I’m playing with fire a bit here as I am not a native Welsh speaker, and there are subtleties of meaning that I don’t fully understand. Any feedback is appreciated, and please assume good intent. Still, I was struck when reading a poem in translation – with the original Welsh on the adjacent page – at two different words that translate as granular but mean different things. They are clapiog, which means awkward, lumpy, rough or stilted and gronynnog, which is a more direct translation. In narrative and other areas of organisational development, this can translate into differences between categorising things and understanding linkages. The former are two frequently awkward and miss subtle differences. I’m using the metaphor of containers here as both a positive and a negative. Container shipping resulted in radical improvements in efficiency over hand stacking of cargo holds and better integration with road transport. While smaller containers were part and parcel of shipping from the early Greek use of amphorae in the 1950s, we see the development of standardised metal shipping containers that are now familiar on the road in trailer parks and docklands and highly specialised ships. As most measures focused on efficiency, shipping containers radically reduced labour requirements at all points in the supply chain act, and embodied knowledge was also lost at the same time. I’m making a judgment on that now other than to call it out as a more or less inevitable consequence. The more coarsely grained, the more efficiency, the more adaptability within defined constraints, and the less resilience when those constraints no longer apply. There isn’t a right and a wrong here, but there is a danger in not recognising unique contexts and changes in those contexts.
But it does raise a question. If you make everything a formal garden, where will genetic variety come from if the context of your formalisation is no longer sustainable? Keeping a wildflower garden there is critical, just as are rare breed farms and so on in agriculture.
This post is part of a series on narrative and narrative approaches to sense-making. Having made the general point about granularity and its consequences, I want to apply that and a few other things. One of the major frustrations I and others have is when well-meaning (and often less well-meaning) people talk about changing or creating a narrative. The idea that you can do this top-down or that some form of elite can choose or interpret the underlying narrative of a society is deeply problematic. Populists don’t do this; they pick up an existing pattern and magnify it to work the dispositional landscape rather than trying to design it. I’ll talk in future blog posts about citizen engagement in this respect. But put very simply, if you want to change the culture of an organisation or a society, then you have to do the same thing, and that doesn’t work if your containers are clapiog. The tendency of a lot of people in narrative, in particular those indulging themselves with Jungian Archetypes (which are very definitely clapiog) in creating the Hero’s Journey, while attractive to Senior Executives, is not going to do anything other than generate anti-stories, the cynical watercooler stories that pick up and amplify the inevitable failure of the Hero to live up to expectations outside the comfort of a fictional environment.
Through narrative and estuarine mapping (assemblages and affordances), our work focuses on finding what you want to amplify and what you want to avoid, then asking people, at scale and in context, the question in the subheading. We also need to recognise a few key things about human sense-making.
Of course, all these build in nostalgia when appropriate and critical because they are based on real anecdotes captured at scale. They have strong coherence to reality but at the right level of granularity. Decomposition and recombination are the essence of complexity. Combined in different contexts, small things can help make sense in an uncertain world; more coarsely-grained things lack context sensitivity. They are awkward, lumpy, rough and frequently stilted.
This is also a counterbalance to attempts to control the narrative by discussing how other people should behave. One of the many problems with things like the Innder Development Goals is that they are a culturally specific form that approaches neo-colonialism by preaching Enlightenment and Northern European value systems. IDG are not the only sinner here, by the way; most inter-government agencies make the same mistakes as do many of the great and good talking about climate change and the need for peace. The granularity is all wrong, and the timing is always premature. First, initiate changes in the substrate, then move to amplify what is working. Oh, and gaslighting people into talking about a meta-crisis is not the way to avoid what is a poly crisis, but that is a subject for another post or two.
The opening picture of shipping containers is by Guillaume Bolduc sourced from Unsplash; the banner picture was taken by yours truly walking from Capel Curig to Pen-y-Pass. It shows Castell y Gwynt en route from Glyder Fach to Glyder Fawr, with Yr Wyddfa’s distinct silhouette on the horizon just to the left. Walking is problematic because it is on massive rock slabs, many shifting when you step on them. I broke a rib when that happened once, and I ended up trapped upside down between two boulders, and it took some effort to extradite myself. The granularity could be better …
Just over a month ago, I tagged an article in The Guardian which had picked up on the work of Italian anthropologist Vito Teti on the social value of nostalgia. That sent me burrowing, but the only one of his books which I could find translated from la bella lingua (to quote Lucia, and if you don’t get that reference, then make a note to read E. F. Benson’s Mapp & Lucia novels or watch the BBC adaptation) was Stones into Bread which is about all the small things that make a village in Calabria its identity. It is, to quote the blurb, “about migrating and about remaining, about yearning to leave if you’ve stayed and yearning to make the trek back if you’ve gone, about how both those who travel and those who never stray from home change.” As it happened, I had also been sent a book, in a similar vein, by a friend of mine, Rob Sheffield, Pieces of Us , which is a story of the people and community of Greenhill in Swansea, once vibrant. Both came to mind this morning, which is the twentieth anniversary of my Father’s death. He died in Ysbyty Gwynedd a few minutes before I arrived to take over from my sister by his bedside. My mother could not, as she was briefly at home before she was admitted to the same hospital to die in the early hours of St David’s Day a few days later. To lose both parents within ten days of each other was never going to be easy, and the memory is a little less painful twenty years on. That was also the period in which the politics of IBM made my life untenable. I would eventually take early retirement as part of an agreed settlement a month later. I still remember a friend in IBM telling me not to take the viciousness of that process personally; I had just been “road kill’.
