I might not write another blog in the MassSense series for a while, so I wanted this one to be a banger: an expanded exploration, twice as long as usual and focusing on more than one insight. As a reminder, this series draws from an open-source situational assessment we ran in 2020 and 2021 as part of our Climate Change programme. The assessment (known as MassSense) maps how a diverse network of human sensor sees things, when they’re not influencing one another’s responses. We presented participants with a graph on carbon emissions as a prompt, a series of image associations, and invited them to share an observation on the (then) present, as well as a micro-scenario about the future. For more context, you can refer back to the first blog in the series.
As with our other open projects, we wanted to put the data back into the world, and I have been doing that for a while now, one insight at a time. In addition to sharing information back, I hope that this series helps answer a series of questions about SenseMaker®, in practice and in context: how does it work? What does the data look like? How do micro-narratives and patterns come together? What kind of insights can we draw?
In the triangles above we see the pattern of assessment for two different age groups: 16-25 year-olds on the left and ages 41-55 on the right. The dimension of interest here are expectations when it comes to change: which domain(s) do people see promise in? What do they expect will trigger improvements, and how do they combine? Immediately we notice two especially prominent differences. The first is that the younger group believes much more in the potential of technology as a standalone force: when it comes to the expectations of what can create change, the younger group has placed many more stories on the top of the triad, associated with technology. Conversely, the older group has a cluster of stories that barely exists for the younger group, located in the middle of the bottom of the triad: they see potential in the combination of laws and radical lifestyle changes.
Note that the younger group and the older group place pretty much the same amount of emphasis on radical lifestyle changes in themselves (stories at the right-hand corner), and both see the combination of all three forces as promising (stories at the centre), but where they substantially differ is their faith in new or improved technology, and in the part governance and regulation has to play: the older group combines legal framework with radical life style changes, seeing them come together. The younger group does not.
A different representation might help drive the point home (the red star represents the mean of all responses):
Think about complex systems more broadly – you can close your eyes (after reading this paragraph) and see it in your mind’s eye. Picture currents swirling in a space of possibility, like storms above Jupiter. Let’s borrow a phrase from the Bible: “the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep”. Now let’s bring in elements that change this space of possibilities. Our currents are not, actually random – they are created by things that push and pull them, so they are likelier to be in one place than another. Paths form. Those things that push and pull we can call constraints or influences, and we see that they are good. Looking at the patterns on our triads, we see that the “force field” of technology is more powerful for the younger group, while in the older one, the combined attractions of radical changes in law and in lifestyle form a new stream we can travel through.
Let’s contextualise the patterns above with some stories from those two clusters:
16-25:
Notable changes in 2020:
Introduction of electric cars and I think we should have more production of these even in airplanes to avoid more emissions.
What brought on an imaginary 2030 utopia?
Introduction of advanced technologies in the mechanical industries. We abided to the regulations provided to us and produced less emissions that may even cause global warming.
When we look at the themes of this group of micro-scenarios, beyond the two shared above, it is notable that technology is not viewed as an end in itself. Instead, the narratives give us a hint of the kinds of things young people think technology might enable: human closeness and appreciation, community growth, global information-sharing, better work lives – this latter aspect being particularly prominent.
41-55:
Notable changes in 2020:
To me personally not many because for environmental reasons I live a frugal life anyway and I have been consciously changing my habits over the last 10 years.
Look into the future – What brought on an imaginary 2030 utopia?
A future where we are true democracy, where people are treated according to what they do and not where they happen to be born, or the color of their skin, or their political affiliation. A world where the Planet and its creatures are all considered living being that cannot be “possessed” or “exploited” or treated as “resources”. A world where everyone has according to their needs.
Themes in this group are very coherent: Connection with nature, doing and owning less, changing economic structures, including the role of work, and a different role and form of government are emphasised. Community and elements held in common are paramount. This thematic analysis draws a good parallel with the impressions the patterns give: their visions of the future are broader and more radical than those of the younger group.
Inspired by that, let’s explore a bit more the notion of techno-optimism. John Barry in “Biofuelling the Hummer” offers a typical example of how techno-optimism tends to be defined in the context of sustainability: “belief in human technological abilities to solve problems of unsustainability while minimizing or denying the need for large-scale social, economic and political transformation”.
Although the group of stories from what we might call “the young techno-optimist” group is small, it is perhaps notable that although large scale technological changes are mentioned (as in the example shared above) most focus on the immediate world of personal connections and (especially) work. In fact only one story mentioned large-scale social transformation in their vision of an ideal future: “Hunger in the entire world is eradicated and everyone is able to live a basic lifestyle”. This, at least, gives us a hint that the two elements in that definition can be potentially decoupled: there are those who believe in the power of technology as primary in changing things, and still do not minimise the need for large-scale changes. However, at least in our dataset, those who demonstrate that attitude definitely appear to be scarcer.
Let’s look at another angle of this assessment – as a reminder, the image participants were looking at, and the trigger for their reflections, was a graph depicting carbon emissions before and during the pandemic. Using our signifiers, our triads and dyads, they approached it from several different angles. One of those angles was the domain of the impact, which we already engaged with from a different perspective in the second blog of the series. Another dimension, expressed in the form of a dyad, was the temporal one. The image above brings the two together.
