One of the critical approaches we developed with narrative, initially in workshops and then at scale with SenseMaker®, was to take people through parallel processes of interpretation and then get the two groups to compare the results. That work is three decades old in some forms, and the underlying principles have stood the test of time. Humans respond to anomalies. Indeed, the eye has a tiny section, which shifts into highly focused attention in a blurred background when something different happens. So, creating anomalies is critical to any sense-making, a point I have made several times over the last few weeks in varying forms.
But it is not enough to create an anomaly; the process by which that is triggered is also essential, especially when you are dealing with power. And the nature of the anomaly must be explicit and ideally not ‘explainable away’.
Some of our early work included generating contextual archetypes (for example, managers’ and employees’ archetypes created in parallel processes), showing this to both groups and asking each other why they saw it differently. This article from my days at IBM provides some more background to this approach, and a more updated post-IBM article can be found here. Archetypes are a form of symbolism, and if we ignore the abuse by Jung and Campbell trying to create universal and limiting categories, they provide resilient and oblique ways to address complex issues. They allow people to have conversations through the medium of abstraction, reducing stress and increasing the effectiveness of what follows. They also create symbolic languages that enable difficult conversations without getting too personal. It is an aspect of our work that has been in the background for a bit, and I want to bring it more into the foreground and extend into broader semiotic approaches.
As you can see if you read the articles, the process of archetype creation is workshop-based. As we developed SenseMaker®, we could do similar things at scale and with less risk of facilitator bias using people’s experiences reported in narrative or observational forms. We get people to interpret their experiences using high-abstraction metadata (and we can use archetypes for this, by the way). Then we only look at stories that provide an explanans for the statistical patterns that come from people-empowered self-interpretation. This avoids people being triggered or primed by the first stories they see that match what they want to hear. If we take a cluster of the narratives/observations signified (our word for interpreted or indexed) in a similar way and present it to other groups and ask them to interpret the material, then they have gone through the same process; no expert who can be dismissed, no algorithm that can be blamed: they did it, and now they have to think about the consequences. We call this Descriptive self-awareness a principle that applies to a much wider body of our work. Create tensions, and differences that make people aware of differences, don’t drive it home with the proverbial sledgehammer.
I made the point forcibly in my last post that allowing people to interpret their own experiences is vital on both practical and ethical grounds. This was driven home to me in a conversation with a network member that started yesterday and hung over into the morning. They argued that AI, specifically generative AI, could identify and cluster stories to create a ‘living map’ that would allow the more like this, fewer like that question to be asked. This is problematic on different levels:
Don’t get me wrong, AI has value for anomaly spotting and synthesis, but its use for primary meaning is problematic. The above processes work with abductive reasoning; the AI is inductive by nature. This is a point I have been making strongly in my pre and post-Christmas posts.
I should make a related point here – we focus on clusters of stories based on self-interpretation, not on a single structured story. This is an essential difference with techniques such as Most Significant Change or some approaches to Positive Deviance (not all by any means), which create a competitive environment to tell the best story. Many story consultants also like to discover and retell powerful stories, which I find problematic, although I can see it satisfies ego needs. The dangers of expert interpretation are well-known and can impact even Anthropologists. It is worth reading this paper to see the danger, but be aware it is controversial, and I am not endorsing Freeman’s claims, just pointing to an issue).
Humans don’t make sense through single stories or narrative forms (or when they do, it leads to tyranny); it is the fragmented patterns of day-to-day experience from which meaning-making emerges, and change comes from spotting or attempting to trigger anomalies in those patterns. AI can assist us in that. But not replace its essential human qualities.
A ‘living’ map created by AI is more likely to represent the undead, with no further evolution, just degeneration.
Postscript
Another danger with algorithmic interpretation (generative or otherwise) of the narrative is that it plays fast and loose with the truth. Bad actors exploit new technology faster than good ones, and pleas for “responsible’ use are naïve in the extreme and dangerously so. We are entering a period where no one can trust any information unless you know the source. That is one area of particular focus for CynefinCo in society-level work and builds on the work of the Ponte project we ran for the EU. Others were trying to algorithmically determine what was true in a world of disinformation; we focused on getting the input right.
It is a constant source of amazement that the IT community that promulgated the phrase Garbage in, Garbage out still doesn’t realise the implications.
