Thank you both, Beth Smith and Rhiannon Davies, for your outstanding contributions to the White Paper.
In a world that constantly generates data at an unprecedented pace, making sense of it all can be a daunting task. This is true whether you are monitoring and evaluating the impact of initiatives, projects, programmes or interventions. SenseMaker® offers an innovative and inclusive approach to collecting, interpreting and acting upon your data. SenseMaker® is used for monitoring and evaluation in a variety of contexts including in the commercial sector, healthcare, impact investment, education, public services, philanthropy, international development and more.
What is Sensemaker® Software?
SenseMaker® is a pioneering way to gather qualitative and quantitative data about people’s observations and experiences. What’s remarkable is that the people taking part analyse their own responses. So, we get authentic analyses of real experiences, rather than external interpretations of them. Results are demonstrated using simple graphics that make it easy to spot patterns and themes. This perspective can reveal things we might, ordinarily, have missed. Or perhaps not even looked for. The result? We can make sense of what’s really happening and determine the next steps or actions.
How SenseMaker® Software Works?
The essence of SenseMaker® lies in its ability to gather narratives through custom-built or ‘off the shelf’ questionnaires. Participants share their experiences in their own words, allowing for a rich collection of qualitative data. Participants then reflect on their experiences and analyse their own responses in a structured and meaningful way. The software then aggregated the stories and metrics to allow for a collective analysis and categorisation of these narratives, identifying themes, patterns, and connections.
This process enables a nuanced analysis of individual and collective perceptions, offering a multifaceted view of the impact being assessed. The Benefits of SenseMaker® Software in Monitoring and Evaluation:
1. Rich and Contextual Insights:
SenseMaker® allows for the collection of rich, contextualised data directly from the participants. By sharing their experiences in their own words, a deeper understanding of the impact, including the nuances and cultural differences is gained.
2. Real-time Analysis:
The software provides real-time analysis of the collected narratives, offering quick insights for timely decision-making. This agility is crucial in dynamic environments where rapid adjustments and refinements may be necessary, and tracking change over time (see vector theory of change).
3. Identifying Patterns and Trends:
SenseMaker® ‘s analytical capabilities help in identifying patterns, trends, and outliers within the narratives. This assists in recognising recurring themes and understanding the factors that contribute to or hinder the desired impact.
4. Visual Representation of Data:
SenseMaker® translates otherwise ‘messy’ qualitative data into visual representations such as graphs and charts, making it easier to communicate findings to stakeholders. Visualisations offer a clear and concise way to present information, aiding in informed decision-making and tracking systemic change over time.
5. Stakeholder Engagement and Alignment:
Involving stakeholders in the sensemaking process fosters engagement and aligns understanding. By including their perspectives and insights, it ensures that the evaluation is comprehensive and accurately represents the various stakeholders’ viewpoints in a culturally appropriate way (see Citizen Engagement White paper).
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Communication and language are both amazing inventions and fraught with complexity. Nina dove into this issue in her Complexity in Communicating post last year. As many of us know, from the first time we heard Dave speak, it can take a lot of work and navigation to really understand what someone means with the words and narratives they choose to use.
For some context, I had a long background in the arts, as an actor, improviser and over several decades working with non-profits. This background was unique when I attended Business School just over a decade ago. A few unexpected turns later I found myself working on senior leadership programs at the Business School and found myself in the position of teaching a communication and leadership course to MBAs, an unusually linearly driven group.
After hearing Dave talk about working on how to use Sensemaker® technology for contemporaneous feedback and coaching, and then speaking with Beth and Anne about it, I was interested to see if this use case could be deployed in my classroom where feedback is paramount to learning. In addition, while communication has a healthy dose of the rich theory behind it, many concepts are more tacit in nature. Practice is required. Feedback is a must since interpretation of language, non-verbals, and tone are to a degree personal, culturally and contextually specific.
