The Personal–Collective System (PC System) is a concise, structured framework developed by Dense Analysis to help individuals and groups pursue meaningful, high-value objectives. It uses a four-dimensional scoring model broken down into Fun (“Will I enjoy it?”), Achievement (“What will I gain?”), Ease (“How little effort is required?”), and Impact (“How much good does it do?”). A reference tool is available to clearly visualise where the best objectives may lie. The system is designed to support both solo goal-setting and collaborative planning, with guidance, tools, and best practices contributed and refined through real-world use.
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Please consult the following sub-pages for collective wisdom from authors and thinkers from around the world and across time that complement the PC System and build towards a shared Dense Analysis Philosophy.
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How To Win Friends and Influence People
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Systematising objective-setting helps clarify a vague and difficult topic: how to set goals for yourself or others. The PC System provides a means to quickly and efficiently discover the most appropriate goals for an individual by weighing personal interests and growth opportunities against goals of a collective. Adding clarity and efficiency to objective setting reduces tensions between individuals as each individual will tend to achieve more for themselves and others.
The PC System introduces an algorithmic guide for objectives setting to function ****as an advisory tool, complete with a reference implementation that is freely available online. The PC System tool can be applied with the web browser reference implementation. It can be sketched out on paper, drawn on a whiteboard, or otherwise applied.
The PC System encourages general application of a Dense Analysis philosophy for work that combines the conventional wisdom of several key authors, lecturers, project managers, philosophers, and more. Importantly, the PC System and the shared Dense Analysis philosophy of work encourage critical thinking, with the ultimate aim of selecting the most valuable work and improving performance, both Personal and Collective, in pursuit of high-level goals.
The PC System captures the following four dimensions, that answer four important questions, which are separate factors. You may rate an objective separately higher or lower across these four dimensions. The goal is to find objectives that optimize the most for all four dimensions.
In the Western world we read information from left-to-right, and the system has been designed such that the dimensions can be drawn on two Personal and Collective planes where the label for a vertical y-axis appears first, and the label for a horizonal x-axis appears second. Written as a series of mathematical values as four dimensions, we can see the four dimensions mathematically as such.
$$ (A,F,I,E) $$
You can remember which dimensional components the system includes by the sound “/ɑː fiː/”, or you can say “a fee,” as in, “you pay a fee in time to complete objectives.” The four dimensions can be split into separate coordinates for the Personal and Collective sides as such.