The banner picture is cropped from an original used under the Unsplash+ license, and the street art of the opening picture is by Nick Fewings and obtained from Unsplash. Credit also to Gregory Bateson for the phrase that acts as the title of this post. There is a whole literature on whether he said it and assuming he did what he meant by it, and I may write on that at some stage in the future. For the moment, I am using it in the sense that different ways we use the same information provide the necessary gradient from which meaning can emerge, something that the homogenisation of common interpretation too quickly destroys.
This post continues the narrative theme that I have been working through over the last few weeks with two purposes: (i) to add to what has been a thirty-year body of work and (ii) to prepare for an easy-to-use set of tools to understand, and as significantly to change, underlying attitudes in a range of fields. That will start with culture and AI, extending to safety, ethics, and other application areas. They are being created to allow people to see what it is like to work with distributed ethnographic approaches to narrative-based understanding and intervention design without needing significant commitment regarding cash, training, etc. I’ll blog about those offers more specifically next week to alert people. I am pleased to say that the software sprint needed for the offer resulted in a successful test yesterday, so we should be ready to launch midweek. I want to look at two aspects of organisational narrative work: obliquity and liminality.
Obliquity should be a familiar concept to any parent with teenage children. Dealing with issues directly doesn’t work; dealing with things indirectly is more likely to be successful if you are not too obvious in what manipulation of the dispositional state or substrate (to use complex language) in which actions take place. John Kay’s excellent book Obliquity will provide many examples from organisations, countries and military environments. To quote him, “Obliquity is characteristic of systems that are complex, imperfectly understood, and change their nature as we engage with them”. More colloquially, we can talk about going around things or exploiting an essential aspect of human behaviour, the ability to create workarounds, something well summed up in Scot’s word canny, which means worldly-wise or shrewd. These two words I didn’t often connect with the organisational change initiatives I lived through at IBM. The OED definition of obliquity is: “The quality of being oblique in direction, position, or form; inclination at an oblique angle to a straight line or plane; the degree or extent of…“
Telling a story is a classic way of doing this. A gifted storyteller will bring their audience into a narrative space where they will start to make the inferences to their lives without being bludgeoned by purpose statements or motivational speakers. Nora Bateson does a lot of abductive work using metaphors, telling a story about nature from which people can conclude ways to do things differently. I’ve been doing the same in recent posts, looking at things like Lévy walks with similar intent. Our theory of change, which asks for more stories/observations like these, fewer like those, is one variant. It doesn’t talk about specific objectives but instead starts to micro-nudge the system in roughly the right direction, opening the possibility of novel discovery along the pathways by not being overly directive, thus avoiding the perverse incentives of explicit objectives or direct commands, instructions, exhortations or pleas. We generally do the same in day-to-day conversation. If we have a difficult discussion, we may be tentative in our initial exchanges, testing the water to see what reaction we get. It is the same in organisational change; if we start with the existing narrative patterns of the organisation and test the water with micro-nudges, then we are less likely to engender anti-stories and can achieve a more sustainable and resilient cadence of change. The new QuickSense products I mentioned are a way of getting you started and don’t preclude a more conventional approach later., but they can significantly de-risk those initiatives. To deal with a possible objection, this type of caution demonstrates respect for current employee attitudes of being curious and open to different ways of thinking. Once you commit to an objective, the die is cast. While dishonesty is always a poor policy, honesty is not always the best. A little testing of the water through oblique approaches is more effective and, I would argue, more ethical.
That brings me to liminality, being on the threshold of some change, either awaiting a signal to move or in a state of transition. Creating a liminal state is too often neglected in organisational change initiatives. The assumption is that this is where we need people to be, and they should damn well get on with changing. If they don’t, there is often a righteous indication at the lack of the right mindset or similar.; deflection of the blame onto the individual. The other one is to blame people for not communicating the right message, which always amuses me a bit – it may well be that the message is wrong or was too quickly open to misinterpretation. By targeting a collection of narrative observations (more like these are always in the plural), our request, or even instruction, carries a sufficient degree of ambiguity to allow adjustment to meet the local context. We can represent the map fractally as well. Allowing each part of the organisation to see their current position and the next step they can take rather than be absorbed into a whole organisation initiative. First, shifting people into a liminal transition state is the best way to prepare them to change from where they are to where you want them to be. It increases the likelihood that your initiative will be successful in part by reducing the stress of change on individuals. More like these also allow some local flexibility and context-specific interpretation of how to move in the right direction. And it generates micro-interventions that can be shared and partially copied on a peer-to-peer basis across the organisations.
