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Monthly Archives "March 2020"

Learning with your kids at home: how we unschooled

March 24, 2020 By Chris Corrigan Being, Featured, Learning, Unschooling 4 Comments

From the time my daughter was born in 1997, my partner and I went hard on studying learning theory to understand how kids learn, what’s good for them and how to support their growth. These little beings don’t come with instruction books. It’s hard enough to learn how to feed and maintain them, let alone figure out how to help their brains and hearts grow.

We studied for a lot of years and gradually landed on the work of John Holt, an educational psychologist who, in the 1960s and 1970s, studied how children fail in the Boston school system. Motivated by that work, he later wrote a book called “How Children Learn” which was a seminal text in what became the movement of “unschooling” or “life learning.” This is, to some, a radical approach to homeschooling children.

In the early 2000s, along with a few other families on Bowen Island, Canada where we live, we created a publically-funded homelearning support community called Island Discovery Learning Community. There, our children could come together with other kids and adults, with teachers and resources, and even with curriculum and assignments, to engage in self-directed learning in the community.

Unschooling is a serious commitment and we did this with our children until they were 13 and 10 respectively, following their leads, and guiding them until they chose to go to school. At that point, we treated their choice as another step in their learning journey and at the end of every year, checked in with them about whether they wanted to keep doing that. They said yes, and have both since made their way into university – our daughter first as a jazz musician and now studying psychology and criminology, and our son going part time to explore subjects that might interest him, currently focusing on economics.

I share with you this history so you know that I have some experience in what many of you are facing right now. Kids at home, not feeling like you are qualified to teach them anything, not knowing what to do and maybe even afraid that without school they will be set up for failure in life. It’s all real.

SO to give you some hope, I want to share a few key principles and practices that work when you are homeschooling kids. Your mileage may vary.

First, relax. Even if your kid took a whole year off school, it is not going to lasting damage to them. You are not falling behind, and your kids isn’t losing an advantage by spending a tremendous amount of time away from a classroom. Things will be fine. Trust me.K

Don’t replicate “school” at home. This is a recipe for failure. Your home is not a school and probably the last thing your kid wants is a full scale conversion of their living and playing space into a school run by a nervous parent who is trying to replicate a mass education institution with no good grounding in theory or practice. Your home needs to be a home, especially now, and it needs to be a place of safety and security and love for your kids. Try to avoid doing things that place pressure on your relationship and that cause the child to become angry, resentful, or distant. If your school district is giving your child work, make sure it doesn’t take up the whole day. Remember that they need time to goof off and let off steam. So do you, probably.

Notice that you are all learning all the time. Leaning always happens best in context. Your kids will have ample opportunity to practice reading, math, epidemiology, art, music, video editing, writing, research, cooking, animal care, mutual aid and support, ideation, design, technical skills acquisition, and life skills right now. Just like they do every day. Just like you do every day. Learning doesn’t stop, especially in a context that is always challenging and offering up new experiences. What you can do is take time to notice what they are learning, collect examples of their work and build a portfolio together. Homeschooling families do this all the time because if you never go to school, this is how universities court you to attend their programs. On your body of work.

Kids learn at different speeds. For busy parents who are not intimately involved in their kids’ education, it might come as a surprise to realize that your kids all learn things at different speeds. Our son taught himself to read at 4 years old. Our daughter didn’t start reading until she was 10. They both learned to read in a couple of weeks when they were ready to. If you are getting homework from the school and it seems to be taking your kid ages to grasp a concept that is because it takes them ages to grasp a concept. They might not even be ready to grasp it. They are not broken. There is not something wrong and they are not “losing.” You might need to put aside that concept and do something else. Don’t forget there is nothing essential for them to learn right now in this moment. You could spend months trying to teach a kid something when they aren’t ready to learn and find out that a year or two later, they get it right away. Don’t force it.