To give students instant access to the multiple perspectives in the room seemed like a no-brainer, so with the generous support of Beth and Anne, I designed and began using Sensemaker® in the classroom instead of my previously used offline approaches, to help students more systemically approach the core of the issue… the delta between their intent and the impact they have on the listener.
The first thing that became clear to me is that everyone would benefit from this contemporaneous feedback in their conversations. I can see the usage being incredibly helpful for leaders in many situations, such as presenting in town halls. They could learn more about the impact they’ve had on the hundreds or thousands of employees in the audience and see what was understood or felt by them, and then adjust in future communications rather than relying on a small circle of ‘yes people’ to tell them how well they have done. Something I have observed happens numerous times.
Back in the classroom, I’m still looking at and analyzing the data that has come through after two classes (with a third and fourth in progress), which I will share in a subsequent post. For the moment, as a teacher, there appear to be four important uses of the Sensemaker tool:
The order above is important. The tool is not meant to be a research tool for myself, it is meant first and foremost to serve the students. Making sure the design focuses on student driven usage is essential.
My final thoughts here will focus on #4 and I’ll write about how students found using the tool and their takeaways soon. One of the great things about Sensemaker® and especially in the classroom is it forced me to really think about what I was teaching and what was important. Designing the first Sensemaker® honestly led me to question whether I knew what I was doing at all. So much of my Communications coaching is by context and feel, and small suggestions to students to see what changes. So, I questioned trying to sum those up with useful signifiers. It was difficult to make some of my tacit, more explicit, and I also had to lean into doing my best the first time around and checking if it was useful to students.
I did this with mixed results from the first class. So, I significantly changed the signifiers for the second class as well as the qualitative prompts. I should note here as well, that I have tried to keep technology out of my classroom. Allowing students to have their computers open, and input feedback while folks were speaking was a leap and a risk, and I still believe is problematic. I am still unsure how to solve this issue under the constraints of the class but am open to suggestions.
In the first class, I concerned myself with focusing on only positive questions but found that it led to responses that were too abstract. It turned out that the real value was specific suggestions on how to “improve”, which, I constantly point out is specific to each feedback giver (though patterns on similar themes make more of a case to take them to heart). So in the second class, I explicitly asked the question of suggestions for improvement and what worked well. This resulted in significantly better inputs (or at least richer and more useful in my judgement, though looking at early feedback from the students, they seem to have felt that their classmates were too “nice” leading to a missed opportunity for more actionable improvements.)
Finally, I benefited from seeing the overall trends in feedback. I can also quickly tell when a class is being “too nice”, which doesn’t serve speakers in terms of growth or additional possibilities. There is a tendency by students to worry that their suggestions are too critical, rather than of great value for taking a speaker’s delivery to the next level. Also, my initial analysis notices a tendency to mark a lot of folks in the middle of signifier triangles when from my experienced eye that was not where most folks were. This could be a function of confusion of how the triangles and signifiers function, (something I hope to remedy in my upcoming section) or that there is a lack of knowledge of what higher levels of mastery look like. If I were to put a great orator in the room, certainly I would expect to see a shift in subsequent feedback. All of these are observations and ideas that are helping me incrementally adjust to the class on the fly.
To sum up, it has been a bit rocky off the ground, and I have literally turned the course a bit inside out to incorporate Sensemaker® as well as playing with some of the complex facilitation methods I’ve picked up to create emergent teaching moments. From initial responses in their final papers, students seem to think they are taking away meaningful lessons and tools going forward. I’ll look forward to saying more about how the students experienced it all and sharing some of the data soon.
About the author:
Jeffrey Golde founded the consulting firm Deep Breadth with his friend of over three decades, Matt Kennis. They serve as thought and action partners for socially minded organizations to ensure that strategies, programs, organizational structures, and practices have the best chance to deliver longer-term impact. As a teacher, he draws on his extensive background as a professional actor, improviser, director and producer to teach communication, leadership, and strategy to senior business executives. He is a graduate of an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School and proudly serves on the Board of the Dobbs Ferry Public Library.
