THE LEXICON

The Lexicon

Thirteen terms I use on this site with specific meanings. Some I coined, some I did not. Each entry gives the definition, the earliest document that carries the term, and a link to where the idea was being practised — often years before it had a name. Where I cannot evidence a date, the entry says so.

These are the terms Kevin Barrett uses on this site. The engagements behind them are on the record.

Creation Society

If the Knowledge Society was Drucker’s answer, what comes after it?

The Creation Society is the era that succeeds Peter Drucker’s Knowledge Society, in which information must become knowledge and knowledge must create.

Drucker named the Knowledge Society — work organised around what people know. The Creation Society is the argument that knowing is no longer the scarce thing. What is scarce is the willingness to make something with it. Every member of an organisation has to gather information, convert it to knowledge, and apply that knowledge to something new.

Not to be confused with the Creation Society (創造社), the Chinese literary society founded in 1921.

“We have moved from the ‘Information Society’ into what Peter Drucker calls the ‘Knowledge Society’… I believe we have passed through the ‘Knowledge Society’ into what I call the ‘Creation Society’. It is a natural progression, information must be converted into knowledge and knowledge must be used to create.”
— 12 Faces of the Millennium, 25 February 2000

A note on the evidence. The date comes from the document’s own file properties — created 25 February 2000, last saved 23 October 2002 across seven revisions. That is self-held evidence, not third-party timestamped, and I would rather say so than imply more. A date of 2005 appeared on this site previously; it was the PDF export date, not the writing date, and it has been corrected.

Creatrepreneur

A Creatrepreneur is someone who builds with entrepreneurial discipline and creative formation, and who asks not only whether the work will scale but whether it heals or harms.

The word compresses creative and entrepreneur, and the compression is the argument: the two were never meant to be separate roles. A Creatrepreneur treats the business as something that forms people — customers, staff, the owner — rather than as a mechanism for extracting value from them. The term is the noun; Formation over Extraction is the verb.

Drucker’s entrepreneur belongs to the Knowledge Society. The Creatrepreneur belongs to the Creation Society.

First evidenced in a document

A seven-page article on K.J. Barrett & Associates letterhead, titled The Creation Society — What is it? and How to become a “Creatrepreneur”, uses the word ten times, including in its title. It sets out the derivation in full: Agricultural → Industrial → Information → Knowledge, attributed to Drucker → Creation. It cites Nonaka and Takeuchi’s The Knowledge-Creating Company, uses Prigogine’s bifurcation points and open-versus-closed systems throughout, and takes 3M’s autonomous business units as the open-system example. It carries SOULutions, and an early unnamed form of what was later called Formation over Extraction — that a Creatrepreneur “will create Things of Value,” and that a solution “has the ‘Whole’ as its primary motivator.” The author biography records that Kevin Barrett “likes to refer to himself as a ‘Creatrepreneur’.”

What the document can and cannot date

This is a working document, updated and reused over years — which is how this writing has always been produced. It carries several dates, and they do not agree.

The filename supplied with the file reads 1998, and a separate commentary describes it as a 1995 article. Neither date is supported by anything in the document, and neither is claimed here.

On the most conservative reading — 2008 — the word was in considered use, as an identity and inside a derived argument, roughly fifteen years before it was defined in the academic literature. No claim of first use is made.

Not to be confused with the creator-economy sense of the word, defined in Alexander Edeling and Simone Wies, Embracing entrepreneurship in the creator economy: The rise of creatrepreneurs, International Journal of Research in Marketing 41(3), September 2024, pp. 436–454. Both senses describe creative work built into a venture that sustains itself. They differ in what the word names. The paper’s sense is a category a person belongs to — a content creator who scales an audience to sustainable revenue. The sense used here is a practice a person performs, and can fail to perform — one that asks not only whether the work will scale but whether it heals or harms. No connection between the two senses is claimed in either direction.

Note on evidence

No document has been located that establishes when the word was first used, and none is claimed. What is established is use, in a derived argument, at a date. Two gaps are recorded rather than filled: no earlier document carrying Creatrepreneur has yet been located here, and no published etymology of the word exists anywhere located — the 2024 paper above introduces the term without citation, footnote, or prior-art reference.

Formation over Extraction

Formation over Extraction is the principle that a business should build value into its people and relationships rather than take value out of them.

Extraction takes value out: vague terms, chased payments, funnels dressed up as gifts, urgency manufactured to close. Formation builds value in. The test is simple — after the transaction, is the other party more capable than before, or less? Formation over Extraction sits underneath every other term on this page, and it applies to this site’s own checkout.

The practice is decades older than the name, and saying so is more useful than claiming both. That gap is the ordinary case, not the embarrassing one — most people are doing the thing long before they can say what it is.

Inner Quality Management

Inner Quality Management is the application of Deming-era systems thinking to the person rather than the process — the premise that an organisation’s quality is bounded by the inner state of the people running it.