Enabling micro conversations at scale is pragmatic and more respectful to your staff than top-down communication, definition of ideal qualities, etc. There is also a subliminal element to using narrative-induced directions of travel. So, when initiating change, we have two questions: How can we approach the change obliquely, and how can we create safer liminal states from which transitions can be more effectively triggered? We can do that with micro-narrative to create the raw material for the more like these questions, and there are also a whole bunch of other things we can do with archetypes, counter-actual stories, story viruses and a host of other methods that we, and others, have developed over the years.
Postscript
One of the reasons for choosing the picture of two men gossiping is that attempts to search for pictures using “gossip” produced entirely female examples. Attempts at AI generation again were entirely female but biased towards exotic and near-pornographic pictures based on North Atlantic male fantasies. A crucial part of our approach to gathering the initial narrative is that people self-interpret their experiences. We don’t allow AI or experts to interpret it for them. Nor do we build in the assumptions you see in most cultural questionnaires, which start with an assumption of what should be the case, one that generally enforces stereotypes of leadership, management, etc. We also ask for authentic experiences, and the interpretation is non-evaluative; that is to say, our approach is oblique. Asking people direct questions about their feelings is stressful and results in gaming behaviour. Modern trends by which people are scored for behaviour by their colleagues are just taking all that is wrong about 360º approaches and seeking to replicate it at scale.
Start with description, not evaluation, and avoid defining what you think will be the correct attitudes or endpoints. This question, asked fractally through the organisation: How do we get more stories/observations like these, fewer like those? represents an oblique approach, which people can engage with at all levels of education, and you maintain resilience through liminality for longer.
The opening picture of two men in conversation is by Belinda Fewings. The banner picture is cropped from an original by Josh Felise chosen to show the liminal nature of Twilight, and if you check carefully, you can see four figures there. . Both were obtained from Unsplash.
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, I summarised the material in my pre and post-Christmas blogs and added material on tribalism. One of the key points I was making there is that creating boundaries and conflict between those boundaries is a natural tendency of all species. You can’t eliminate it, so you have to work with it. To that, we can add pluralistic ignorance, which describes the problem where, even given an opportunity, people will not speak up as they assume everyone else is happy. This is not a modern phenomenon, a thing of the famous story of The Emperor’s New Clothes, which requires a child, untouched by adult sophistication, to call out the fraud. At its extreme, this can mean people going along with extreme cruelty to others or extensive harm: drinking the cool aid. Now, this isn’t a paradox; we are a cooperative species, which means fitting in, but that is based on fitting within a group, which, in general, we might summarise as hordes, tribes and clans. Those groups compete and cooperate in very different ways in different contexts. It is worth remembering that these groups act as social scaffolding; it is energy efficient as we cannot survive as individuals entire of ourselves, to paraphrase John Donne. But we like things to be different. My Twelfetide series from 2021 has a lot of material on this and related issues of rituals and habits. In the seventh post of that series, I introduced a basic typology from Caporael, which does a little beyond Dunbar’s numbers, although there are some links. In effect, we can see a Macrodeme as a Clan, which then breaks down as shown. I recommend reading the linked post, but here is the typology:
Other work I have read sees the task groups as evolving from the maximum number of decision-makers within an extended family where, in the main, we evolved to compromise. So, from now on, I will call them Quintets, with Trios acting as a transition between the two. The consequences of severe ongoing conflict are, in the main, worse in the smaller groups as you can’t separate. The smaller groups, and this is important, have more innate empathy. Closeness in space and over time increases the ability to see things from another perspective, not necessarily to agree on it but to understand it. Empathy, in the way I am using it, can give rise to compassion, pity and sympathy, but it is not a synonym for any of them. The inability to separate impacts on much larger groups, by the way, but for the moment, I am focused on organisations. Smaller groups can combine and recombine in different ways. We use this in a Triopticon design with seven groups of three involved in exploration, while three groups of seven then integrate the ideas. Whatever never do is confuse the task group with the Deme or Macrodeme, which requires a task, not empathy, to trigger collaboration. Working together on something that means you see the other person differently is critical to some of our work on peace and reconciliation. Still, the same principles apply within an organisation. Different types of tasks allow more people to get a sense of common purpose; it cannot be imposed top-down. People in the UK often hark back to the Spirit of Blitz and ask why we can’t return to it. The reason is that period was an existential threat to a whole nation, and the associated tasks can unite people, but without that threat, we won’t. This is scary on big issues, by the way. Covid was an