I was lucky enough to have loving parents and a stable home growing up in North Wales; otherwise, I might not have survived to set up Cognitive Edge. , identifying (through my mother with Cardiff in the south). My father, a vet, spent much of his spare time in his garden. I’d help him create the substrate for that when we moved into a new build on clay soil. He and I dug (with pickaxes, spades and shovels, no mechanical assistance) through that clay to a depth of ten feet and then dug in the truckloads of manure, dumped at the gate by his farmer friends before breaking down the clay and refilling the massive trenches. I was in my early teenage years, and honestly, I resented but did not question the necessity of the task, although I still remember the smell. The other memory from those days is that everything that went into the car’s boot (trunk for my American readers) ended up smelling of Lysol. My involvement in the garden was limited to the heavy work, adding flagstones and wall construction. My all-time favourite picture of him, using a wheelbarrow as a deck chair, opens this post. The banner picture is of me, taken by Iwan Jenkins on day 63 of my 67-day walk around and through Wales; this a bleak moorland section between Glyndyfrdwy and Milltir Gerrig. Dad’s place was his garden; mine was, and still is, the mountains of Cymru and the Celtic kingdom of Rheged; for the ten days leading up to my 70th birthday, I will be ticking off some more stages of my second full Wainwright round starting with four days at the Wasdale Head Inn before moving onto a holiday cottage in Cockermouth. All Fools Day, my actual Birthday, I will also have to drive the five hours to Heathrow Airport, which is how things have panned out. But if the weather is good, I will be somewhere around Ambleside to minimise the drive overall. I belong in the mountains, not the all-too-gentle agricultural landscape of Wiltshire; I once yearned to leave, and now I yearn to return.
This post is not just one of my memories of my Father; I didn’t want the twentieth anniversary to go unmarked. It is also about the sense of belonging that is associated with places in your past. When I read Stones into Bread, my mind immediately jumped to the Welsh word hiraeth. The idea of yearning to leave and then yearning to return better summarises it, and it is often translated as a nostalgic longing for a place which probably never really existed. It, like Cynefin, is a word of movement and change, not a static one, and it recognises the power of narrative, both collective and personal, to weave us into histories that define our identity. Understanding where we are is not just factual, although that is important; it is also about how our memories have reconstructed those many pasts to create positive and negative identities in the way we perceive ourselves and our communities today. The notorious (at least in Wales) Report of a Commission of Inquiry into the State of Education in Wales stated, “The Welsh language is a vast drawback to Wales and a manifold barrier to the moral progress and commercial prosperity of the people. It is not easy to over-estimate its evil effects.” The Commissioners were a group of young English Lawyers who spoke no English and only paid attention to the reports of witnesses from the Established Anglican Church of Wales, ignoring, in the main, those from the dominant non-conformist and Welsh-speaking majority with their network of Sunday Schools. The Commissioners were asked to address “the means afforded to the labouring classes of acquiring a knowledge of the English language,” which gave rise to the Welsh Not and was used throughout Central Europe as an exemplar for linguistic subjugation.
In understanding society, we need, to quote Alasdair McIntyre, to understand “the stock of stories which constitute its initial dramatic resources”. That applies as much to an organisation as it does to civil society and is one of the reasons we created a narrative offering around the idea of a Sacred Storybook for organisations, which not only captures those dramatic resources but also makes a tangible part of onboarding new employees and leaders. We are just putting one of those together for one of the major car manufacturers, and it also gives an effective way of mapping culture and change over time. Cynthia and I wrote about the criticality of these stories for any form of learning in our Bramble Bushes in a Thicket article. The essence of estuarine mapping at a collective and individual level includes understanding the substrate of memory and culture that stories provide. When I update the method on St David’s Day, I will deal with some new options for using narratives as a base-level input to the framework and as a novel form of conflict resolution and measuring differences in perception and micro-changes in that perception as change initiatives start to unfold and/or unravel. We are woven into our memories, but they do not necessarily bind us, and that is what I want to address in what will be a linked series of posts on understanding and using micro-narratives in organisations. Understanding the substrate and getting it right is something my father understood about gardens, but that understanding is often missing in organisational change. You will need manure and a lot of spade work at some stage, and the earlier you get around to doing that, the lower the cost downstream. And go with the Italian and the Welsh, not English …
There is a little of the old and the new in the imagery I have used in this post. I took the banner picture on an evening walk along the Ridgeway from its official start on Overton Hill. The Ridgeway is one of the ancient pathways in Europe, and it can be walked as far as Ivinghoe Beacon, which is around 90 miles in length. It takes the high ground on the chalk downs and has been used since prehistoric times. It is one of my sunset locations when I have limited time. One of the reasons for that is that all the ancient barrows are covered with trees, which form a unique silhouette on the horizon in Wiltshire. Still, I also like to get into the trees at times, and there is a cluster of three barrow mounds just off the main Ridgeway, one of my favourite places to sit and think as the sun goes down, although I do not linger past twilight. It is a landscape that (Wo)man has patterned over thousands of years, and you can read the patterns when you become familiar with them. Some can be taught, some have to be experienced, and some can only be known in the act of knowing. In reading the landscape, we can sense when something different is happening; we pay attention to anomalies and ignore the routine.
