quite fun and simple as it asks you just to address two questions. You can do it alone for starters, but then I suggest you repeat it with a couple of other people so that you can experience the conversation aspect. A very large part of the value in Totemics is in open ended conversation.
Second, there is a Totemic Technique called the The Ten Chairs Routine. It is used to explore team working and groups. This is going to provide you with practice in using Totemics. Again – it will make more sense as you go along – a word of caution, it is a staged process and it won’t make sense if you attempt to skip a step! The Ten Chairs purpose is to unearth assumptions and prejudices. Once you have the hang of it, do it again with colleagues or friends. Totemic Techniques make use of two quite universal characteristics of humans, their predisposition to adopt symbols and assign to them meaning and the use of metaphor which is a common factor in just about all languages. Their juxtaposition may be less than usual to some people but pretty much we are all familiar with both.
To go back to the bike riding analogy – we like much of what goes along with bike riding, the art of balancing and the buzz from the speed, the feel of fresh air in the face. So what is to be liked or is familiar in Totemics? We like to use visual symbols and artefacts – they give us our place in the world we seek out emblems, brands, logos and kit to signal aspects of how and where we belong. Many of us like fashion and actually we can all be caught up with and become enthusiastic about the trappings of a trend. Totemics uses metaphor which is a core aspect of all languages: it is familiar so for example as we chat, I might say, “I bumped into Chris just now in the street” it signifies that I didn’t plan a meeting but you might ask, “What was he up to?” The word, up in this instance standing for the business of what Chris might be doing.

Visual Metaphor is at the core of Totemics.
Be reassured that you are able to do this – what is more is that the neuro-scientists tell us that, as we retrieve a memory, it first arrives as an image or series of images prior to being converted into words and a story we can tell. We are visual first even when we have been adeptly programmed to not understand this of ourselves.
The conversations that are an intrinsic part of a Totemic Routine just do draw out from us the assumptions that we hold tacitly rather than explicitly. Acquiring the skill to do this builds out a far richer field of options in a non confrontational and quite natural fashion. We need this for innovation activity.
In his book The Strange Order of Things, Antonio Demasio wrote: “The same protagonists, the same place, same events, same outcome – can yield different interpretations and thus have different meanings depending on the way [any storyline] is told…….the nature of the respective descriptions relative to magnitude and qualification are decisive for the interpretation we make……..for how it will be stored in memory and for how it will be later retrieved”.
In a Totemic Routine conversation, when we adopt an image to act as a metaphoric vehicle we imbue it with aspects of all of the above and in doing so we help some of the tacit assumptions we hold yet cannot easily put into words, to make their way to the surface to be understood by us and others in a somewhat more explicit guise.
It is useful to remind ourselves that the word metaphor comes from the Greek word metaphoros, meaning to transport, or perhaps for our purposes here to be a vehicle for something.
When meaning is carried in a metaphor, the lack of any detail can feel more OK. The conventions surrounding metaphor can be particularly helpful for development work and scientific enquiry where new angles or maybe challenges to accepted wisdom are necessarily short on detail. A classic example of a metaphor in science came from the early descriptions on the behaviour of atoms as “bumping into one another”. I believe it enabled lots of talk over and about the how, why and what of the “bumping”.