Banner image credit: The Tower of Babel, Wikipedia
One of my favourite books in the Swallows and Amazons series is Great Northern in which our heroes ultimately save the eggs of a pair of Great Northerns from a malicious egg collector. The final scene in which TItty and Dick return the eggs to their parents is especially poignant. Those two characters are interesting by the way, the mystic and the scientists but they play a critical part in the series over the more congenital twenties stereotypes of derring-do and domestic competence. Egg collecting was the vogue for many years and was capturing, killing and mounting butterflies and other insects on pins or paper. Eggs were blown the living material was sucked out of them to create an artefact that could be catalogued and displayed. In seeking images for this post I came across an interesting story from the family who created one of the largest-ever collections of bird eggs, when that was still legal as a practice. If you look you will see that historical collections have current value in understanding the impact of pesticides over time and there is a scientific purpose which at times, might even be considered noble, But life has been sucked out, and what is left is just a collection, a memory of what was and could have been.
Now the context of this was a recent series of introductions to organisations which went along the lines of these people working with stories like you are, you should get in touch. Now I have a few scars here and the reality is that many of those groups are like the egg and butterfly collectors. They gather people’s stories and then they curate them. There were major issues with this in anthropology at the turn of the last century where stories from the oral tradition, along with songs and pictures of indigenous people were captured, catalogued and displayed. Yes, we don’t want to lose that material, but better still is to keep it as something that is alive and in a state of constant interaction with its environment. The essence of the oral tradition is that it is a living emergent property of the interaction of the storyteller with their audiences over time. Something that is lost when the stories are written down and frozen at one contextual point in time,
Then we get the question of who will curate the curators. I’ve had an argument several times with journalists involved in story databases as they see anecdotes as the raw material from which they can create stories. Or, in some ways worse, coach the anecdote creators in story creation. In Complexity terms they chunk things up, they reduce the granularity so that meaning is frozen at a point in time. Machine learning (it isn’t artificial intelligence) curates based on its training data sets and they in turn come from the dominant ideology of the time unless careful work is put into their construction. In that context, the original design of SenseMaker® was to create better training data sets and it’s still something we can do.
I’ve seen the same with participative action research and narrative research in general where the facilitator or researcher has far too much engagement with managing who speaks and what is paid attention to, and/or the interpretation which is an exercise of power, a perpetuation of epistemic injustice. And it’s always done with good motivation. I still remember one person in a development agency who couldn’t cope with people interpreting their own material, he could do a lot better with text analytics and visualisation. But where did those tools come from, and what assumptions did they make? One of the key insights from working with indigenous researchers should be (but often isn’t) the way in which the methods of the North Atlantic determine the outcomes achieved. There is value in that work, but not if that is all you do.
Critically in sense-making, the meaning-making takes place at the point of origin through the use of high-abstraction metadata. We’ve found that people don’t interpret the text when they use signifiers, they add layers of meaning that were not present in the original. By allowing people to find more stories like theirs, or stories which contradict their own perspective we create something which uses technology to increase interaction and mutation not reduce it. By showing people how the same material is interpreted differently by people from different backgrounds we don’t put a pin through a story in a catalogue we make it a catalyst for change in a flow of meaning over time.
Worse with some of the new developments in machine learning we are allowing the machines of loving grace to curate our very existence. Instead we need to curate and create the processes through which meaning can emerge in multiple contexts, not curate the meaning at a point in time, in the cultural context of the collector and curator.
Butterfly on a Flower is by Kageyama on Unsplash; the Banner picture is cropped from an original by Cátia Matos
In this look at the MassSense data, we turn to age. The older participants are, the more prominent the anticipation of change in people’s values becomes. The oldest also see the possibility of building bridges between ideological and institutional change. One of the dimensions we asked participants to assess the Covid-associated images against was the domain of coming change – between financial change, change in ideology or values, and change in formal institutions, which domain, or combination of domains, was more prominent in participant’s expectations?