My other image to the left shows patterns from a project we ran last November in Washington to look at attitudes toward AI, and the material is in the public domain. Yesterday, Anna wrote an excellent post on our long-running open-source narrative capture project, which is a part of our climate and sustainability programme and shows similar images. For those unfamiliar with SenseMaker®, we combine the persuasive narrative in the form of stories, observations, opinions and so on with the objectivity of numbers. Triads have a lot of science behind them in triggering a cognitive load (in contrast with a linear scale) in that the respondent cannot guess what response would reflect them in the best light. Balancing three positive qualities also makes you think more deeply, especially on tablets and smartphones, where there is a tactile element to placement.
Another crucial element to SenseMaker®, and is epistemic sovereignty, is the right of any individual to interpret their own experience rather than have it interpreted by an algorithm or an expert. That principle also extends to our work on reducing bias from facilitation and an over-dependency in organisational design and change initiatives to depend on workshops. This is not to deny their value, but there are issues with even the most gifted in avoiding influencing the group, and that is before we get to the pseudo-psychological facilitator at the end of the spectrum between pragmatism and ideology, when the facilitator has firm ideas about their capacity to extract the real meaning of what people are saying. We also see anthropological criticism of Participative Action Research in privileging those participants who match the cultural expectations of the facilitator. None of this is deliberate, by the way; it just is. The visuals I have shown here don’t make causal statements, but they do represent patterns.
I’ve also shown two perspectives here. They are also slightly different in style; I did think of getting them the same but decided, instead, that it shows there are options in SenseMaker® for analysts and decision-makers. Now, for each triad, I could have had three Likert scales, but then they could all be scored high; by getting people to balance three positive qualities, we get much closer to how they feel. It also means we need fewer checks and balances and can reduce the response time burden. We recommend feeding the results back to participants within a day or so of their entry and gathering how they interpret the patterns revealed – make it a consultative operation, not another survey. The feedback from that can also be stored in narrative form, and we start to build a lessons-learning database, narrative-based, which allows for peer-to-peer knowledge flow.
The triads in question are testing the motivation for using AI. We see the hyperfocus on convenience in the first and a more nuanced approach in the second between convenience and intrigue. That could be between different groups, or it could change over time. You can see how this works to manage the five things we need to do from the second post in this series. We haven’t got any complex statistical reports; we have a straightforward set of patterns requiring little knowledge for active sense-making. They also ask straightforward questions: Why do we see it like this, and they see it like that? Creating anomalies, showing differences and critically making no judgements. And, of course, I still have the original narratives to go with the data. I’ve shown below one of the slides we put together on this project to illustrate that.
Once you have that data, the change mechanism is pretty simple; you ask the question: How would we create more stories like these and fewer like those? The context is carried with the question; it requires no elaboration or specialist knowledge, and there is nothing about abstract qualities, causal factors or whatever. 
And given it’s based on mass input with qualitative data, I can measure if that change is being achieved. In effect, we measure vectors, not outcomes; we manage shifts from where we are rather than fantasising about some ideal future state. Going beyond that, I can present the visuals for the organisation or any part thereof. So people are only asking the vector question (How would we create more stories like these and fewer like those?) at their level of competence to act. Rather than a one size fits all change programme, we have a context-specific one with multiple small initiatives that will align the organisation over time. That also allows us to adjust our direction of travel as we go. And, of course, we can confidently combine triad data into full landscapes. Still, people have to trust the results: Landscapes are more valuable in that no one can trace input to output, but equally, they require more trust for precisely the same reason.
In the work we are about to start on citizen engagement, we can also use this technique, at scale, to identify issues which warring factions have in common and algorithmically trigger micro-investments to get them working together. At this point, they can talk about their differences when they are ready to do so. The same technique and the Triopticon can be used for trans-disciplinary and cross-silo work in organisations.
Everything is about patterns and responding to patterns. Next week, we will launch some easy-to-get-started options for organisations in cultural change and AI awareness. I’ll blog on the latter tomorrow or the day after. But what I have been doing here since the conclusion of the Twelfetide series is to lay down the reasoning behind this approach. Next week, there will be more of a marketing focus.
Yesterday, the alarm went off at 0500 to allow me to drive up to Liverpool for a series of meetings that started at 1000 and finished at 1930. Thanks to an accident on the M5, which necessitated a cross-country diversion through the Cotswolds, I got home shortly before midnight. It wasn’t strictly necessary to be there, and there was an offer to watch Liverpool play Fulham the night before and stay at a friend’s house, which would have made things easier and more enjoyable. But, I was already committed to an evening of physiotherapy as part of a course of treatment to restore my Achilles tendon to the point where walking in the hills is possible so that wasn’t an option. But all of that said, I felt a sense of obligation to be there, and from around 1015, I would not have been anywhere else.
I add that Liverpool is one of my favourite places in the UK. It is a natural centre for North Wales, where I grew up, and in some ways, it is an unofficial capital. Lloyd George was born there, and it has strong Welsh and Irish roots. Our parents went to Chester when I was young, but as teenagers, Liverpool was a better draw. The F10 or F11 from Mold would take you to Birkenhead Pier, from which you boarded a ferry across the Mersey under the watchful eyes of the Liverbirds. Traffic went the other way as well, with Colomendy Camp just outside Mold a rite of passage for Liverpool School Children; I was good friends with the son of its Head Master, so was there a lot. Then we had one famous episode of Z-Cars filmed in part on Moel Fammau and the Beatle’s last performance before they shot to the top was in Mold Town Hall.