immediate and proximate threat, so people accepted radical changes in behaviour. While climate change is something we all know we need to get around to, current concerns outweigh future dangers. Admonishments and guilt-inducing lectures end up having the opposite effect and give succour to demagogues. Task-based collaboration can create empathetic relationships that persist into other contexts, but that is more likely with smaller groups than larger ones, which is why we use trios or quintets for distributed decision-making and discovery. The Entangled Trios method can also handle Dyads (with, for example, trans-generational pairs). But it gives us a set of factors we must consider. The impact of task-based initiation of collaboration is highly context-specific and related to proximity in time of the need for cooperation. Seeing things from another’s perspective requires resonance with something familiar. For example, in 2015, the pictures of a drowned refugee child in the Mediterranean (trigger warning: the pictures are terrible in this link) elicited considerable sympathy but not a long-term solution to the problem. We become hardened to the suffering of others in a way that we don’t with family and friends. Collaboration and common purpose are emergent properties; they cannot be designed and imposed top-down, however well-intentioned the intervention is. But before we do that, we need to understand the patterns of where we are. Estuarine Mapping is one technique for that, and it has undergone a lot of experimental validation since the last update, so if interested, get in touch; that technique handles disagreement by getting participants in the process to break things down until they agree and then focuses on small actions not to solve the problem, but to reduce the energy cost of any solution. It is a strategy tool in its own right, but it is also significantly valued as a pre-process before something more traditional. It creates an Affordance Landscape, one component of the 3As, along with Assemblage mapping and intentionality managing Agency. Mapping and intervention go hand in hand. But when we get to the broader issue of attitudes and beliefs, which includes culture, we need to focus on assemblage and agency. That means five things:
All of that is something we are planning to make a lot easier for people who want to approach this from an anthro-complexity perspective, and I will summarise that in the third post in this ser
I’ve been building a theme based on the idea that making sense through patterns is a natural form of decision-making that has evolved in humans over time. That has also been linked to the difference between abductive and inductive thinking, which has also been critical to the AI series, which I am temporarily interrupting as this post and the next are needed to conclude that series. In the first post, I quoted Mumford and Lill: “Dispositions only tend towards their manifestations; they do not necessitate” and linked that to the general theme in complexity that there are no levers to pull but dispositional states to manage. I also talked about the need to stimulate anomalies if you want people to see things differently. In Lévy walks, waggle dances & fungi I discussed natural systems that have high utility, but no directing intelligence. Vector Theory of Change, in particular the More like these, fewer like those process of change featured in my last post before I shifted gear to the Twelvetide series on Science Fiction & Fantasy. But I was still thinking about patterns and resilience while writing that.
With Epiphany past and the Christmas decorations down for another year, my first writing turned to updating the Uncertainty Matrices, which was designed to focus on preparing for unknown, unknowables, but as importantly, creating processes for discovering unknown knowns in the context of need. The first in the Patterns & pragmatism series pointed out that we know how to manage complexity and uncertainty in our daily lives but forget about that when walking into an organisation. That post also introduced the idea of requisite ambiguity, which I plan to build on this week. The series also addressed the need to reduce the granularity of pattern languages and interventions in general. A lot of the thinking from that writing spilt over into the two posts to date on AI, namely Algorithmic Induction and Anthropomorphising Idiot savants. I’m working on new alternatives to Artificial Intelligence for the AI abbreviation to complete that series. And, of course, not to be forgotten, my report on a bottom-up approach to change bringing together football fans and food banks. I titled that post Hopeful Tragedy (the foodbank gave hope; the need for it was tragic) in a partial reference to the discredited idea of the tragedy of the commons to which I also want to return.
I’ve spent some time summarising there, so you know what I am drawing on. I also want to add to this somewhat messy but hopefully growingly coherent mess of material a recent article in the Washington Post by Joel Achenbach, which addresses the increasingly polarised tribal nature of society in the US with increasingly inflammatory rhetoric and an easy slipover into hate in respective of anyone not in our tribe. That reports on one experiment from the year of my birth, 1954, and I will quote the article in full:
Social psychologist Muzafer Sherif took 22 Boy Scouts and separated them into two groups camping at Robbers Cave State Park in Oklahoma. Only after a week did they learn that there was another group at the far end of the campground. What they did next fascinated the research team. Each group developed irrational contempt for the other. The boys in the other group were seen not just as rivals, but as fundamentally flawed human beings. Only when the two groups were asked to work together to solve a common problem did they warm up to one another.