This graphic shows an association between two sets of things: transient changes and individual behaviour on the one hand, and permanent changes and ecological needs on the other. Or, to put it differently, people who saw the impact of the lockdown-driven changes as only in the moment, focused more on the impact they had on individual behaviour, while those who saw them as a point of transition towards a permanent change focussed more on the impact they had on (eco)systemic needs. This matters because, indirectly, it is showing us a lot about the attitudes that go into harnessing the opportunities of an event to create longer-term possibilities: in order to have a long-term (some might say systemic) impact, it is important to make people aware of the ecosystemic interconnections of their individual behaviours – it doesn’t mean that the behaviour doesn’t matter, but on its own it might not be connected to sustained changes.
The momentary impact on individual behaviour shows very clear and repeated themes when we see the changes people actually noticed during the pandemic and what the changes have to do with: the different balances of home and work, emphasising remote and flexible work and work/life balance. Their visions of the future, however, are more far-ranging:
“Local sourced food. No fossil fuel. Resilient community with redundant back up. Ecosystem biodiversity flourishing. Weather patterns stabilizing. Local individuals connected, shared work, communicated with each other, all demographics worked towards a sustainable, fair future.”
Looking at the permanent changes associated with the ecosystem, we immediately note that themes are much broader, even in the concrete changes personally undertaken by people. Work modes and work/life balance still appear, but they are prominently joined by explicit mentions of closer human connections, sustainable practices, and a greater awareness of the impact we are having on others. The content of the micro-observations and micro-scenarios, then, seems to confirm the suspicion of, in a sense, the present and the future seeming to be less divorced for those seeing current changes as permanent. The visions of the future associated with those run the gamut, from the more immediate:
“Having more than enough planted trees and green grasses for people to enjoy and children to play on instead of living in an area where the streets are covered in waste and the air is too polluted to enjoy and be healthy in.”
To the more extended:
“Re-commoning replacement of enclosure of the commons and privatization of land and resources, replacement of money with mutual credit. Reinvigorating local economies and ways of life. Giving people back their own agency to create and produce what they want to.”
This ecosystemic perspective towards supporting and enhancing the capacity to make changes and increase sustainability is also borne out in literature – which also reminds us of some other important aspects. For example, a review paper in Science Advances discusses the importance of accounting for complex, adaptive, interconnected dynamics in the exploration of COVID-19 and its impacts. It also reminds us that the “environmental” is not an isolated “nature” but a dense connection that includes people, technologies, institutions, and knowledge.
This paper emphasises the impact of the pandemic on institutional and political responses, beyond the measurable number of GHG emissions, and the role these play. This brings us back both to the patterns examined earlier, and in earlier posts in the series.
Basically, assessing the potential of shocks to create a real transition needs to be systemic – and we will come back to this potential in the final section. A final overlap between this paper’s exploration and ours are the limits of individual behavioural change alone. Yet, as we have previously discussed, individual behavioural change is not a separate realm from overarching systemic changes – it is a subtle but important difference, typical of a complex system: individual behaviour does not add up to systemic (nothing in complex systems adds up), but it can create new connections, opportunities, possibilities, and tipping points and ultimately create or contribute to creating systemic change – not through aggregation, but through multiplication.
A different aspect of the same question shows up in the dyad above, where people placed the image associated with pandemic-related changes somewhere on the spectrum of ease and difficulty. If the triad discussed before gave us the perspective of longevity, here we can play with the associations of change to hope and ease. Unsurprisingly, those who said they felt optimistic looking at the images representing climate-related pandemic shifts also found those changes easier than expected to implement, while those who associated the graph and images with despair skewed towards finding those changes incredibly hard and difficult to sustain. To give ourselves some context, let’s read one story from each extreme:
Easier than expected: “We should have more days at home, I enjoy the hybrid setup.”
Incredibly hard and impossible to sustain: “Working from home, less supermarket shopping (more local shopping), less travel (air & car)”
As these examples show, the changes people made do not necessarily look different at the opposite ends of the spectrum, which tells us two things: the first is that the perception of ease or difficulty of changes has less to do with what a person changed themselves, and more with their assessment of how collective changes seemed to the world at large. Clearly, when people talk about “easier” or “harder”, this is a big component of what they are actually assessing. The second element being revealed has more to do with the method: people have a lot more in their minds than what they directly express in the “text” of their responses. The process of making sense of what they have shared through different angles and perspectives allows new layers of meaning to come out that we never could have read ourselves.
Since it will be a while before I return to this group of data, I would like to close this blog with a reflection prompted by looking through the patterns and stories: as I was looking at patterns, and running analyses, and exploring possible interpretations, and digging through the relevant literature, I thought: “I wish there was more of this”. And by “this” I mean continuing to look at the patterns and sense-making of the “long Covid” (if I may call it that) period. I am concerned that we are moving through a period of collective forgetting of how differently we saw things just for a moment. We talk about the importance of anomalies for making people actively pay attention, and Covid was a massive one – are we following the trails of this anomaly enough? Are we looking at its interacting elements in the current moment? Or is it soon going to be something in the rear-view mirror that we will only be able to access via hindsight?
Still there and is still finding its way out to you, even if it is a trickle rather than a flood. For anyone who needs a reminder about what this is even about, in this group of blogs, we are sharing some of the insights gleaned from the open project run by the climate change and sustainability program from 2021 through 2022.
Hope is a theme that has appeared in this blog, in many guises and by multiple people – and you can rest assured that it will be a returning theme, including around the climate change programme, for reasons that will become immediately obvious. In our MassSense, hope was present in the guise of a multiple-choice question that replaced the more classic emotional tone question (would you consider your experience good, bad, etc.). Instead, it gauged participants’ reactions to the prompting graphic and associated picture in relation to their hopes and expectations. Here, we will start by looking at how their tendency to respond to the situation (by fighting, fleeing, or freezing) is associated with hope. A lot of the hope literature around sustainability focuses on giving study subjects a hopeful prompt or a dark one and evaluating the impact on reactions. Here, participants instead assessed the same prompt but had different interpretations of it depending on their own experiences, attitudes, and inclinations.