Scousers of all ages have a natural sense of humour, tell you things as they are, and fix things. That was very evident in conversations today in multiple environments. They are also ‘tough’ in the very best sense of that word. I still remember when I was helping out on the Llanberis Mountain Rescue Team before heading up to University as a part of a rescue party for a woman from a Liverpool coach trip who had managed to get halfway across Crib Coch at 3,000 ft in a mini-skirt and high heels. It’s a sort of OK, I’m here, whatever is, is, and we need to get on and fix it. In this story, Emma was also a Liverpudlian with the same spirit.
My reason for being there is a project we have been supporting, managed by Rhianon and Beth, working with Liverpool John Moores University to measure the impact work of Fans Supporting Foodbanks and the Pantry (banner picture). It has been an important SenseMaker® project, and the report was to be presented in the evening. I wasn’t involved in the presentation, but I was invited to be there. I was also invited to see the Pantry in operation, hence the 1000 arrival time, and to look at a related venture planned with Farm Urban. That itself was fascinating, and there are some exciting prospects for us to work together on mental health, which I will follow up on.
But the real purpose of this post is to let you know about the work of Fans Supporting Foodbanks, founded in 2015. It started with one wheely bin outside Goodison Park, which became one outside Anfield, and they snowballed. Spirit of Shankly now fund the Greenhouse Pantry, which I visited, to the tune of £40k per year. As Fans Supporting Foodbanks say, hunger doesn’t wear club colours. The project has extended to Glasgow, with Rangers and Celtic involved and many others – red and blue, orange or green- all uniting in the face of hunger. But the remarkable thing about this initiative is The Pantry, pictured in the banner, which also shows a fascinating mural commissioned by the area’s young people and executed by an artist who had lost the use of one arm. It is called the Peace Wall, and it has the word peace in the ten most common languages in a highly multicultural area.
The whole purpose of the Pantry is to destigmatise food banks. Instead of turning up to a hall and being given a box, people come to an open market area, exchange £3.50 for tokens worth £20 and then do their shopping in the market from the food on offer, all of which is donated, all of which is high quality. It seems tiny, but it is a significant factor in allowing people some dignity. The market’s location is The Greenhouse Multi-Cultral Play & Arts Project “a charity founded in 1997 in the heart of Toxteth, Liverpool, designed to give disadvantaged children and young people the opportunity to increase their creative potential and grow their life chances. From early years childcare to supporting young leaders – we know that participation in play and arts contributes much more to quality of life.” That is a minor miracle in its own right, progressing from a temporary building for post-school to a significant establishment with its own football ground and about to build a new mini-sports centre – all owned, driven and managed by the local community.
Please read the report and reflect on it. It also shows the power of a quantitative approach to narrative work to demonstrate the impact of a programme in terms of statistics and carry the persuasive advocacy of stories. There are other examples in this book, which is a free download. The title of this post comes from the closing statement by Dr Jack Sugden that, while initiatives like this are hopeful, it is tragic that we need them. I was thanked for our contribution, but I wanted to thank them for the privilege of being involved. I hadn’t spent a more worthwhile day in years, and the experience humbled me.
We were involved because of Paul Khan, who was the first ever customer of SenseMaker® when he worked in Liverpool Museums. He is Chairman of The Greenhouse, one of the main drivers in Fans Supporting Foodbanks, and I am proud to call him a friend. He won’t thank me for saying this, but you rarely get to meet someone who is very simply, heart and soul, a good person. Paul is one such person, and, thank God, he supports Liverpool.
This is the first of two posts that will juxtapose the work of a modern writer with a classic from the past. A future post will look at Terry Pratchett as the modern-day Swift. Today I want to position Jasper Fforde as the modern-day Lewis Carroll hence the opening picture. For those who don’t know his work, he has four main series namely Thursday Next, The Nursery Crimes, Dragonslayer and (awaiting completion) the Eddie Russett series which posits a future state which is a colorocracy in which the ability to recognise different colours provides status in society. There are a couple of other books including a tirade against Brexit in his The Constant Rabbit but his series allows the development of complex alternative worlds. Like Carroll, these appear ridiculous but they include satirical and other commentary on current reality.
To give you a sense of this, the Thursday Next series is based in an alternative world in which England is still locked into the stalemate arising from the Crimean War against Tsarist Russia. It was also occupied by the Wehrmacht until 1949. Wales was declared independent in the late 19th Century and is now a dark socialist republic that only survives by smuggling cheese to England. It is also locked into its own Vietnam with post-colonial struggles in Patagonia. The national sport of England is Croquet which is a vicious sport (reminiscent of the Cloggies) played in the national stadium in Swindon. As a side note here, while Fforde now lives in Wales he was local to Swindon for a long period, indeed his children were contemporaries of my children in St Johns, Marlborough. Vampires are a constant nuisance and we have the Goliath Corporation which in effect is a covert government involved in all aspects of modern society including the arms trade. Overall the country is controlled by SpecOps, a paramilitary which includes the ChronoGarde who monitor time travel and SpecOps-27 who are responsible for detecting crimes in popular works. This is a universe where literature is a mass phenomenon, gangs roam the streets supporting particular genres and as a result, there are literary detectives.
