A great quote from a post by Mark Simon:
The more
power you have,
the more people will lis ten respectfully
to your story.
Consequently,
listening to some one’s story is a way
of empowering them, of validat ing
their intrinsic worth
as a human being.
~ Kay Pra nis
A very important principle for design work.
Analyse this...!
Yesterday I had a chance to grab lunch with Dave Pollard in our local coffee shop on Bowen Island. One of the things we talked about was the supremacy of analysis in the world and why that is a problem when it comes to operating in complex domains.
I have been intentionally working a lot lately with Dave Snowdon et. al.’s Cynefin framework to support decision making in various domains. It is immensely helpful in making sense of the messy reality of context and exercises like anecdote circles and butterfly stamping are very powerful, portable and low tech processes.
Cynefin is also useful in that it warns us against a number of fatal category errors people make when trying to design solutions to problems. The most serious of these is remaining complacent in a simple context which has the effect of tipping the system to chaos. Nearly as infuriating and problematic to me is the applicability of analysis to complex domains.
Analysis has a dominant place in organizational and community life. It provides a sense of security that we can figure things out and operate in the space of the known. If we just analyse a situation enough we can identify all if the aspects if the problem and choose a solution. Of course in the complicated domain, where causes and effects can be known even though they are separated in time and space, analysis works beautifully. But in complex domains, characterized by emerged phenomenon, analysis tends to externalize and ignore that which it cannot account for with the result that solutions often remain dangerously blind to surprise and “black swan” events.
The Cyenfin framework advocates working with stories and social constructed meaning to sense and act in complex spaces. Where as analysis relies on objective data and meaning making models to create rules and tools, action in complex spaces uses stories and patterns to create principles and practices which help us to create small actions – probes in the system – that work in a nuanced way with emergence.
In this respect culture matters. The stories that are told and the practices thy are used to make sense of those stories is the method for acting in complex space. This distinction us helpful for me working with indigenous communities where program management may rely on analytical tools (and culture is stamped out in the process) but practices need to be grounded in culturally based responses. Using stories and social meaning making restores culture to its traditional role of helping groups of humans move together in complex domains while using analysis more appropriately.
I am preparing some questions tonight for an exercise I am running, and I rediscovered this elegant and simple process for constructing questions that elicit stories, courtesy of the Ultimate Guide to Anecdote Circles.
Build the question.
People remember events when they can picture an image reminding them of a specific situation. Combine this idea with the suggestion of adding emotion and you have the two building blocks to create good questions.
First start with an image-building phrase:
- “Think about…”
- “Imagine…”
- “If…”
- “Consider…”
For example, ”Think about a time when you were given advice by your manager.”
Add an additional sentence or two to enhance the image:
“This might have been done formally in the office or perhaps outside the formal environment.”
Then add the open question with the emotive words:
“When have you been annoyed, ecstatic or perhaps just surprised by what you were told?”
Notice there is a spectrum of emotions, which increases the chances of a memory being triggered by the question.
Simply asking people to tell stories rarely results in stories being told. In fact people are often confused when you ask for stories, thinking they might have to concoct an event or perhaps demonstrate Hemingway-level storytelling. Consequently, we suggest you avoid the term ‘story’ and use terms like: examples, illustrations, experiences.
So simple and results in great questions.
Stories that run deep within a culture arise out of the basic and unquestioned metaphors and archetypes that provide the foundation for a culture. This is true in all kinds of communities, including nation-states and villages, organizations and families. You can discover some of those foundational metaphors in your own communities by asking yourself “We are a community and that means…”
As someone who has been working with the cultural narratives of the United States over the past few years, Rob Paterson has cast his eye on the way out of the rhetorical tennis match that passes for conversation on immigration in the US. In this great post, he finds a better metaphor for the conversation about immigration in the United States:
For our debates about immigration and all important aspects of life today are rooted in beliefs and not in knowledge. Two great tribes struggle for power. Their ideology affects everything.
“Secure the Border” is a cultural and tribal battle cry as is “Racists”.
Neither side can hear the truth in the other. Both sides make the other angry. The result is that America is splitting apart. Civic discourse is dying and it is nearly impossible to get anything done anymore.
So how do we escape this trap?
I think that we need to change the rules of the game entirely. What might help is to shift the underlying metaphor.
The metaphor we use today is “Fortress America”.
In the Fortress you are in or out. There is a wall. All that matters is the wall. You make it perfect or you leave holes in it. Motive or the circumstances for people outside the wall or inside the wall mean nothing. This is a mechanical and a simple model that is not suited to a complex and organic problem.
Being simple, such a metaphor insists on a right or a wrong answer and so can never produce what is demanded in a complex problem.
It is like 14th century Catholicism when confronted by Galileo. Facts mean nothing. Only dogma and tribal loyalty count.
You can’t argue with dogma. Facts mean nothing.
Competing dogmas can only fight.
Don’t we have to find another way of seeing the issue that does not trigger a tribal response?
I think that a better metaphor might allow this. I think that a better metaphor might enable us to keep our tribal beliefs but to agree with others about things that do not need beliefs to understand and agree on.
A better metaphor is our body and our immune system. It represents the dynamic reality of America and Immigration much better than a wall. It can show us ways of seeing our response that are not in the realm of ethics but in the realm of system dynamics.
For our body, like all real systems has not a sealed but a porous border. It has open portals such as our nose and mouth and a porous skin.
The most important line of defence that we have is inside the body is our immune system. It is our immune system that regulates our body and that reacts to “newcomers”. It is our immune system that allows the familiar and rejects the unknown.
The healthier it is, the more it can defend you against real threats and the less it will overreact to small threats or even to good things. A Balanced immune system will protect you from flu and will not over react and kill you from toxic shock if you eat a peanut.
The Immune System is also affected by the scale and the power of the newcomer. Large scale and sudden intrusions will cause a reaction. Small and slow will tend not to.
Newcomers who want to enter our body have their own dynamics too. They have pathways, life cycles, reasons to get inside and reasons to leave where they were.
Our bodies are a dynamic system that interacts inside and with the outside. So is America.
v
Chimamanda Adichie explains in a beautiful talk about how we construct single stories about people and cultures. This happens all the time with indigenous communities. People often hear one native person say something and attribute that quote or idea to a whole culture or even worse, to “Native Americans.”
Adichie goes deeply into how the flattening of stories results in power shifts that lead to marginalization. Spend the time watching…