We already know hope is potentially significant, but in what configuration and together with which other things? (Remember, after all, that this complexity). Those who feel hopeful in our MassSense are significantly more inclined to have a fight reaction than those who are discouraged or don’t feel much in response. The former group are more inclined towards avoidance. At the same time, the latter seem more muddled and uncertain in their reactions, with the larger group of assessments located in the middle of the triad – we could almost suggest that a reaction, either way, helps give people some orientation as to the appropriate response, with an absence of reaction leaving them with fewer grounds to move towards a choice.
Things also get interesting when we go to the extremes of that hope scale (absolute despair and complete optimism). These aren’t presented here since the response numbers are lower and the associations less secure. Here, we are on shaky ground, and connections could be due to chance, but they also offer intriguing hints and paint a more layered picture. The (five people) who are optimistic emphasise fighting more than any other group, but, perhaps surprisingly, the tendency to fight is as prevalent among the hopeful as it is among the despairing (eight people). If (and it’s a big if) there is something to this, it could suggest that a neutral or lukewarm reaction is the worst possibility – worse even than despair.
With this as a point of departure, we can consider what hope means in practice. Here, I am especially drawing inspiration from the notion of radical hope, which appears in multiple fields and allows for a less individualistic and more collective understanding of the challenges we face. Radical hope is often associated with agency, the capacity to act as part of and influence a system, and the belief that the fight to achieve a collective improvement is worth it. In other words, hope is a combination of agency and faith. This means, paradoxically, that it can be present even in the darkest places as long as something can be done. Radical hope draws in particular from BIPOC examples and perspectives, often referring to lessons from groups of people who know something about devastation.
Lear, the author of Radical hope: Ethics in the face of cultural devastation draws heavily from the experiences of Plenty Coups, principal Chief of the Crow Nation – and of course, it is hardly necessary to describe why Native American nations might have something to say about surviving when your world is being upended. Hope is also connected to change and transformation. According to Lear’s description, radical hope is for revival: coming back to life in a form that is not yet intelligible. For eagle-eyed readers, you might have noticed the connection with the definition of resilience around these parts: surviving with continuity of identity. This allows us to interweave one more of the threads that make up hope: (collective) memory and identity, to support this continuity over time.
With that in place, let’s look at the emerging pattern: hope is action and reflection, future and past and present, change and continuity, gift and responsibility. The MassSense data shows something of that character – interpreting a situation as hopeful could make us more likely to keep fighting. In a moment of crisis or change, having a strong reaction either way might be more productive than numbness. There is a material reality to every situation, but hope is the part of that reality that, come what may, is up to us and our actions, even when we don’t realise it is.
Part 2: What could change and how?
Part 3: Age and the anticipation of change
In this look at the MassSense data, we turn to age. The older participants are, the more prominent the anticipation of change in people’s values becomes. The oldest also see the possibility of building bridges between ideological and institutional change. One of the dimensions we asked participants to assess the Covid-associated images against was the domain of coming change – between financial change, change in ideology or values, and change in formal institutions, which domain, or combination of domains, was more prominent in participant’s expectations?
So why was potential, anticipated change selected? Why does it matter? We have talked elsewhere in this blog about the importance of expectation, attention, and anticipatory awareness in the cognitive capacity to take action. Our contexts, beliefs, and environments prime us to notice certain things, and the things we notice are the ones we can act upon. The change we tend to expect is the change we are likely to participate in and make come about. So addressing anticipated change gives us a dimension that tugs at the landscape of possibility, of the things that are more likely to happen than others. The other side of the coin is that, when it comes to human beings, change assessment is rarely, if ever, a passive calculation – it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. And when it comes to those prophecies, we can start seeing that age matters, as the image below shows.
The MassSense also included older and younger people, but here we’ll focus on the three age groups that are best represented in our population. People from 26 to 40 see change as possible in all three domains simultaneously but place more emphasis on the possibility of change in people’s economic priorities and less on attitudes towards what is right. Those aged 41 to 55 emphasise attitudes much more strongly and move away from changes in financial priorities alone. Finally, the oldest group here, people from 56-70, move away from the centre, maintain a strong focus on ideology, and interestingly show a tendency to combine ideology with its institutional/legal expression that no other group does. The ability to explore age groups at a greater nuance is an advantage here – most age-related studies around the environment and sustainability tend to focus on strongly divergent groups, such as young adults versus seniors. Those that do not can sometimes show interesting contextual associations.
Existing research shows little compelling evidence for systematic age or generational gaps in environmental concerns and policy preferences in Western democracies. Instead, we see increased environmental concern across all generations – people care regardless of age. Multiple papers, including this one from New Zealand, share this finding. In the words of the article from Switzerland, linked above, “Generations live together and ideas travel across generations.” The contextual nuance comes in recognising that age is not the only factor – significant generational events can influence attitudes too. Such generational events, such as a major contamination scandal or a flood, are often highly contextual.
A relevant note of caution here: like the vast majority of formal studies on the subject, this data is cross-sectional, not longitudinal. In other words, it looks at people who belong to different age groups now, not at the same group of people as it grows and, potentially, changes. But with this in mind, we need to say that a difference in assessments and reactions between age groups is almost certainly not a difference in whether people care, but in the direction that caring takes and how it is expressed. The practical expression of concern becomes especially relevant when it comes to political involvement, attitudes and behaviour. This also tends to vary according to age. For example, we know that older people tend to emphasise electoral participation and the “institutionalised” ways of expressing their citizenship, which is consistent with what we see here for our older group.