So why was potential, anticipated change selected? Why does it matter? We have talked elsewhere in this blog about the importance of expectation, attention, and anticipatory awareness in the cognitive capacity to take action. Our contexts, beliefs, and environments prime us to notice certain things, and the things we notice are the ones we can act upon. The change we tend to expect is the change we are likely to participate in and make come about. So addressing anticipated change gives us a dimension that tugs at the landscape of possibility, of the things that are more likely to happen than others. The other side of the coin is that, when it comes to human beings, change assessment is rarely, if ever, a passive calculation – it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. And when it comes to those prophecies, we can start seeing that age matters, as the image below shows.
The MassSense also included older and younger people, but here we’ll focus on the three age groups that are best represented in our population. People from 26 to 40 see change as possible in all three domains simultaneously but place more emphasis on the possibility of change in people’s economic priorities and less on attitudes towards what is right. Those aged 41 to 55 emphasise attitudes much more strongly and move away from changes in financial priorities alone. Finally, the oldest group here, people from 56-70, move away from the centre, maintain a strong focus on ideology, and interestingly show a tendency to combine ideology with its institutional/legal expression that no other group does. The ability to explore age groups at a greater nuance is an advantage here – most age-related studies around the environment and sustainability tend to focus on strongly divergent groups, such as young adults versus seniors. Those that do not can sometimes show interesting contextual associations.
Existing research shows little compelling evidence for systematic age or generational gaps in environmental concerns and policy preferences in Western democracies. Instead, we see increased environmental concern across all generations – people care regardless of age. Multiple papers, including this one from New Zealand, share this finding. In the words of the article from Switzerland, linked above, “Generations live together and ideas travel across generations.” The contextual nuance comes in recognising that age is not the only factor – significant generational events can influence attitudes too. Such generational events, such as a major contamination scandal or a flood, are often highly contextual.
A relevant note of caution here: like the vast majority of formal studies on the subject, this data is cross-sectional, not longitudinal. In other words, it looks at people who belong to different age groups now, not at the same group of people as it grows and, potentially, changes. But with this in mind, we need to say that a difference in assessments and reactions between age groups is almost certainly not a difference in whether people care, but in the direction that caring takes and how it is expressed. The practical expression of concern becomes especially relevant when it comes to political involvement, attitudes and behaviour. This also tends to vary according to age. For example, we know that older people tend to emphasise electoral participation and the “institutionalised” ways of expressing their citizenship, which is consistent with what we see here for our older group.
Finally, since we couldn’t represent the youngest and the oldest, we can spotlight their voices through their visions of utopian change:
We got here by building a genuine and sustainable relationship with the land (not in terms of resources but in terms of how we see and speak of her). We no longer see Earth as a resource or something to be developed but rather a great gifted who has many teachings. When we think of Mother Earth we instinctively relate her to the “divine feminine”. One way I have already experienced change such as this is by gathering those interested in climate action and/or equality and sharing our experiences. Though it my sound like there is not a lot in common, the language we (government, developers, educators) is the same as any abuser. It is important we talk about, understand, and challenge this deeply rooted pedagogy in a holistic way.
16-25 years-old woman, US/Canada
Decentralized, non-monopolized entrepreneurial economy Massive wealth redistribution so that everyone has enough Radical application of best new technologies to mitigate climate change Global commitment to rapid and massive reduction in carbon emissions Global preparation for inescapable impacts of climate change, especially for the most vulnerable populations
70+ years-old man, US/Canada
Banner image by Tara Scahill on Unsplash
Hi there!
I’m Lizzy, and my work in Cynefin is all things health!
Considering that I’m the biggest hypochondriac, this makes little sense to my friends and family.
I started out by studying Psychology at university, which gave me a great foundation for exploring why people behave the way they do, and how our minds actually work. But really it just meant that I signed up for a life of being asked if I can read people’s minds (I definitely can).