The quality canon holds that most failure lives in the system, not the person. Inner Quality Management takes the next step: the person is also a system, with its own inputs, variation and special causes, and can be worked on with the same discipline. The term appears in Working from the Inside Out, a change programme written for AMP Custodian Services executives in the 1990s. It is the direct ancestor of the Foundations Workbook.

Super-conscious Competence

Super-conscious Competence is a fifth level added to the four stages of competence: the point at which a practitioner draws across unrelated areas of their own unconscious competence to create a new response rather than retrieve a learned one.

The standard model runs unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence, unconscious competence — and stops. Unconscious competence is the driver who no longer thinks about the clutch. Super-conscious Competence is the level above: the response that has never been made before, assembled in the moment from competencies learned somewhere else entirely.

“I believe there is a fifth level, which I have called: Super-conscious Competence — You are now able to link up to other areas in your Unconscious Competency data base and create NEW creative responses. The perfect response for any given situation.”
— 12 Faces of the Millennium, 25 February 2000

Best for All Concerned

Best for All Concerned is a decision discipline: before acting, weigh People, Planet, Profit and Purpose together rather than optimising one.

It is not a promise of a perfect outcome and it is not consensus. It is a discipline of consideration — the requirement that all four are on the table before the decision is made, so that a choice which quietly costs one of them has to be made knowingly.

Conceding this one is the point. A lexicon in which every term is the author’s own invention reads as a brochure.

Psycho-Sclerosis

Psycho-Sclerosis is the hardening of attitude by which a person, or an organisation, stops being able to change.

Arrived at independently; Ashley Montagu got there first. Montagu (1905–1999) used psychosclerosis for the hardening of attitude that stops a person dreaming, seeing, thinking and leading. The term was in use here before that prior art was known, and it goes up with the attribution rather than as a coinage.

Why it goes up this way. The term was in use here before the prior art was known. Publishing it as a coinage would have been the one error this whole architecture exists to prevent; publishing it with the attribution shows the checking works.

SOULutions

SOULutions is a values framework for building solutions that serve people as well as problems, resting on four pillars: Shared Humanity, Overcoming Trauma, Unity of Purpose and Long-Term Interdependence.

The name joins soul and solutions: a solution is incomplete until it accounts for the people who live with it.

Used in The Creatrepreneur Foundations Workbook and the Self & Strategy Audit.

A note on the evidence. The word appears in the same article that carries Creatrepreneur, so it takes that entry’s dating and its caution: the conservative reading is 2008–2009, and no claim of first use is made.

Scrolling Deficit Syndrome

Scrolling Deficit Syndrome is the conditioned habit of skimming instead of reading, where a thin layer of truth carries whatever is laid on top of it, and there is no longer time to tell the two apart.

Feeds reward the fast reaction over the considered one. Over time the reader loses the capacity, and then the appetite, for depth: contemplation, the slow read, the double take. Decisions get made from the surface, and the person making them feels informed.

Signs: reacting to headlines; deciding from summaries; finishing nothing long; feeling informed without being able to explain.

Antidote: deliberate depth — read slowly, pause before reacting, and form a judgement rather than collect an impression.

Not a medical or clinical term.

Inconvenient Manufactured Consent

Inconvenient Manufactured Consent is what happens when the information was delivered, but the decision was made as if it had not been.

Manufactured consent, as Lippmann and later Herman and Chomsky described it, is agreement shaped before the decision is made. The inconvenient form needs no shaping at all. The fact was written down, sent, and addressed to the people who needed it; it went unread, and the decision was made around it. No one lied and no one conspired. The urgent story in the room was louder than the inconvenient fact in the inbox — and the person who raised it is often the one who pays.

A note on the evidence. This date is held by LinkedIn, not by me: the post’s own identifier encodes its publication time, the morning of 1 October 2026. It is the first entry in this Lexicon with a third-party timestamp.

The Sixth Filter

The Sixth Filter is the loop that shows you more of what you already react to: first in the feed, and now in the AI you ask for advice.

Herman and Chomsky named five filters through which a free press shapes itself: ownership, advertising, sourcing, flak, and the common enemy. They could not have named a sixth, because it had not been built yet. It needs no one to lie. The feed only has to learn what makes you stop scrolling and give you more of it; an AI model only has to build on the frame it is given. The result is not censorship but abundance, sorted by your own reflexes.

The Consent Check

The Consent Check is three questions a leader asks before any decision made under urgency.

1. What am I being told to fear, and who benefits if I act on that fear?
2. Who raised an inconvenient fact, and how was it received?
3. Did I ask my AI to test my direction or to confirm it, and did I ask it to argue the other side?

Three questions, two minutes. It does not tell you what to decide. It tells you whether you are still the one deciding.

Not to be confused with consent checks in privacy, medical or legal settings.

Co-Creation through Co-Elevation

Co-Creation through Co-Elevation is Kevin J. Barrett’s extension of Keith Ferrazzi’s co-elevation concept into the AI age: artificial intelligence and human intelligence rising together, transparently — AI amplifying human formation rather than replacing human worth, with humans holding judgment and machines holding scale.

Neither ascends at the other’s expense; they create together.

Last updated 3 October 2026. Corrections are logged at /record.