Finally, since we couldn’t represent the youngest and the oldest, we can spotlight their voices through their visions of utopian change:
We got here by building a genuine and sustainable relationship with the land (not in terms of resources but in terms of how we see and speak of her). We no longer see Earth as a resource or something to be developed but rather a great gifted who has many teachings. When we think of Mother Earth we instinctively relate her to the “divine feminine”. One way I have already experienced change such as this is by gathering those interested in climate action and/or equality and sharing our experiences. Though it my sound like there is not a lot in common, the language we (government, developers, educators) is the same as any abuser. It is important we talk about, understand, and challenge this deeply rooted pedagogy in a holistic way.
16-25 years-old woman, US/Canada
Decentralized, non-monopolized entrepreneurial economy Massive wealth redistribution so that everyone has enough Radical application of best new technologies to mitigate climate change Global commitment to rapid and massive reduction in carbon emissions Global preparation for inescapable impacts of climate change, especially for the most vulnerable populations
70+ years-old man, US/Canada
Banner image by Tara Scahill on Unsplash
The response patterns to our questions suggest that COVID was a chance to re-assess the relationship between the collective, the individual, and the world around us.
This relationship is crucial in climate change, where we continuously grapple with the ideas of action, motivation, and impact. To dig deeper, we will focus on how perceived impact combines with the image people chose to associate with their response. As a reminder, participants were shown a graph of CO2 emissions. The first question we asked them was to associate an image with this graph. The images they could select (seen here as a collage) represented different aspects of the pandemic experience: travel reduction, social movements, contact with nature, lockdowns, and remote work. The triad we will focus on then asked people to situate their collective impression of the emissions graph and the picture they chose in relation to three possible areas of impact: individual behaviour, the economy, or the ecosystem’s needs. The patterns you seen below represent the visual result of how everyone who participated saw the relationship between those three areas. They have not been produced through any algorithmic analysis or machine learning – they are simply the aggregation of multiple, independent human sensors.
What has been affected indirectly also tells us about what affects; if the elements the images represent are perceived as affecting some things more than others (for example, individuals more than ecosystems), this tells us that participants tend to link the theme expressed by the picture (say, travel) with some domains more than others. So what are some specific links we arrived at (pictured in the figure below)?
Impact on individual behaviour is associated with flying and (less exclusively) with the responses to lockdown and physical distancing rules. An interesting further implication to ponder is the degree to which we see the things we went through in the pandemic, the choices we made (freely or because of legislation), mostly through the lens of what happened to each of us rather than all of us – ultimately, were we in this together?
We also asked participants follow-on open questions on the changes they feel they could keep up forever and on their visions of a utopic future. Responses to the former question (on changes) show that consumption habits are seen as a component of individual behaviour. These findings show parallels with the observations of a study from Sitra on how lives in Finland have changed after the lockdown. That study found that Covid has prompted a re-assessment of priorities and more consideration of the impact of small choices and behaviours, resulting in more readiness to take action and responsibility. Travel habits were cited as a part of that shift and are very prominent in the changes listed by our participants.
Going back to our patterns, an impact that bridges the needs of the individual with those of the ecosystem is primarily associated with collective action, while the ecosystem alone takes an even more prominent role among those focusing on nature. This link between levels (large and small, individual and collective) is another element featured in the Sitra report mentioned above, which identified the sense of shared responsibility as a bridge towards the potential for systemic change. Similarly, adopting more sustainable lifestyles is part of a socio-cultural project, not just a personal consumption choice. Another paper from the early pandemic days already connected change and collective mechanisms, such as citizens’ assemblies. Such collaborative action is a way to create a social mandate around individual change so it can be sustained and sustainable.
So far, we have been talking about themes in theory. To close out this section, let’s take a look at peoples’ own words on changes they see as likely to continue, which reflect a lot of the themes discussed above:
“offering a Yoga class online every morning for 3 months straight; spending time without the need for entertainment with family and inner circle of friends; join talks with very different communities and networks globally with a sense of greater connectivity; the readiness to be open, vulnerable, ask open ended questions, admit to being wrong, support others without asking for rewards even in semi-formal groups (work-related, but not part of actual job); the flexibility and willingness to experiment i.e. in hybrid teams and working from home; the chance to stop running, stay home, and breathe”
And we can complement that with a vision of the future:
“Our American communities agreed at local and state levels to focus on sustainable living and eating goals, enabling all citizens to have a safe place to live, healthy food to eat. Cities are redesigned, with space repurposed primarily for housing, secondarily for commerce/organizations. Agriculture is rethought and localized, with a focus on seasonal, local ingredients and self-growing (small hydroponic/grow light devices are found in each dwelling to grow a selection of fruit and veg). Rural areas have local farms and greenhouses carefully planned to provide the food needed by communities in a 25-mile radius. Energy farms have replaced many large-scale agricultural spaces, with a focus on solar, wind, geo-thermal, and other renewable tech, again–providing energy needs for folks in a 25-mile radius.”
We see behaviour as primarily associated with the choices we could (or couldn’t) make: around going out, around travelling, around meeting with particular people in particular places and ways. Yet in collective behaviour and the pursuit of political goals, even when not explicitly described as political, we see more of a possibility to simultaneously impact the needs of the ecosystem and our behaviour. According to a participant, “We now live in a world, where we understand the need to act collectively for a brighter future, COvid has made us understand crisis needs to be addressed in time if we are to avoid disaster.” In our patterns, we see evidence that the lesson is there. Whether it has collectively sunk in is, unfortunately, a different question.