Adopt this simple pedagogy: STREWING AND CONVERSATION. Seriously, these two practices took us through a decade and a half of support our children’s learning. Strewing means that you flood you environment with interesting things – books, websites, podcasts, videos, games, challenges, work, interesting people – and you watch to see what they attach to. When they show some interest in something, engage them in conversation with genuine curiosity. Ask them questions so that they can teach YOU about the topic. Don’t quiz them or judge where their attention goes. Even if they spend hours playing Fortnight, get in there with them and understand what they are doing. Ask them questions about how they make decisions, come up with a strategy and work together. I daresay that you will learn something from having them teach you about situational awareness, rapid-cycle strategic iteration, and real-time collaboration.

Love them above all else.  Can I just bluntly say, that being a parent right now is fucking hard. You’re not failing if you’re feeling that. Your kids are anxious, worried, and carrying a lot as they move through this disruption in their lives. They can’t see their friends and they are possibly even beginning to hear stories of people they love who are getting sick. If they can’t focus on schoolwork, don’t force them to. These are traumatizing times. What they need right now is probably a good hug and a cry. I’m not sure that is an age-dependent need, actually. The most important thing of all is to love them and care for them right now. Make them as happy as possible right now, because that is what will help them stay resilient, and that is the most important thing.

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A tour around the latest Cynefin iteration

March 23, 2020 By Chris Corrigan Complexity, Emergence, Featured, Flow, Improv, Leadership, Learning, Unschooling 12 Comments

Every year, to celebrate St’ David’s Day, Dave Snowden has shared a series of posts on the evolution of the Cynefin framework. This year he introduced the newest version. The framework changes, because as we use it, it has an evolutionary journey towards “better” and more coherent. Not every branch in its evolution has had helpful components, but I find the current iteration to be very useful because it is both simple to use, easy to introduce, and yet has quite a bit of depth.

During the pandemic, I’ve been using this version of it to help people think about what to do and this is how I propose to tour you around it as well.

First, it’s helpful to orient people to the framework. To begin with, it has five domains: the one in the middle, plus four others. It’s helpful to think of the domains as a slope, starting high in the bottom right and tapering counterclockwise around to the bottom left. The domain in the middle is the most important for me, and the most underappreciated. It is the domain of Confusion (it used to be called Disorder). The domains on the right side are “ordered” meaning that stuff there is largely knowable and predictable, and problems are solveable. These Clear or Complicated domains are, distinguished by the number of interactions going on – the more parts in the system, the more Complicated it is – and the level of expertise required to know what the answer to a problem should be.

The domains on the left side are “unordered” meaning that situations are unknowable and unpredictable. This is the world of Complexity and Chaos. These are distinguished by the way the system changes, self-organizes, and creates emergent phenomena. Complex systems exhibit emergence and self-organization, and Chaos exhibits the lack of any meaningful constraints a sense of randomness and crises.

The further you go counterclockwise, the more unordered and unstable the system is. If you go clockwise, you introduce stability and order to the system. Stability lies clockwise of where you are now and instability lies counterclockwise. It is important to note that this is true until you get to the boundary between Clear and Chaos. That is like a cliff. One falls off of the Clear domain into chaos and it is difficult – if not impossible – to recover and clamber back up to the well-ordered world with Clear answers.

Most helpful for understanding strategy and the use of the framework is understanding how constraints work. From Clear to Chaos, one can move through the framework using constraints: Clear systems have fixed constraints that can break catastrophically and can be repaired easily f you know what you are doing. Think of a water leak. If you know how to repair it, it is a simple matter to do so. If you don’t, you fall off that cliff into Chaos quite quickly, and it takes a lot of time to get back to normal.

Complicated systems allow for a little more latitude in practice and so have governing constraints, such as laws and procedures. Break them at your peril, but also discuss them to make sure they govern activity in the system well.

Complex systems are characterized by enabling constraints which give rise to all manner of creativity, emergence and self-organization, but which can also be immutable. Think of the laws of physics or principles of evolutionary biology that seem to generate a huge variety of systems and living beings. But we don’t have a creature that can breathe by oxidizing neon, because neon doesn’t oxidize.