Now this is where it gets interesting (if it wasn’t already) in that there boundaries between fictional characters and the real world are blurred. Miss Haversham from Dickens is a literary detective, as is our heroine Thursday Next, who enjoys driving fast cars in the ‘real’ world. The first novel hinges around hour Heroine’s attempt to preserve the plot of Jane Eyre, but in the end, when she discovers the characters are forced to live the story time after time, she alters to ending to a happy one, the one we are all familiar with, or if not should be. This gets her into trouble and she ends up in the second book on trial in Kafka’s court, her resolution to which is a delight. She also has a pet Dodo, there is a text lake at the bottom of the Great Library, a Well of Manuscripts for unpublished novels. I could go on but that should be enough to whet your appetite. The books can also be read and re-read as there are so many literature references that you can probably never find them all, and each time you find a novel reference there is another aha moment.
I met the author for breakfast some years ago and we got into a conversation on the role of constraints in creativity. He still uses a film-based camera which restricts you to a limited number of pictures. Playing with that concept later that week on my digital camera, imposing the constraint of no more than 36 pictures radically increased my creativity. I do the same with winter photography in the mountains, picking a fixed-focal lens instead of a telephoto makes you think a lot more about positioning – it also has advantages in the depth of field you can use in poor lighting conditions. In Swindon, right next to the stadium that in his world would host croquet tournaments, but is now home to Swindon United we have the magic roundabout which is almost five decades old and through constraints, not controls (traffic lights would be an example of that) manages complex flows of traffic, it is a great example of a complex adaptive system. Wikipedia is another example that uses behaviour, not content adjudication as an enabling constraint. I’m currently finishing off the Field Guide (or Little Green Book) of Cynefin and I’ve created a template in pages which restricts me to one page of text, a picture and bullet points. The template is also visual and that makes for creative and focused writing. One of the things that alternative fiction of this nature enables, is that it breaks constraints and expectations so you think very differently about subjects. His dragon slayer does not slay dragons for example. The other clever feature of his writing is the blurring of fiction with fact and the encounters between one world and the other.
Now these worlds are not completely fictional in that they use multiple elements that are familiar, but put them together in novel and unexpected ways (a return to my point about fractal patterns, not categories that I made yesterday). They also serve a satirical purpose and we see that in both Carroll and Fforde. Satire uses wit to bring attention to aspects of contemporary society. Asking what-if questions is a time-honoured technique to explore new possibilities, and in fictional settings, we can do that more safely than in forced confession and self-awareness sessions. We didn’t evolve to need the amateur psychology of some but by no means all, coaches. However, I have noticed a phenomenon in some coaches to are so taken up with their position that they assume a right to issue pejorative moral edicts at the drop of a hat. I had one yesterday on social media as it happens. The intelligent use of novelty. creates anomalies that draw our attention and make us think differently. It also stimulates imagination and it is no coincidence that many fiction and fantasy novels are dystopian, they make us aware of things we should avoid. That will be the theme of tomorrow’s post.
As an afterthought, my purpose in this series to to bring a series of authors to your attention and to provide some reflection of what it might mean for practice. This is not intended to be comprehensive, but more a stimulation.
The opening picture is a collage of two illustrations, the first from Alice in Wonderland and the second from Alice Through the Looking Glass. Both are used as the original black and white illustrations are now out of copyright. The picture of croquet equipment is by Katie Burkhart on Unsplash
I normally provide a quarterly summary of key blog posts but this year has been my least prolific ever, somewhat compensated by a rich year in terms of forthcoming publications, but more notable in terms of method and framework development with Estuarine Mapping being the highlight. The scarcity in one context probably has some relation to the abundance in the other. But there were valuable posts so I have provided a summary at the end.
My last Twelfetide series focused on what makes human systems complex systems distinct and I used the first post in that series to summarise my 2017 series which addressed the subject, but in a different way. While I was at it I provided a summary and links to all of the previous Twelfetide series, and I’ve also adopted the older spelling of the word this year. The third post in last year’s series looked at the role of narrative and then in April, I talked about the importance of Science Fiction & Fantasy and even created a category for it. Those two posts set the theme for this series where I want to use science fiction and fantasy to explore some wider themes relating to sense-making and anthro-complexity.
In this first post, I want to look at two authors in particular namely Alan Garner and Guy Gavriel Kay. For those who don’t know them it is worth a basic introduction, especially as Alan Garner is probably my first ever encounter with Fantasy via Children’s Hour on the BBC with David Davies reading his Wierdstone of Brisingamen and as I have previously posted, I was at times terrified. His works were also a part of my 2012 Christmas series on Children’s Books. His universe is drawn from Celtic myths and legends, all jumbled together in a wonderful set of stories. Implicitly in the Weirdstone and more explicitly in its equal The Moon of Gomrath, he contrasts the Old Magic of nature with the newer High Magic of the wizards. While the latter can’t free Susan from possession by the Brollachan, Colin resorts to the Old Magic and subsequently when Colin lights wendfire on an old straight track and inadvertently raises the Wild Hunt. Susan in the previous book was caught up in the old Book, representing through the Mark of Fohla the power of the new moon, while their enemy the Morrigan represents the power of the old moon. His books are, in the main, based on and around Alderley Edge in Cheshire and that is my banner pictures.