I have previously argued against homogeneity and for what I called coherent heterogeneity, or in more popular language, messy coherence, a phrase much copied but less frequently acknowledged. My Flexuous Curves framework argues that the energy cost of creating something new is at its lowest when the existing Apex Predator (product or philosophy) has become commoditized. So, homogenising political differences in the US and Europe around neo-liberal economics and Globalisation was problematic as people could no longer perceive any difference between right and left. At that point, the energy cost of extremism goes down. And that, in turn, triggers a switch to tribal othering on which populism thrives. There is a similar argument in organisational change initiatives. The attempt to homogenise around a standard set of values and beliefs will most likely generate cynical anti-stories as the Executives fail to live up to the platitudes that inevitably get used. We like differences; we like conflict. The secret is to use it creatively.
There is a clue in the Scout case – things changed when they had to work together. Minor conflicts are easily managed, large ones less so. If social media reinforces your prejudices, then you will be trapped in an Assemblage from which you cannot escape.; there will be no anomalies in the patterns you see. How we deal with this, well that is tomorrow’s post.
The opening picture shows two Great Egrets battling for territorial fishing rights at dawn on the Sea of Cortex; it is by Chris Sabor via Unsplash. The banner picture was taken by yours truly while walking on Fyfield Down – I had taken the bus to Averbury and ascended to the Down via the Harepath, which also used to be the Coach and Four routes between Bath and London. I crossed the ancient Ridgeway at the summit, diverting right through the Grey Weathers and Neolithic Field systems before passing Devil’s Den and, from there, a muddy route home. It represents the patterning of the landscape over many thousands of years
Observant readers will have noticed that I am using pragmatism in two respects: yesterday in reference to abduction and the Pragmatists today in respect to the more normal day-to-day use. In the opening post, I talked about our natural ability to manage patterns in our daily lives and how language carries highly contextual meaning in family and social groups. I should have referenced Deacon’s Symbolic Species there for those who hung up on theories of language on which AI depends, but I will focus more on that in future posts. I referred to the role of art in meaning-making and introduced the idea of requisite ambiguity as essential for sense-making. In a direct criticism of models seeking to identify qualities and competencies, I pointed out that those are emergent properties with no causal effect. If you change how people interact, the qualities and competencies will emerge in parallel. I also challenged their static nature. In effect, we are dealing with Deluzian Assemblages: an ensemble of heterogeneous elements which compose a territory. The English translation of the French agencement doesn’t help here as it implies an assembly of components. To quote Anna and Ellie in a book on SenseMaker®, we are about to publish, it means “to arrange, to play out or to piece together“, and it is “not a unified whole, but more a heterogeneous co-existence”.
There is a social context to any human capability, which is not just about the individual but also about a body of practices that have emerged over time and are highly path-dependent. Tradition and ritual have a value function, in the main. For example, this video shows a modern craftsman creating a medieval book. Considerable individual skill is demonstrated, but that skill comes from a long tradition of experiments, errors, and consequential learning. I found that on Guy Gabriel-Kay’s Twitter feed. Readers may remember he featured in my Christmas blog series. My second post was all about abductive reasoning and its role in human decision-making. I also introduced the role of intuition in that post and the role of surprise or anomaly detection in getting us to see things differently. I also brought into place a previous set of posts on issues of granularity, abstraction and coherence, which are essential here. Our work on abduction, with SenseMaker® and otherwise, is focused on abstraction and is complementary to both the Pragmatists and the work of Bateson (father and daughter) on metaphor.
So what can we do differently?