Banner image by Tara Scahill on Unsplash
I’m starting to hope that this blog is the start of something that will become a tradition. The climate change (nature, sustainability, biodiversity, take your pick) programme periodically releases an open collection. Such collections invite participation from absolutely anybody and offer the possibility of collecting targeted data and accessing them at no cost. The first and original such collection was the Acorn Project, followed by a series of blog posts on the results. Then, amidst lockdowns and uncertainty, the Covid MassSense was released. The post you are reading now is launching a new blogging series to discuss some of the results – you can expect around six or seven, released roughly every other week. And of course, as this collection is closing now, a new open project will be released under the theme of hope, a subject that has been on our minds for a while.
But before we get to the good stuff, some inevitable stage setting so anyone can make sense of this. We will be looking at the results of a MassSense, so I’ll start by explaining what that is. Not long ago, my colleague Beth wrote a blog post covering the various applications of SenseMaker, which I recommend going off and reading. But to summarise the main idea here, a MassSense is a way to employ diverse points of view to assess a single “artefact” (an image, a scenario, an infographic, or even a single phrase). This artefact usually represents a broader theme or area of interest. SenseMaker signification visualises the participants’ assessment in ways we will explore in the upcoming posts. Usually, an invitation to generate micro-scenarios about the future accompanies this assessment. Since, in this case, we wanted to see what people thought about a specific issue, rather than seeking to hear a broader spectrum of experiences, a MassSense was the natural SenseMaker engagement mode.
The theme in this specific MassSense was the relationship between the pandemic (especially in the earlier stages of starting to cope with it) and climate change. In the early days of the pandemic, it was impossible to avoid thinking about this topic – as “nature returned” in cities and people marvelled at their ability to travel less, we had started to wonder how a collection of their understanding of the situation and a longer-term projection would look. This is that collection. The relationship of the pandemic with climate change was expressed in the choice of a sense-making artefact: a graph representing CO2 levels during 2020, the insert image here. A series of images representing different aspects of the pandemic experience (which you will see in the following post) followed this graph. Before we look at the data, we should highlight some of their characteristics as a whole. The first is diversity; in a human sensor network, diverse viewpoints are crucial in identifying different aspects of the problem. Here, we might have a degree of cognitive diversity, but other dimensions of our population are more homogeneous.
At the point of writing, with the collection close to closing, 303 entries have been collected. This number might increase by a bit as the site is still open. The gender distribution of participants is mostly evenly divided, with slightly more men than women. However, Northern Europe (47%) and the US/Canada (31%) predominate among locations. I think it is reasonable to assume that the majority of the audience is fairly similar to the audience of this blog and website. All future discussion then needs to come with the awareness that this is not a systematic sample, carefully collected, and it isn’t representative of anything. Still, it is varied enough to suggest some compelling associations without claiming that they are proving something or are generalisable. Another implication to highlight is that this MassSense eventually took on a slightly retrospective character. Although it launched in the heat of the pandemic, later responses looked backwards at events rather than being in the middle of them. Such a retrospective perspective can make a big difference in assessment.
Each post in the series will focus on an insight or theme and will try to go further than the previous Acorn Project series in two ways. Firstly, I will connect the insights from our data to findings published elsewhere on that same theme and draw some broader reflections from them. A second novelty here is statistical testing. Statistical verification for links or associations spotted through SenseMaker has always been possible. It isn’t a replacement for sense-making – just more fuel in its furnace. But for what it’s worth, every association presented in the following series is statistically significant. Finally, similarly to the Acorn project series, this first post will also serve as an index: as I add new posts to the series, they will all be collected and linked from this one, so they can be accessed from a single location in the future.
PS As this open project wraps up and the Hope project starts, we are experimenting with a new possibility: making all pre-existing open participation projects available to be reopened and reused, still at no cost. So if you want to use them for a significant collection opportunity that corresponds to your needs, get in touch.
Banner image by Tara Scahill on Unsplash
In-text image source cited in caption
Part 2: What could change and how?
Part 3: Age and the anticipation of change
Part 5: Double feature, twice the inspiration and provocation
I was trying to remember when COVID started to impact me personally and touch wood despite lots of social contacts I either haven’t had it or didn’t notice if I did). Yes, I was aware of it, and that awareness crept up slowly and remorselessly. When it started it felt a little like SARS, not good news but not that significant for the UK, but then it gradually started to intrude on work with cancelled events and at home in terms of worries and concerns. The point where it really started to impact me was on a Christmas break. I had booked a holiday cottage near Bangor to have a week walking in Snowdonia and it was a good one, albeit with some precautions. hand-washing before having a meal in a pub in Bala with my sister and friends after a walk on the Rhinogs, but nothing major. I’d planned and booked a last night at the Cross Foxes Inn to do the Milford Trail walk up Cadair Idris and then back around the corrie before driving home but that was the first day of lockdown. I wasn’t sure if the booking was cancelled and neither was the Inn, all was confusion and although I was allowed to stay, I couldn’t go to the bar and a meal was more or less pushed under the door of my room.
