Skip to content
Chromatic Coherence

Hue knows · Priority two

Storytelling, where the cast is small and the moves are many.

The roles a story is told through and the moves it is assembled from — dramatis personae, archetypes and actants, beside the dramatic situations, narrative functions and journey stages that carry them.

What a Hue Model is

The model holds the domain; your org holds its own light on it.

A Hue Model is the world model of a domain — its rows, the positions they stand in, the two sides they fall on, and, where the domain has one, the source of truth that settles a row. There are no people in it. It is a model of the world, not of anyone in it, and it has no cutoff — only a last-visited state. You stand somewhere in it and it answers by position.

Stand somewhere, and the rows come to you

You copy a position out of the chamber's own map and send it back. No words are matched and nothing is guessed on your behalf — the door reads structure the index already carries, and answers with the neighbourhood you are standing in.

The rows below arrived with no search term at all, by position alone.

NARRATIVE FUNCTIONSPreparation

placed
16
observed
0
unobserved
16
reached
16

the room you named

absentation

A family member leaves home or is absent

function

interdiction

A prohibition or command is addressed to the hero

function

violation

The interdiction is broken

function

reconnaissance

The villain seeks information about the victim

function

delivery

The villain gains information about the victim

function

trickery

The villain attempts to deceive the victim to take possession

function

complicity

The victim is deceived and unwittingly helps the enemy

function

the rest of its floor

villainy or lack

The villain causes harm, OR a member of the family lacks/desires something

function

mediation

The lack is made known; the hero is dispatched or allowed to go

function

beginning counteraction

The seeker agrees to or decides upon counteraction

function

departure

The hero leaves home

function

first donor function

The hero is tested, interrogated, attacked — preparing the way to a magical agent

function

hero's reaction

The hero reacts to the actions of the future donor

function

receipt of a magical agent

The magical agent or helper is acquired by the hero

function

guidance

The hero is transferred to the whereabouts of the object of search

function

struggle

The hero and the villain join in direct combat

function

THE JOURNEY

placed
9
observed
0
unobserved
9
reached
9

the rest of its floor

the ordinary world

The life the hero has before the story disturbs it

function

the call to adventure

The problem, challenge or invitation that opens the story

function

refusal of the call

The hero hesitates, declines, or is held back by fear or duty

function

meeting the mentor

The hero gains counsel, training or an aid before setting out

function

crossing the threshold

The hero commits and leaves the known world behind

function

tests allies and enemies

The new world is learned through trials and the company found in it

function

approach to the inmost cave

Preparation for the central ordeal; the stakes are named

function

the ordeal

The central crisis — a confrontation with death, loss or the greatest fear

function

the reward

What is seized or learned by surviving the ordeal

function

A position the chamber does not hold comes back as a question

NOT A REAL ROOMUNKNOWN_CATEGORY

7 rooms

The door never substitutes a nearby name. An unknown position returns the map instead, so the next thing you send is a place that exists rather than a guess that looked close.

Every row arrives already knowing its state

The reading is not a ranked list. Each row comes back in one of three states, and the state is the useful part — it tells you whether to build on the row, to go and look, or to honour it before you do either.

Zero point

The contract the work must implement. It is present whether or not anyone went looking for it, and it constrains the answer rather than decorating it.

Observed

Rows your org has already returned on. A lit row carries your org's reading as well as the chamber's.

Unobserved

Reached, and your organisation has not returned on it yet. This is the invitation, and it is where a return is worth the most — every one of them is a row you can light.

Two sides, and an ask lands on one of them

Storytelling is indexed as who is in a story and as what happens in it. The two sides are very different sizes here, and that is the finding rather than a gap.

The moves

  • DRAMATIC SITUATIONS35
  • NARRATIVE FUNCTIONS31
  • THE JOURNEY12
  • BASIC PLOTS7

The cast

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

8

ARCHETYPES

7

ACTANTS

5

A story has few people in it and a great many things that can happen to them. The index is shaped like that because stories are.

Seat levels

A Hue Models seat opens every Hue Model — the domains here today, and the ones that follow them.

Seat

One person working in an org

£19/seat/mo

5,000 units per seat, per month

Ask for a place
Most orgs start here

Org

An org putting real work through it

£29/seat/mo

25,000 units per seat, per month

Ask for a place

Team

An org that leans on it daily

£79/seat/mo

100,000 units per seat, per month

Ask for a place

House

Arranged, not bought

Custom

100,000+ units, a named contact

Talk to us

Per seat, per month, pooled across the org — so one busy week never costs a quiet colleague their work. Lighting a row — returning what you observed — is the Observer's Index.

Before you compare two models

A hue identifies a row within a model, and never across them.

Bands are allocated per model and some overlap, so one hue can appear in more than one model. Each model is its own coordinate system, so two rows sharing a hue in different models are not related.