One good place to start is the idea of pattern languages, a term initially coined by Christopher Alexander in 1977. His work was to break down various architectural forms into design patterns that ordinary people could reassemble to solve complex problems. Patrick Hoverstadt and Lucy Loh have taken that approach in their book Patterns of Strategy, which I recommend. I’m curious if Patrick is happy with me doing this, and that may relate to the qualification I will make in a minute. By its nature, language needs vocabulary, and the eighty patterns in that book provide it. There are elements here of object-orientated design, which was important in my early work on methods over thirty years ago – seeing software and people as objects or patterns allows for more adaptability and resilience in system design. In any assembly or agencement, the interactions also matter, and not everything can be joined to everything else, and there may be dependencies in the process anyway. But the underlying principle of ensuring that your ‘components‘, ‘objects‘, or ‘patterns‘ are coherent and make sense as such but require combination with others to have practical application is essential. Although it arises before we see the adoption of complexity science in organisations, it works well with scaling by decomposition and recombination rather than imitation, but not with avoiding aggregation.
Our approach with Hexi links to this. We started it last year and got a lot of uptake, and we also had a lot of learning! The 2024 version is finally available for sale. The new Estuarine pack will be announced soon, as will the opening up of the approach to participation by other methods and tool providers. We’ve been working with the Flow System Playbook via Nigel and John to understand what is needed here. What is critical here is to know when an assembly becomes an assemblage. That also includes when it needs to make the change, which is only sometimes the case, and how to make it happen. In relatively crude terms, an assembly handles complication, but an assemblage is needed for complexity. An assembly creates a homogeneous whole, while assemblage is a heterogeneous evolutionary process which is never fully stable and is requisitely diverse.
Now, there are several ways in which that switch can happen, and here, I want to focus on two: firstly, when the acts of assembling and their practice become ritualised within a community and secondly, where we change the interactions and enable fractal engagement through multiple interactions. I’ll go through those now, but on the second, I am also building to a significant post and product launch midweek (I hope) so there is more detail to come.
So, to the first. I’ve previously argued that the process by which Black Cab drivers acquire The Knowledge over several years also, through the interactions, creates the abstract qualities of trust and professionalism that you would not get by simply assembling drivers controlled by apps. Both have utility, but they are very different. The social processes engender emergent properties that make the assemblage more than the sum of its parts. On the downside, while that can introduce energy efficiency, it can also stifle innovation and change. The conflict between generations of craft results in innovation in part because of the constraints of the prior generation. Much innovation in the arts arose because of the need to find ways to work around censorship, for example. At a certain level, those constraints encourage innovation, but when they become stifling, we need to engage in radical disruption. These options are all in the various types of Cynefin Dynamics and the new framework Estuarine Mapping, which de-territorialises a negative assemblage by changing the granularity.
Which leads me to the second. As a general principle, the finer the grains, the less we disagree about what they mean, and they can combine more quickly than course graining. Estuarine mapping breaks a situation down to the level of actors, constraints and constructors understood in the context of what energy and time is required for change; from that point, we can assemble something novel that achieves agreement by emergence over time and if it stabiles heterogeneity then it retains the capacity to evolve and is an assemblage. Suppose it stabilises in a homogenous manner as best or good practices. In that case, it still has high utility in the context of its creation but less adaptability when the context shifts. So, one of the things I would like to do with the 80 patterns in Hoverstadt and Loh is to create several hundred, nay thousands, sub-patterns and diverse perspectives on the original 80. As they stand, they are categories. Fragmentation and fractal search would make them something that is constantly being as becoming. Years ago, I did a similar project with an Architectural school, which allowed citizen stories to combine and recombine at a finely trained level through abstract interpretation to suggest novel and different opportunities in brownfield development. That same process applies or organisational design, strategy and many other fields. To quote myself: reduce the granularity, distribute the analysis, and disintermediate the decision makers.
Nowhere is this more important than in the field of mapping attitudes. We have done that work in the context of safety and culture and are now starting to look at ethics in general and in the context of AI. Attitudes are lead indicators from which we can spot anomalies or weak signals early enough to say something about them. And, critically, if our interventions take place in diverse contexts, we have a heterogeneous process. In effect, one-size-fits-all change and education programmes in companies try to homogenise the system based on a complete perception of what is required. That is what we need to change, and we will announce a set of offerings that are fast, low cost and easy to adopt, without the need for any special expertise, shortly. In these three blogs, I have tried to lay down some of the foundations of the approach,
The banner picture is cropped from an original, licensed under the Unsplash+ License, meaning I paid for it. There is a theme in the banner pictures of this series, starting with the formalism of a highly structured field system to the potential of a boat anchored in the mist to this more purposeful one. My opening picture in the first blog has a sense of mystery or discovery, and I then used an AI-generated image yesterday. I’m doing the same today, and this time, the instruction was to “create an image that creates patterns of meaning in a complex environment“. This one is interesting for the selection and positioning of the elements but note the regularity. I will return to that tomorrow when I start a theme on AI.