Then it all started to get serious. We all started to realise that events were not being postponed and we would have to develop whole new ways of working. The net result is that I have spent two years at home for the first time in a very very long time. I had been on the road for over 250 days a year before so it was a major change. As a company, we had always worked virtually so the shock of that was not high, although the ability to just go and see people sort things out or meet with a client in London was curtailed. Trips to the Opera, Rugby and the Theatre, a part and parcel of my life were lost. I did other things; the library was sorted and catalogued and I tiled the boot room. I learnt the ability to rapidly don a pullover or smock over pyjamas to appear respectable on the early morning ones. Several days involved wearing said pyjamas until midday before changing into lycra for a fifty to one hundred kilometre spin on the bike before a shower and a new set of pyjamas! Hillwalking was out for a long time so I meandered over the neolithic landscape that surrounds my house. When England relaxed its restrictions but Wales didn’t we spent a lot of time exploring the Olchen Valley which is in Herefordshire, next to the Welsh border and that constraint meant we explored valley sides and river beds, not to mention the odd jungle when in better days we would have just ascended the Cat’s Back to Hay Bluff and then carried on over Twmpa before returning by way of Capel-y-Ffin.A place well worth a visit with its own unique history, disproportionate to its size. We now have enough material for a guidebook!
Other memories of COVID are mixed, we didn’t suffer any direct losses as a family but many did. Business continued and if anything we increased our staff – working in complexity becomes more significant when everything is changing. A major focus on the EU Field Guide resulted. A lot of theory, practice and experience born of the COVID period went into that guide and in turn, it gave rise to Estuarine Mapping, the third major framework in the Cynefin pantheon. But that said, much of the learning of that period is in the multiple, fragmented stories of the people who lived through it. As an action research company, we were born out of respect and understanding of the role of narrative in knowledge transfer and learning so it would be odd if we didn’t do something to enable the use of that knowledge in organisations.
Storytelling is also a critical process in grieving and in transition, it is a means of letting go and moving on. I’ve always respected the Irish tradition of a wake which allows time for this. The narrative provides a means of sense-making in respect of the past, and an opening up of new possibilities. Narrative can also provide coherence and identity under conditions of growing uncertainty. We may have started to exit from COVID but now we have a European War between States (something I never thought I would see again in my lifetime), an energy and food crisis along with a rise of populism and the growing immanence of climate change. It is a world where we need to know where have come from and also create mechanisms to learn and carry that learning into new and novel contexts.
There is a partial return to my original work on knowledge management and my extension of a quote from Polanyi to the saying We always know more than we can say, and we can always say more than we can write down. That created the idea of narrative as a halfway house between tacit and explicit knowledge, an idea that in turn triggered the development of SenseMaker® the best part of two decades ago. As we started to exit from COVID we started to work on projects to gather experience during COVID and also created a Sacred Story Book – a well-designed collation of stories with interpretation and other key facts that would stand as artefact and testimony to the pandemic. We did a lot of work on the signers and the process as we realised this was something that needed to be easy to take on and create – less of a project with people already committed to naturalising sense-making as a discipline, more a customisable product that could be quickly adopted and used by organisations at a relatively low cost. We have now brought that to the market and there is an opening offer that you can take up here – we have made it really easy to create something of value, but then that of course offers wider possibilities downstream. We have a few scholarship type opportunities for organisations willing to both move quickly and make their results public, if you are interested in that email us.
Three masks is by Isaac Quesada Poppies is cropped from an original by Karim Ben Van both on Unsplash
Yesterday I raised the idea of using a colony of different organisms that have evolved to collaborate as a single entity as a metaphor for new forms of organisation. In that first post in respect of physical workspace I referenced using the familiar, in a modified context to cope with the familiar. I started there as the question of physical and virtual options is at the heart of much current discussion on what I think is wrongly titled hybrid working. I reminded readers of my definition of resilience (which includes as a subset those designed anti-fragile) as survival with continuity of identity over time. Continuity is the important word here and radical disruption can threaten individual, group and organisational identity. At an individual level this can manifest as a well-being or mental health issue, at a collective level as a form of disfunction which is made worse, but not created by individual issues. Radical change is dangerous, but may be forced on us by circumstance, as in the case of COVID or by choice. That choice may represent a needed act of leadership in anticipation of environmental change, but all to frequently it is just jumping onto the bandwagon of the latest fad of organisational transformation. Given that it takes about two or more years for any change to settle in and the overall fad drive change cycle seems to be two years or less we can start to understand why employees have learnt to ride the wave of change, without really changing or simply give up and assume the role of automata to the detriment of all,
To return to an earlier example where I talked about the way mycorrhiza provide a form of hidden nutrient connectivity between tree roots in any healthy eco-system. You can uproot a tree and replant it, roots and all but it takes a long time for the fungal links to reconnect. In an organisation the unarticulated informal networks of interaction and role are critical to health but nearly always neglected. It is why in merger work I have always focused on mapping cultures and then using informal network management techniques to create a more vigorous hybrid, in this context an appropriate word to use. By coincidence Gregersen and Lehman in the latest issue of MIT’s Sloane Review (which has replaced HBR in my reading and a physical copy arrives at my house) talk about the need to recognise the function of archetypal roles in change. They argue that in the focus on task and work redesign we neglect tools such a problem-solver and deal-maker which have evolved over time around individuals and groups. The system relies on those roles but they are destroyed, or at least badly damaged during periods of change. In times of COVID this is particularly the case as such roles are generally the evolutionary result of multiple casual physical interactions.
In my second post on mycorrhiza I introduced a key new method namely entangled trios. This is also referenced in the EU Field Guide and provides a structured approach to generating cross silo informal networks that can approach meritocratic status, linked to the formal systems and as such avoid the Old Boy’s Club negativity. This is of heightened importance during disruptive change and during a lockdown allows for rapid communication, A friendship or association where physical contact has already taken place is much easier to sustain than one which seeks to form in a virtual environment.