Constraints in complexity can be quite tight and still contribute to emergence and creative action. Think of the way the rules of the haiku form don’t tell you what to write, but instead offer guidance on the number of syllables and lines to use: three lines of five, seven, and five syllables. These simple constraints give rise to tremendous creativity and inspiration as you work to create beauty within a distilled form.

In Chaos the absence of constraints means that nothing makes much sense, and all you can do is choose a place to act, apply constraints and quickly sense what comes next. This is what first responders do. They stabilize the situation and then figure out whether a technical expert is needed (to operate the jaws of life) or whether the situation needs to be studied a bit more (so we know how a pandemic actually occurs and the different ways a new virus operates in the human body).

That’s the basic orientation to the framework. There are additional features above that are helpful to note, including the green zones of liminality and the division of the Confusion domain into A and C, standing for Aporetic and Confused. Aporetic means “at a loss” and indicates an unresolved confusion, or a paradox, which is just fine. Sometimes things need to remain a little murky for a while. “Confused” refers to the state of mind where you just aren’t getting it, and you don’t understand the problem. It’s often the result of a failure to see past one’s own biases, habits, and entrained patterns of solving things.

Contextualizing your problem

One meaning of the Welsh word “Cynefin” is “places or habitats of multiple belonging.” The name of the framework references the fact that in any situation of confusion, you are likely to have all five types of problems or systems at play. So when you are working on trying to understand a situation, start by assuming you are in Confusion. As much as it is tempting to look at all situations related to COVID-19 right now as Chaos, they aren’t. In fact, the desire to do see them that way is actually a key indicator that you are in Confusion. When I am teaching this framework, I sometimes label this domain “WTF?” because that is precisely what is happening here. We don’t know what’s going on, we’re confused, and we’ve never been here before. Any data you collect about a problem should all go into the Confused domain first.

From there you can ask yourself where things belong. This is called a Cynefin contextualization and is a core Cognitive Edge method for working with Cynefin. It works like this: you literally put as many aspects of your situation on individual post-it notes as you can, put them in the middle of a table and sort data into basic categories according to these criteria:

  • If the aspect is clear and obvious and things are tightly connected and there is a best practice, place it bottom right.
  • If the aspect has a knowable answer or a solution, has an endpoint, but requires an expert to solve it for you, put it top right.
  • If the aspect has many different possible approaches, and you can’t be sure what is going to work and no one really has an answer, put it top left.
  • If the aspect is a total crisis, and you are overwhelmed by it, put it bottom left.
  • If you can’t figure out which domain to put the aspect in, leave it in the middle for now. NOT EVERY POST IT NOTE NEEDS TO GO IN THE FOUR OUTER DOMAINS.

Now you have a table with five clusters of post-it notes. You can do lots of things with your data now, but for me, the next step is to have a look at the stuff on the right side. Make a boundary between the stuff you can do right now (Clear) and the stuff you need an expert to help you with (Complicated). You can cluster similar pieces of data together and suddenly you have little projects taking shape.

In the top left corner (Complex), make a distinction between things that are more tightly constrained and things that are less tightly constrained. Think of this domain as a spectrum from closed to open. For example, moving my work online is constrained by needing a laptop and some software, and a place to work and some hours in the day to minimize interruptions. Those are fairly tight constraints, even though I know that I’m not going to get it right the first time around and no expert will solve it for me. I have to make it work for my context. Figuring out how to manage a team of eight people from home is much less constrained, and even comes close to chaotic. So that gives you a sense of the variety possible as you move from the boundary between Complicated and Complex and the boundary between Complex and Chaos. And you can see now why the liminal spaces exist there too. It’s not always clear cut.

Anything else on the left side that is overwhelming is in Chaos, so leave it down at the bottom left. If it is an actual crisis, you probably should take care of it right now and then come back to your framework later!