Guy Gavriel Kay is a much more prolific author, originally from Winnipeg he spent 1974 helping Christopher Tolkien edit the Simarillion before qualifying as a lawyer. He has a strong, moral presence on social media and writes complex novels that could be, but should not be, classified as historical fantasy. They are much deeper than that classification would allow. His first set of novels was the Fionavar Tapestry (which a month ago was a free download on Audible) which tells the story of three young Canadians who are transported to the ‘the first of all worlds’. The basic construct, and you can see elements of the Silmarillion in this, is that Fionavar is the world from which stories ripple into all other worlds. The story of Arthur, Gwenevere and Lancelot is played out again in the books as it has been played out many times before. We have the Lios and the Svart Alfar (elves of light and dark) that we also see in Garner. Yggdrasil along with Huginn and Muninn link us the the Norse legends and the Cauldron of Khath Meigol is the Cauldron of Annwun from the Mabinogi and Rakoth Maugrim, the Sauran figure who exists outside of the Tapestry links to Chinese legends. In a later novel Ysabel two of the characters come back into a different context, but with the central theme a contest between two males for one female, in welsh legend that is the story of Pwyll, Rhiannon and Gwawl and it is also the Arthur, Gwenevere and Lancelot theme.
What both authors have in common, over several books is a reweaving of patterns from older traditions, a modern version of the oral tradition that I talked about in yesterday’s post. Now there is an important point here in that they are reworking patterns, not creating a formulaic set of recipes as we see in the Hero’s Journey of Joseph Campbell’s work. I don’t see that as an archetypal form, any more than I see his, and Jung’s archetypes as universal. Creating recipes has utility but the formulaic nature lacks depth. The really powerful stories create new forms, by weaving or blending old and new themes.
Both books also involve people making choices, often (in fact in the main) difficult ones, that are mostly against their own self-interests, at least when they were made. In The Darkest Road, the final book of the Fionavar Trilogy the concept of heroes and villains is not that clear gut and the overall theme of forgiveness and sacrifice is clear. Power on its own is not enough, neither is withdrawal from engagement. One of the most engaging sub-themes of Fionavar is the story of the pacifist Paraiko and their rituals. In all these cases the choices are exercises of Free Will, they are not the inevitable journey of a stereotype, there are genuine counter-factual pathways which the stories could take.
The other major theme here is the contrast between older wisdom and modern thinking, and from that we get the title of this post. In Fionavar and Wierdstone the older, more basic magic of the emotions is contrasted with the intellectual magic of the Mages and in Fionavar the Mages draw on the strength of a companion to wield their magic, the latter being a perpetual sacrifice. In Ysabel the difference is between scientific (and more specifically medical knowledge in Megan) and the awareness and acceptance of Magic in her older sister Kim. In all the books, nothing is solved by either winning out, in effect, they come together in different ways. THe contrast is there to make you aware of something, not to create dichotomous categories as we see in a lot of contemporary management literature not the mention the whole right/left brain/hemisphere nonsense. The point is that we are part of our past and our present, we need to respect both.
The granularity of the patterns is also important, the hero’s journey is too coarsely grained but we need familiar elements in the stories we are told and in turn, tell. For me, this is one of my frustrations with the pattern languages you see in cybernetics where the patterns are coarsely-grained categories. I keep wanting to break them down and use multiple agents to add high-abstraction metadata from varying perspectives so that we can create new assemblies that may become assemblages in the act of telling and retelling. I’ll be picking up this theme again in the new year, but I would refer you back to an earlier post on the paucity of mental models to make sense of the world (another categorisation of filters approach). Also to a quote from a book we are about to publish on SenseMaker® by Anna Panagiotou and Eleanor Snowden who argue that Assemblage is a slightly problematic term in English as it doesn’t mean an assembly of parts. It “translates to agencement; meaning to arrange, to play out or to piece together”, it is “not a unified whole, but more a heterogeneous co-existence”. Hopefully, I am not being too obscure here, my point is that don’t want a formula. But meaning comes from a series of agencements.
A good story allows us to use the past, but to weave it into new contexts with new experiences. Our past stories, in the sense of the oral tradition, are a key component here and it is one that, in a modern age, technology can enable.
The Twelvetide series was followed by posts on the theme of Rewilding Leadership which was a focus for us in 2023 along with rewilding as a concept more generally. At the first Rewilding Leadership course later in the year, I created a simpler way of explaining complexity (which has developed considerably since looking out for it in the new year). Narrative was the theme in a two-part series at the end of January before two posts on the danger of metamuggledom (which I contrasted (unfavourably) with the aesthetic movement of meta-modernity. That got followed up with the new phrenologists post IN April. The annual Cynefin update was replaced on St David’s Day with an early version of Estuarine Mapping (which has been the big hit this year). The Granularity pair of posts later in March are ones that I need to build on. And of course, last March was the Mike Jackson lecture at Hull which I reflected on here and which you can listen to in full on the Centre for Systems Studies website and I picked on some of these from that in subsequent posts, the first on conjecture and then on eliminating the incoherent. April saw two posts on craft. What I see as a growing existential crisis in HR/OD came next along with noting a rather poignant anniversary. May saw a post on curation. In June I posted on emergence through abduction and language. June also saw me use a Robert Frost poem to look at the rich contextuality of language. In July I created a post linking to other key posts and went on to discuss wandering and lame excuses before a post on the elephant metaphors used by Senge. July also saw a polemical post on purposelessness Tand an introductory post on distributed decision making which will be a major theme this coming year. Then I hit an extended fallow period interrupted by a tribute to Larry Prusak, before I picked things up again a few days ago. The fallow period was in part induced by putting a lot of work into two major articles, there are interesting posts from other members of the team and the wider network that you can pick up on.