More recently I’ve stated to see the idea of self organising associations of roles in threes, fives or at the most sevens as a new way of thinking about organisational design which allows for the emergence of capability in the context of as yet unknowable need and picks up on a key complexity approach to leadership namely, delegate decision making, centralise co-ordination. In part this has been drive by engagement with an organisation parallelised by the bureaucracy of holocracy: an algorithm seeing to avoid the need for human judgement. Here you identify tasks or groups of tasks and delegate responsibility to what I think I may call a zooid (you read it here first). A zooid has three, five or seven members; uneven to allow for resolution of disagreement and limited by Millers number, or the smallest number in the Dunbar sequence depending on which source you want to use. Critically some individuals are super-connectors, they are present in multiple zooids and are primarily there to influence by co-ordination. We have a new version of SenseMaker® coming out soon (codename project Gemba) which supports this, along with other functions including ways to connect unconnected zooids (although with good design the three levels of separation should be a max). More recently I have started to look at overlaying task based zooids with archetypal role based zooids in an advanced and more distributed approach to gaining many of the benefits of crews without the long training overhead. if you want a quick way of identify archetypal roles then something like Belbin (the original 7 roles) is a good way to get started. But we can also chart what roles are currently in play and the gaps through SenseMaker® for those interesting.
This brings me back to my other statement of yesterday namely that complex systems scale by decomposition to the lowest level of coherent granularity and recombination. This type of structure means that zooids can assemble and reassembly quickly to form new colonies. The coral reef of the banner picture is a colony (and there is a wonderful science fiction novel whose name escapes me where the coral is the sentient creation not the humanoid creatures that appear to live in it) but one that is not resilient, in fact as we know coral reefs are at threat worldwide. This is also key to sense-making, which remember, I define as how to we make sense of the world so that we can act in it. Here the capacity to act is distributed, but the overlaps between the zooids allow for co-ordination and rapid sensing of anomalies. We can also use push based micro situational assessment (something else in Gemba) to engage people in both insight and actions on a distributed basis in real time. The response to that is also a form of organisational sensor. In terms of physical space, we can now talk about allowing for virtual and physical spaces for zooids which allows for more flexible and context specific approaches to managing the exit from shall we say catastrophic COVID to waves of COVID.
To be clear you don’t jump into such a structure overnight – that would be hypocritical and counter productive. Instead you start by using zooids for specific projects and also as archetypal role based connectivity over all members of your organisation; a retro-virus approach to change. One of those projects can be how do we change, rather than a top down driven design, bottom up emergence of something sustainable with 10% of the energy consumption involved in most change. That type of connectivity is key given the mental health plague that we are likely to face over the next year. Close contextually triggered interconnectivity can probably do more for well-being than a few token training sessions. And for Agile people much taken with things like the Spotify Model, this type of approach would generate a contextually appropriate version of the underlying principles. In complexity you don’t copy an outcome, you replicate the starting conditions.
Oh if you think this seems to bear a strong relationship to revolutionary cell structures, well yes it does – we all have a past.
Illustration of a Portuguese man o’ war (“Physalia physalis”) by Internet Archive Book Images No restrictions,
Coral Reef in the Red Sea by Francesco Ungaro on Unsplash
I am indulging myself a little with the title to this post. For those who don’t know it describes a type marine entity which, while it appears to be a single organism is in fact a colony of different zooids that are different morphologically and are functionally specialised. One of the best examples is the Portuguese man o’war pictured left. They have no means of propulsion but drift with the tides and if washed up can cause a beach to be closed as they are very poisonous. That is the theme of The adventure of the Lion’s Mane one of the Sherlock Holmes stores, and one recounted by Holmes not Watson. interesting each colony is either male or female so breeding takes place between colonies. Interestingly the zooids can be connected by tissue or contained within a common exoskeleton. This parallels with our work on constraint and the idea of those which contain and those which connect.
As another curiosity, the blanket octopus , which is immune to its poison uses ripped tentacles as weapons. I used that ability in a lecture back in 2009 to illustrate the dangers of IT departments trying to avoid the implications of social computing. Something which is still true in many guises today. As well as the photograph I have also used a 19th Century illustration (to the right) which gives you a good idea of the nature of the beastie and is a work of art in its own right. To be very clear this is not a jellyfish. One of the two things that really infuriated me in IBM was (i) being called a behaviorist in an IBM double-page spread add in the FT, Wall Street Journal and other such publications and (ii) when marketing changed by Portuguese man o’war to a jellyfish on the Cynefin emergent business unit. They said it looked nicer and weren’t they the same thing. To see the result look at the banner picture, extracted from the slide template.
Now a hybrid, in contrast, arises from sexual breeding between different species. We know no that our own species interbred with Neanderthals and acquired some hybrid vigor in consequence. Interesting in these types of Covid it also turns out to make some more vulnerable and some less so. The minotaur is a mythical example of the same as are centaurs and sphinxes.