Stuff that is still confusing stays in the middle and you might want to take a crack at sorting things into Aporetic and Confused. An example of Aporetic might be trying to figure out whether you have the virus or not without being able to get tested. Because you can’t know for sure, you have to hold that knowledge in suspension and let your actions be guided by the idea that you might have it, but you might not too. But you might. You just can’t know right now.

So now you have options:

  • For Clear aspects, just do them. Don’t put them off either, because failing to do so will drop you into chaos. WASH YOUR HANDS OFTEN FOR 20 SECONDS WITH SOAP. That’s an order. Orders work well here.
  • For Complicated aspects make a plan. You might be able to find someone to help you learn the technical aspects of setting up a zoom meeting. You’ll definitely find videos and technical documentation to help you do it. You can learn that skill or find someone who knows it. This is what is meant by Sense-Analyse-Respond. Do a literature search, listen to the experts, and execute.
  • For Complex problems, get a sense of possibilities and then try something and watch what happens. Figuring out how to be at home with your kids is pure complexity: you can get advice from others, talk about with friends and strangers, read blog posts and tweets, but the bottom line is that you need to get to work and learn as you go, engaging in a rapid iterative cycle and see if helpful patterns emerge. As you learn things, document practices and principles that help guide you in making decisions. If rules are too tight, loosen them. If the kids need more structure, apply it. Finding those sweet spots requires adaptive action, and learning as you go. Here we talk about Probe-Sense-Respond. Don’t worry about collecting tons of information before acting: it won’t help you past a certain point. Act on a hunch first and monitor the results as you go.
  • Liminal complexity means that you are choosing to enter into proximity to either Complicated or Chaos. if you apply constraints (like enforcing rules on the kids) you are moving complexity towards the ordered domains. That might work, but too much rigidity will create problems. On the other hand, if your constraints are too rigid you may find yourself unwittingly creating patterns that make it hard to flow with the changing times. And so you release the constraints until you can discover something new and helpful, and then apply constraints again to help you manage in complex times. An example might be adopting the assumption that you are a carrier of the virus and letting that assumption guide your behaviours. That helps you to make choices that will probably benefit you and the people around you. (And here are some heuristics to practice with if you have kids at home during the pandemic)
  • For chaos, you are going to need to apply constraints quickly and maintain them until the situation stabilizes. That might mean self-quarantine if you are infected and sharing a house with others. It might mean relying on emergency services to impose those constraints for you.
  • For confusion, think of this as the top of the fountain and as new data enters your system, add it there until it trickles into the right domain. I like to revisit things that are in this domain from time to time, because as I get to work on stuff, sometimes my confusion about other things disappears, or sometimes I find a true paradox that can never be resolved and those are delightful in themselves.

So, to conclude

In summary:

  • Cynefin is a five (expanding to seven) domain framework. Whatever you are doing probably has aspects of all the domains at play at any given time.
  • If you need to learn something, or discover new things, loosen constraints. If you need to stabilize a situation, tighten constraints.
  • In the Ordered domains, rules, laws, and experts are helpful and should be obeyed. In the unordered domains, principles and heuristics should be adopted that are coherent with goodness, safety, and care, to guide behaviour and learn new things.
  • In chaos, stabilizing the situation is most important. Act now to restrict your actions and once things are stable, make the next move.

Be careful, be aware, be connected, learn and share as you go. None of us have been here before, so offer grace and support. Try to look at what is happening and suspend your judgement. Don’t spread information unless you know it is reliable, and help each other out.

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Into the chrysalis

March 20, 2020 By Chris Corrigan Being, Collaboration, Community, Emergence 7 Comments

My friend Elizabeth Hunt reminded me on twitter of a conversation I had with her in Glasgow a couple of years ago when she attended a complexity workshop I was offering with Bronagh Gallagher. It was a conversation around what is sometimes called the mid-life crisis, and somehow the image that came to mind when Elizabeth told me how she was doing was one of a chrysalis.