The wonderfully moody picture of Alderley Edge Woods is cropped from an original by Riik@mctr used under a Creative Commons license via Flickr. You can almost imagine Colin and Susan meeting the Hooded One here. The ‘weaving’ picture is also cropped from an original, this time by Robert Linder on Unsplash
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
Communicating and interacting with others is a funny thing. Even when we speak the same language, communicating is a hot bed for confusion and misunderstanding. What I write down here will likely be interpreted in slightly, and maybe in some cases majorly, different ways to my original intentions. However, communicating and understanding one another is fundamentally important to our personal, social, and economic lives.
This blog was partly inspired by the podcast Why Conversations Go Wrong (which I highly recommend). In it, Deborah Tannen, a Professor of Linguistics, discusses some of the reasons why we get so confused. Tannen explains that we each have a learnt, automatic conversational style which affects conversation on a ‘meta’ level. For example, different people have different expectations about how long a pause between each conversation point should be. This could change one’s experience of talking to someone who is perceived to be constantly interrupting them versus not engaging enough. It also influences preferences for speaking more directly or indirectly – where meaning often gets lost. And don’t get me started on how often we talk in metaphors and idioms (by which I mean, do get me started, it’s a very interesting topic).
Other processes might be at play too. Signal amplification bias, for example, refers to when people incorrectly assume that what they have communicated has been fully understood by the other person (Vorauer & Sakamoto, 2006). This especially happens in new situations, where novelty causes someone to experience heightened self-awareness and so is more likely to perceive that the person they are talking to is similarly aware of these feelings. This can lead to hindered relationships wherein the correct message is not communicated, and so expected feedback is not given.
Many many factors influence how we might interpret and understand events: such as age, gender, culture, mood, stereotypes, personal experiences, cognitive abilities, and physical characteristics (a small child is going to experience a large supermarket much differently to a tall adult). Even if we agree on a dictionary definition, our perceptions around what words mean in practice can be very different. For example, one person’s perception of what is considered an expensive meal will be very different to another. A teenager’s perception of what constitutes a clean room may be very different to their caregiver’s. The additional reliance on technology has made it even more tricky to communicate, without visual cues and voice tones we’re left guessing whether an exclamation mark means someone is excited, surprised, angry, or friendly! (Ferrazzi, 2013). My personal favourite emoji is 😬 – what people actually think of me when I send it, maybe I’d rather not know.
Different perceptions and interpretations can not only be confusing, but it can also be dangerous. For example, it can lead to inappropriate or incorrect medical care when patient and health professional do not understand each other (Iezzoni et al., 2004). Even in the highly standardised industry of aviation, accidents are still often attributed to miscommunication (Molesworth & Estival, 2015). It is therefore important to be humble and responsible with the way we communicate and listen.
We at the Cynefin Co are particularly aware of the efforts it takes in communicating. We are a multi-cultural, multi-disciplinary team, working with an even wider range of clients and collaborators, on multiple virtual and in-person platforms. A standard team meeting consists of finding out what is happening in Cape Town, Greece, Denmark, Wales, Netherlands, Singapore…The complexity of language, accents, and understandings is never far from our minds.
The SenseMaker® tool helps to bring alive these differences, to help us not make assumptions about how people are feeling and experiencing their environment but for everyone to express and explain themselves in their own (written or recorded) words and then to further self-identity how their stories fit into themes. However, it is no magic bullet. So, take care when creating significations and analysing patterns, there’s always room for more perspectives.
Some thoughts on collaborating on design and analysis
Ask us about future Narrative Basecamps for a deeper dive into language and complexity.
Banner image by cdd20 on Unsplash.com. Top image by Mark König on Unsplash.com
From time to time someone, knowing my interest in narrative sends me a link to yet another website collecting people’s stories. One popped up in slack as I was writing this offering a “magic formula” to change the world. It has some powerful stories all carefully curated by the design team. They are organised into categories and you can find ones suited for their need, and then you can sign up children (as long as an adult is present) to follow the four-stage magic formula to create more of the same. All worthy, all valuable in its way but I normally respond with the comment that the meaning in those stories has been curated and stimulated through the agency of the teachers, facilitators, or whoever who have initiated the work. The key aspect of SenseMaker® is that the power of interpretation and also engagement rests with the originators of the story. In effect, we want to encourage distributed facilitation and horizontal engagement with ideas in far less structured ways, the key to achieving what I call messy coherence; one of the best terms I have created over the years. Curation needs to be distributed and to achieve that we need abstract typologies not culturally determined taxonomies. The dangers of epistemic injustice are ever-present with structured approaches to curation.