There may now be enough material to see where I am going with this, namely the whole question of organisational design, and in particular the way, and the where, of work over the next year or so. I am not talking about post-covid as I think that is years away at best and there are worse things than Covid starting to thaw out in the Siberian Tundra. So we are going to have to find new ways of working and interacting that can handle a state without stability and with constant fluctuations of working practice. In the 14th Century, the Black Death killed 50 million people, approaching half the population of Europe, and it created a major turning point in economic development. In those days if you had money you retreated to your country estate and left those who couldn’t to the plague pits; in the modern-day that is being replicated as rural house prices rise. And of course, if you are really rich then you head for space …
Now there are links here to two statements I use a lot:
I’ll come back to both of those tomorrow, but just hold the ideas for the moment, and what follows uses both but in particular the second. Now, this post was prompted by one from my old friend Nancy Dixon who I have agreed and disagreed with over the years within the field of knowledge management. The post is called Yes to Hybrid, but No to “Working in the Office Any Two or Three Days a Week”. Her main theme is the need to rebuild a sense of belonging within a team where she argues that three days is the minimum required to rebuild relationships. She quotes Hollowell’s use of human moments when two people share the same physical space and also quotes Weick’s statement that there is no such thing as an organisation, only the ongoing interaction among human activities. She argues for ‘pizza lunches’ and mutual admiration and problem solving, and against cubicles in favour of newly designed open workspaces where “serious and playful activities” can place with readily available food and drink.
Now I don’t disagree with Nancy, but then there is a not inconsiderable distance between not disagreeing and agreeing which needs exploration. We all know that personal disagreements and conflict can escalate quickly in virtual exchange, not least because the opportunity to withdraw is not available. Social media threads escalate conflict quickly (I will confess to enjoying that at times) in a manner that would not happen in physical spaces with a greater range of interaction and stimulus and a chance to correct misunderstandings and more important sense them early. At the same time, the ability to hop on zoom for an hour rather than engage in complex flight plans makes interaction easier in many ways.
But overall I don’t think we should be talking about hybrid working, but more about new ways of organising and interacting in different environments. A hybrid is a fusion and involves genetic loss, while a siphonophore form is, well a colony that is either formed by its connectivity or its containment.
So that will involve a redesign of the physical space, but creative play spaces were done to death in the early enthusiasm of creating a learning organisation. I have terrible memories of sitting on too colourful, too soft, too low foam rubber chairs in a lurid play space in the Ministry of Defense in Singapore to the embarrassment of all parties. Over-designed and over here to adapt a WWII British saying. John Seeley-Brown’s work in Merlo Park was more interesting when he placed wipe boards in an enlarged coffee area and tried cameras onto them that anyone, anywhere in the organisation could connect to and engage with. Small changes to the way people connect within an established space. In work I did in knowledge-based design for SKB many years ago we ended up with Clarks and junior staff having offices while executives were in open space. For the former sticking things on the walls was a part of distributed decision making and they needed to concentrate. In contrast, executives needed to overhear conversations in the main and interact. Sipgate, one of my favourite companies pays good money to have a high quality and healthy breakfast available to all staff so that days start with casual conversations over food. Using ordinary spaces for extra-ordinary purposes is more effective than trying to design a special space. When I ran a business unity years ago I used to take everyone away for a weekend doing something outdoors (walking, pony trekking, etc) without facilitation and lots of pub meals followed by two days in a residential facility talking through issues and plans. In Covid creating an outdoor well-ventilated space is a good idea full stop and you don’t have to end up on Dartmoor, the River Wye or the Yorkshire Dales to achieve it.
The key point I am making here is to use the familiar for something novel rather than creating multiple levels of uncertainty and discomfort through special spaces. Make small changes to existing spaces, or do different things in understandable if not always familiar settings. Cooking for your team also goes down well but don’t expect them to do the washing up. But there is a lot more to this in terms of organisational development and design and I will pick up on that tomorrow.
Acknowledgments.
Portuguese Man-O-War image courtesy of Islands in the Sea 2002, NOAA/OER., the 19thC drawing is by Lesueur both public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
In 2021, the Cynefin Centre hopes that we can start introducing and highlighting the work carried out by our members more than ever before. Today’s blog post offers the stage to a project looking at experiences of the pandemic all around the world. Catherine Russell explains:
2020 saw a transformative series of events that have shaken the status quo. Around the world, countries and individuals have been forced to adapt to both direct and indirect impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic. With vaccines now being distributed, and mitigation/adaptation strategies evolving, there is hope we may soon be able to shift the global focus to rebuilding towards a better future.
Our project asks: how has the world experienced the year 2020, and what has changed for us during it? This is a crux point in modern history and throwing a spotlight onto projects that provide deep insights into current narratives is essential to ensure we turn to the global future with our best foot forward.
The purpose of Sharing Global Perspectives is to generate an open access platform that can bring individual voices and experiences around the world to light. We believe that building these narratives can provide insights, understanding and compassion to the global community.
The project is run by a group of driven individuals from research groups in Aberdeen, Stanford, and Wisconsin Universities, in collaboration with the Cynefin Centre. All are working pro bono, with the strong conviction that working towards a better future should come from a whole system perspective – this can only be obtained by gaining deep insights into individual perspectives around the world.
Our team will be regularly expanding as we bring on more Local Leads who will play a crucial role in accessing communities that do not have access to technical devices or internet. The diversity, equity and success of the project depends on individuals and organisations taking on this responsibility.
In later stages of the project, we will be running webinars and workshops to share the results. We would like to be working with decision-makers to provide them with a live and ever-evolving picture of what is happening on the ground and work with them to better meet the needs of those they serve. Please contact us if this is of interest.
Sharing Global Perspectives is open to anyone and everyone to contribute – including your children and grand-parents!
For further details or questions, please take a look at our website or contact us directly. The platform is officially launched and open to contributions – what was your perspective of 2020?
Dear Reader, while we have your attention: we are on a determined drive to expand our network around the world. We’re certainly living in uncertain times (sic), and we believe that it will take a large collective of like-minded people to help organisations and societies navigate stormy waters, make sense of the world and make good decisions. Consider joining the Cynefin Network by clicking on the banner below. Links to eBook and paperback copies of our latest book are also available on this page.
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