This will be a non-scientific post, so if you are an actual entomologist I apologize for appropriating your field here. But chrysalises both inspire and baffle me. The thought that a caterpillar can crawl into a sac made of its own body and dissolve its form and come out as a butterfly is a cliched image of transformation, but holy crap. Stop for a moment and really think about that. Does the caterpillar know this is going to happen? If it does that shows some tremendous trust. If it doesn’t, then that shows some incredible courage. It just hangs out there, isolating itself from the rest of the world and changing in ways it can never understand.

Does a caterpillar see a butterfly and go “that will be me one day?”

So yes, we are all heading into our chrysalises. Over the past few days, I have been on calls and courses with colleagues all over including in Canada, the USA, the UK, Moldova, Denmark, Colombia, The Netherlands, Australia, Italy, and Brazil. Every single one of us is isolating and practicing social distance. We are all doing the same thing. We have never been more unified in action, and never more physically separated from each other. We have all climbed into our cocoons and are waiting for the imaginal discs to come into play and elongate and grow into our new ways of being. We might be here for a long time. We are going to learn some things.

I am struck by how we are learning to let go of policies and rules that are based on punishment and retribution and choosing to govern social relationships a little more on trust. Relaxing the need for doctors’ notes. Forgiving interest on student loans. Preventing evictions if people are sick or recently laid off and can’t make the rent. We are starting to see things happening that are countercultural to brutal capitalism and a society that is governed by the fear of ordinary people taking advantage of the system. Small things, small changes. Still very gooey. Imaginal discs.

Whatever we are in right now is not the final stage. We are entering an interregnum that will be as big a challenge as any that humanity has faced. It is as big as climate change but more present, so we are actually acting like it is a real emergency, instead of rhetorically calling it an emergency and carrying on as before.

Have some empathy for the caterpillar who creates its chrysalis and becomes a pupa. It may believe that this is now how things are, and meanwhile, at an unconscious level, the imaginal discs are swirling about in its corporeal soup, with a different idea about what it is to become.

Inside the chrysalis, your ideas about yourself dissolve and life itself takes over. Watch for the small signals, watch for what happens at the edges. Amplify the acts of kindness and possibility that you see in your community and your personal life. Document and grow the new practices you discover be they helpfulness, attention, curiosity, or competence. Stifle the urge to seek cortisol hits from triggering events and social media that make you angry, or the outrage merchants that still crave a hold on your consciousness. Instead, cocoon yourself and study your imagination. Those of us that are not of any use in the immediate safety effort must use this time to prepare to lift us all into what comes next. The first responders and caregivers will be tired and we will need to take over for them and govern and lead in a way that is informed by their example and by the things we are all now discovering are possible.

Into the goo, friends.

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Slow down: a reminder for facilitators working online

March 19, 2020 By Chris Corrigan Art of Hosting, Design, Facilitation, Featured 18 Comments

Facilitators are getting inundated with panicky requests to host meetings online. Some of us have the tech know-how to do this, and others don’t. Clients are feeling pressure and urgency to get teams up and running online and folks are hoping the important meeting that they have been working with for months can suddenly go online and get the same kinds of results.

Here is some stuff to help you out.

Slow down. Just because you are not hosting face to face does not mean you are not hosting. Make sure that you do the due diligence in designing and hosting the meeting. You will need to talk to your clients and coach them and give a sense of some of the realities of what is possible and what isn’t, and you are going to need to remind them that this will be clunky and difficult as people learn new ways to work together. Have them invite the group to be patient as everyone learns how to do this.

Work with a tech person and a harvesting person. No matter what platform you are using. hosting online takes a special kind of presence and attention, and it is helpful if you have a small team of people to help you. Notably, if you can have someone managing the tech – including taking participants with technical problems offline – that helps a lot. Also harvesting and documenting as you go is important. As in all processes I run, I try to get folks to co-create the harvest, and when working online you can do that in a Google document where you can set up a template beforehand. If you aren’t able to get everyone to work on the Google document – because people are connecting by phone, for example – then make sure someone is keeping good notes of decisions. At a minimum type these in the chat function, but don’t forget to save the text before exiting the meeting.