In a related discussion, I’ve been engaged in discussions on the value and use of Peter Checkland’s Soft Systems method and in particular his use of Rich Pictures. I picked up and used the method back in the 80s and 90s in a range of roles and it was a key facilitation technique within the GENUS programme within DataSciences. I also was involved in a four-way debate with Peter, Nonaka, and Richard McDermott at the University of Lyon back in my knowledge management days. For those not familiar with the approach it involves understanding the relevant root definitions of activity within a system. The CATWOE version focuses that on Customers, Actors, Transformation process, Worldview, Owner, and Environmental constraints. The key to the approach is the realisation that change also involves the accommodation of conflicting interests. The development of Rich Pictures involved using sketches and symbols to better visualise the various interactions within a complex problem or issue.
I continue to owe a debt of gratitude to the approach and you can see aspects of it in the Decision Mapping approach I developed in which ethnography is used to create a type of systems map of the flow of information between decisions and the resulting messy output (it always is messy) compared with the more formal process map that exists in nearly all organisations. Interventions then occur in the gaps between the two and those become part of a wider portfolio of projects. One of the key differences here is our use of distributed ethnographic approaches to capturing the decisions and information flows without facilitation, before we move into the comparison which is generally workshop-based. Then within the workshop, we use complex facilitation techniques where we minimise the role of the facilitator. As I have explained to people on many occasions we did the original development of this approach when I was in IBM in Denmark so that we could facilitate in English, but the participants would speak in Danish so we could not engage with the content. I also used some of the early approaches to graphic facilitation (which owe something to Checkland as well but often don’t acknowledge it) but again gave artists to participants outside of the control of the facilitator.
One of my main focus points at the moment is making a significant shift in facilitation, using various artifacts to create various ‘maps’ symbolic and otherwise, to understand complex situations and devise interventions. That draws on other work I was involved in back in the 90s working with Hexagons as a facilitation process. And when I was heavily committed and engaged to that came across the work of John Varney and spent some enjoyable sessions with him in High Trenhouse. His work was in part inspired by the Bauhaus movement (where there are connections with the Field Guide). There are other threads that come in here including the work of Anne Pendleton-Julian and working with her on a typology of constraints over two retreat events was a real treat. I’ve also been working with the ever inspirational Gaping Void who have a highly developed approach to the use of semiotics in change and our recent retreat on that subject brought in several other thinkers who are influencing our current trajectory on mapping, framing, and intervening as a part of the wider development of sense-making. We are also involved in an investigation of the links between SenseMaker®, Cynefin and Nora Bateson’s Warm Data and I am starting to see interesting possibilities there. Graphic facilitation has also advanced considerably over the last two decades.
Part of the stimulus for this post is that I am currently engaged in an interesting debate with Mike Jackson over the differences and similarities between his Critical Systems Thinking (CST) approach and the various body of methods, frameworks, and ideas that come together under the Naturalising Sense-Making approach which includes Cynefin. I owe another response which I plan to post tomorrow or Monday and that will link back here. At the moment I feel I am simply sorting out misunderstandings on the use of natural science as an enabling constraint. For example, in his latest post, he says of me that “In his view, social science, to be valuable, must follow the model of the natural sciences” which is not the meaning of using natural science as a constraint and most definitely is not my view. In fact, I have and will continue to argue that social science cannot, in the main, follow the model of natural science and its value lies in the differences. I actually think Mike and I are not far apart on this, but we will see. I certainly draw on some of the same social sciences as he does (see above) but also a broad range of material from the Humanities. It is going to take time, not even all my own team get it yet! A reason for that may be that my use of enabling constraints in the context of social science is original, or at least I haven’t seen anything similar, But a claim of originality needs to be taken with caution and I am exercising that. Either way, I suspect it will need a couple more iterations with Mike before we have an agreement on what we are both actually saying, and then we can look at differences.
In contrast with that useful exchange, I am dealing with a few less useful discussions around that debate. Some very defensive responses from people whose lives are wrapt up with cybernetics and can’t see beyond it. Other’s trying to make their mark with different takes on complexity or uncertainty by denigrating a better-known approach. I can understand that and while you need to differentiate something novel it is best to avoid denigrating the things you are different from. I’ve made some errors on that boundary myself but at least I read the material I criticise. It is fairly amusing to see the speed with which some people fall into the straw-man fallacy and also with some of the trolling. I think the problem here is that if you have invested years in a paradigm it is difficult to contemplate you might be wrong. My maths is no longer up to the debates in physics but I still retain an intuition that string theory is not the way forward. If that proved to be right a lot of people would be deeply challenged. To be clear this is an example, not an assertion. One particular exchange involved an attack on a key method advocated in the Field Guide namely journaling. The protagonist was a designer who is heavily into the whole rich pictures type facilitation. He (interestingly all the antagonists here are male) assumed that journaling involved writing a diary. In fact, we use multi-media and are shifting to wider use of symbols and other aesthetic forms in our approaches to journaling; if he had bothered to check he might have learned something. But to a degree I doubt it; our approach is based on only allowing his type of facilitation towards the end of a process if at all. If we use it at the start it is to create an open architecture around which people’s own narratives and meaning can emerge. Curation often seems more like museum-based preservation, or to reference the Bonsai tree at the top of this post confining or limited, to privilege the designer. The chrysalises represent a more evolutionary approach and also act as a metaphor for the need for a field to advance, progress, and to synthesis many sources and experiences. I think Mike is, with CST seeking to reinvigorate a field and to a large part succeeding but I am essaying something more radical.
Bonsai tree is by Yaopey Yong, the banner picture is cropped from an original by Francisco J. Villena both on Unsplash
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