Before Thursday’s trip to Liverpool, I talked about the pattern basis of human decision-making and our evolved ability to make decisions under inherent uncertainty. Now, this is a big subject, and I am only going to touch the surface in these two blog posts. In my last point, I talked about the requisite ambiguity that humans can, outside the context of a modern organisation, handle with ease. One of the reasons for that is that we evolved to a large degree for abductive reasoning. We can do the. but it is not the only arrow in our quiver; AI, inductive stuff, is inductive almost by definition. Now, I have discussed this in various ways, and SenseMaker® was designed as an abductive research tool. But it is worth summarising the difference rather than pushing you to a range of previous blog posts.
Abductive reasoning is about identifying the shortest possible connection between apparently unconnected things. Originating with the American pragmatists, in particular, Pierce, who saw abductive logic as hypothesis generation, in Bateson (father and daughter), we see the use of metaphor to gain new insight and in the author’s field of naturalising sense-making the use of high abstraction metadata to distance human insight from material expectation to make serendipitous discovery more likely. It also appears to be a uniquely human capability, insight without training datasets, which today hasn’t been possible with algorithmic insights (the author refuses to call it artificial intelligence) and, as Larsen argues, may be impossible. It is a critical aspect of human resilience. It is linked to our ability to adapt quickly, see novel connections between apparently unconnected things, and radically repurpose them as described in the EUFG. On the downside, it makes us very prone to conspiracy theories. I wrote a two-part series on Granularity, Abstraction and Coherence earlier in the year, which explains and expands on this. I hereby incorporate those posts into this current series, so you might want to read them before we get to part three.
Abduction as a concept is closely linked to intuition, and, as the late great Larry Prusak said, intuition is compressed experience. The ability of a London Taxi Driver to navigate without conscious thought is linked to the enlarged hippocampus, which developed over the two-plus years of driving around the City on a scooter with a map learning the names of all the streets and routes. There is the old adage that appears in many forms of the retired Engineer who turns up on-site and, with one tap of a hammer, gets things working again. When his £3,000 bill is challenged, he revises it to £20 for the hammer blow and £2,980 for knowing where to hit. Experience counts, and it’s not just individual but also social. Indigenous friends in Australia are worried because they can no longer smell the seasons changing. Around this time last year, I reported on some of the work on dowsing, which suggests the rods may be a way in which the dower picks up and concentrates sub-conscious clues from the environment. There is a lot more to the capacity of humans to make sense of their world than we currently understand. Still, we know enough to say that experience and rich social interactions are key, as is visualisation, especially for anomaly detection.
We know that anomalies are critical if we are to pay attention to novelty. Otherwise, it may escape our attention. Methods designed to reduce uncertainty run the risk of preventing the detection of anomalies until it is too late to do anything. Surprise is one of the triggers for abductive thinking. To reference Pierce, if we are surprised by something, but if something else was also true, then we would not be surprised, then we start to suspect that something else is true. That statement is slightly complex, so it’s worth reading a few times. It is one of the ways we use intuition. It is also true that sometimes, we legitimately want to reduce uncertainty and create sufficient structure or scaffolding to create some sense of security. The secret is to know when that is legitimate and when it might prove fatal.
I’ll conclude this tomorrow and also lay down initial grounds for a series of posts on AI linked to planned events and a sensing capability we are about to launch,
Post script on Abduction that may help or hinder from Larson – referenced above
Deduction
All the beans from this bag are white
These beans are from this bag
Therefore, these beans are all white
Induction
These beans are from this bag
These beans are white
Therefore, all the beans from this bag are white
Abduction
All the beans from this bag are white
These beans are white
Therefore these beans are from this bag.
The banner picture is cropped from an original by Zoltan Tasi on Unsplash. DALL-E generated the Opening image on the instruction ‘create a panorama of humans managing complex patterns in nature”. It is my first use of algorithm-generated illustration.
The contrast between the two pictures is important here. The banner picture is redolent with possibilities and ambiguities, but any experienced boat person would immediately know what was possible, the reasons for the mist, etc. The machine-generated image creates highly structured patterns. Interestingly, there is a straight path that might distract from exciting side trips, and a forest surrounds the whole thing.
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