Keep it simple. You might be super interested to use all the new tech tools and apps, but bear in mind that your participants are most interested in connecting and getting their work done. Use the easiest mode possible, even if that is a good old fashioned conference call, and taking notes with paper and a pen.

Design together. Let your clients know that it will be helpful to design well. At the very least you should have a conversation with them about the urgent necessity for the meeting and the purpose, the outputs that you are looking for, and the structure and flow of the meeting that will serve that. You can download the Chaordic Stepping Stones tool for a deeper dive into design, or just keep it simple and high level. But let them know that just because you are going online does not mean you can shirk on design time.

Consider the check in. Check ins are really important parts of meetings. It brings people into the meeting space and helps them ground. Invite folks to do these things:

  • Shut down all their other apps and programs and clean up their monitor view. This will help people not get lost navigating between windows and will prevent them from getting distracted, and it also conserves bandwidth and makes connections more stable. My friend and colleague Amanda Fenton today shared that it is a kind of aesthetic practice, to create a clean and beautiful workspace for work.
  • Give a moment of silence. Just invite a breath, There is a lot going on. Bring a bit of calm into the space.
  • Invite people to check in on the google document or in the chatbox. Doing this invites people to immediately participate, by typing and seeing other people working. It helps focus attention on the work at hand and prevents a distraction.

Attend to dynamics:

  • Be aware of grief. Everything is shitty right now. People are not coming into work situations in the best mood and some may be experiencing crippling anxiety or grief. If you have an intense meeting coming up with important content, consider offering the check-in as a special gathering an hour or two in advance, just so people can connect with their colleagues and share their emotions. At the very least, remember that in stressful times, people swing wildly in their responses to things. You may need to intervene more often than usual and offer silence and regrounding.
  • Be aware of the hum of rush. There is a hum running under everything that is making folks feel rushed. It’s as if the meetings I have hosted or participated in have been running at about 500rpm higher than normal. It’s barely noted consciously, but I’ve noticed that it spins people into intensity. Add to that any technical glitches and frustrations, and it’s difficult to keep it together. So between grief and the hum of rush, pay attention to the emotional tone of the meeting. Focus on the important urgent matters with the right urgency.
  • Get ready to let go of your design. That should go without saying in any facilitation, especially if you are facilitating in turbulent and complex situations, but it’s even more true now. Take time to design, but as my friend and colleague Ciaran Camman remarked today, “really be ready to let things go, to find out what the need is again, and respond to that.”
  • And this one from Amanda Fenton: “Everything takes a little bit longer. If you ask a question, wait twice as long as you would when hosting face-to-face. People are working harder to sense cues from each other on who might be ready to speak or be fumbling for their un-mute button. If you use break-out rooms, give a minute of informal reintegration before transitioning. Welcome those little pauses.” Good advice.

And finally, attend to your practice. Remember when we used to facilitate face to face meetings? You are still that person, and you still have that practice. Take some time in the next few days to sit down and remind yourself of that. Just because we are doing things in a different way doesn’t mean that we aren’t needed in the same way.

Please share more tips and practices below, especially as it relates to the role and practice of hosting and facilitation and less about tools and software.

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Sense-making in real time

March 18, 2020 By Chris Corrigan Complexity, Evaluation, Facilitation, Featured 4 Comments

I put a call out on twitter yesterday, inviting topics for blog posts that could be helpful. I’m happy to take requests! Today my friend Trilby Smith, the brilliant Director of Evaluation at the Vancouver Foundation, replied with this:

Sense making in real time. Like what are the practices we can use to make sense of what is happening to us as it happens? And how can those of us who work in orgs support our colleagues to do this work?— Trilby Smith (@TrilbySmith) March 17, 2020

The last few days have been full of information. It comes streaming through twitter, facebook, texts, emails. And the way the COVID-19 crisis is moving and changing means that we have to look at stuff coming in, sift through it and make some decisions.

This is true in any fast-moving, data-rich situation, but COVID-19 gives us a chance to practice in real-time. So what are some simple tools? Here are a few, rooted in, and derived from, Participatory Narrative Inquiry and Human Systems Dynamics.

Observe the situation. Just watch things for a bit. Whatever the situation, see if you can gather a bunch of data points about it. If this is a meeting, have people bring in a bunch of notes about the situation. These notes should be observations, relatively free of interpretation. Fine-grained data objects, like stories, tweets, news items, reports, stats are all good. Anything that helps describe what you’re all seeing. And having everyone do this ensures that you get a diversity of perspectives. Have everyone come to a meeting with 10 data objects. Or start your meeting by having people sit around and tell some little stories and share observations about the situation, placing each data point on a post-it note. It should only take you less than 20 minutes to generate dozens of data points if you work in pairs. This, by the way, is what we call “situational awareness.”

Look for patterns. In complexity, you’re trying to work with patterns. My go to is to have the group sort through the data and find things that are similar. Cluster these together. These start to look like patterns. From there do a couple of things…

Inquire. I sometimes think that looking at data is a bit like nosing whisky, or appreciating the scent of a wine or a coffee. You begin with overall impressions and then you use specific techniques to get the most out of the experience. Same with data. When you are sifting through data with a group start by recording what people notice in general. Overall first impressions are useful. Keep it open.

After that you can drill down with a little more discipline and rigour, Royce Holliday offers these questions, from her piece on pattern spotting:

  • Generalizations: “In general, I notice…
  • Exceptions: “In general I notice…but…
  • Contradictions: “On the one hand I notice…but on the other hand…”
  • Surprises: “I am really surprised that…”
  • Curiosity: “I wonder if…”

These questions help you to find differences in the patterns and differences are what give you the potential to act.

Look at what is keeping these patterns in place. If a problem is complex, you will probably start to notice patterns that are stable and hard to change. Alternatively, you might notice a lot of turbulence and wonder what you can stabilize. Looking at what is keeping patterns in place is fairly straightforward. A system or a set of problems is made of connected agents interacting with a space defined by attractors and boundaries.:

  • Attractors hold things together coherently. Think of these as the things that grab your attention or the rhythms that dictate your work.
  • Boundaries separate things. These can be tight or loose or permeable or hard.
  • Connections in a system describe how agents are connected to one another. Think of a murder mystery where the detective is always trying to figure out how things are related in a meaningful way.
  • Exchanges are what flows over connections including information, power and resources.
  • Identities come into play and can skew a system with power dynamics, expertise or the diminishment of voice and ideas.

Once you can find a few of these constraints that are at play, you can list things that are in your control and make adjustments. In general, to stabilize a system, you tighten constraints. To break up a system, in order to break patterns or learn new things, you have to loosen constraints. The art is in deciding how much and in monitoring and adjusting as you go. Choose constraints that matter that you have some degree of control over, and you will be able to shift things more easily.

I reckon you could do this quickly in 1:45 or so if you had to generate data objects to start with, less time if people are collecting data objects before the meeting. A sample flow might look like this:

  1. Check in and framing (15 minutes)
  2. Break into small groups to generate data objects (20 minutes)
  3. Randomize the data objects and cluster them into themes (15 minutes)
  4. Ask each person to look at the patterns and answer the inquiry questions individually (10 minutes)
  5. Small groups to compare notes and find commonalities and differences (10 minutes)
  6. Finding ABCEI constraints in small groups (use this template) (10 minutes)
  7. In small groups decide on a small action to shift things. (use this template) (5 minutes)
  8. Compare these actions across the group and wrap up (20 minutes)

In the comments, I would be interested to hear if this is helpful and what kinds of specific situations folks are needing to make sense of.

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