In my final year of uni, I took a module on drug use and addiction which turned out to be a pretty defining moment for the career decisions I ended up making. Not for the usual “don’t do drugs or you will die” message that health campaigns and legal systems love to promote.
But because the module was all about drug harm reduction. So instead of teaching us a whole lot of content on why drugs are bad and what awful things they will do to our minds and bodies, we were taught about how to make drug use a safer experience. Like safe injection sites. We learned about people who broke the law to create safe spaces for those suffering from addiction to inject themselves with sterile needles in a clean and safe environment. For example ‘the man and his illegal van trying to fix Glasgow’s drug problem’.
We also learned about services which set up mobile laboratories at huge festivals specifically intended to check if the drugs that people are carrying are actually the drug they think it is. Not with the intention of taking it off them, but just so they know exactly what they’re putting into their systems. It turns out, this is a lot more effective in actually reducing festival drug use than just banning it. In 2018, a harm reduction organisation called ‘The Loop’ offered this drug-checking service at 7 festivals across the UK and found that almost two-thirds (61.7%) of festival-goers got rid of their substances completely after being told that their drug wasn’t what they believed it to be.
All of this does something that is controversial and disliked by so many: it accepts that drug use is going to happen anyway (regardless of how strict laws are), and instead of condemning it, it helps those with addiction or those recreationally using to do so as safely as possible. Which by the way, is much more effective in reducing drug overdoses and preventable deaths.
This got me interested in the discrepancy between policies relating to health and the actual science behind the issue itself, and why the two don’t always support each other. The war on drugs is a classic example of this. It also highlighted to me how stigma presents such a huge barrier to overcoming ill health in populations.
I decided I wanted to learn more about other health issues from a global lens, which led me to doing an MSc in Global Health at King’s College London where I sat in seminars with experienced doctors and healthcare professionals from all around the world (the impostor syndrome was real).
And that’s when I learned just how critical stigma is in preventing access to health services. Especially in mental health, drug addiction, eating disorders, and sexually transmitted infections, all of which are associated with this huge societal shame. This course gave me the chance to learn about how this plays out across different types of healthcare systems in different contexts of socioeconomic development. Stigma seemed to be a recurring theme, especially when it came to policy making and governmental attempts to influence health-related behaviour.
Just like how drug addiction is ineffectively tackled using criminalisation and punishment, the use of shame and guilt tactics to ‘promote’ healthy behavioural choices (e.g. quitting smoking, eating healthily, you name it) in media campaigns tends to have counterproductive impacts on population wellbeing, it just isolates people instead. For example, the fitness industry has been plagued with empty promises of quick fixes to lose fat and focus on being your slimmest self, rather than being your strongest and healthiest self (as a powerlifter, this particularly irks me).
It’s not just a simple solution of banning drugs, shaming people into dietary choices, or scaring people into taking vaccines. The complexity of human motivation for behaviour is so important to acknowledge when health-related policies and health campaigns are implemented.
What we read, see and hear makes such a difference to our choices when it comes to managing our health. It affects help-seeking behaviour (or more accurately, the lack there-of). And as we’ve seen in the COVID-19 pandemic, it affects critically important behaviour such as vaccine uptake. For my MSc thesis, I investigated the role of health misinformation as a bioweapon in international politics, and how this has impacted the spread of vaccine hesitancy. I explored the tension between the human right to freedom of speech and the human right to good health; by means of being well-informed, a right which is violated by the spread of health misinformation.
So, what seemed like a random decision at the time to take that addiction module at uni ended up redirecting my interests towards behavioural science and global health policy – and now I work in Cynefin’s health programme where we help clients around the world in the healthcare space conduct and deliver powerful research using SenseMaker that not only acknowledges the complexity of human decision-making, but also enhances the narrative of lived experience to guide the next steps in healthcare.
Contant Lizzy: Email & Linkedin
The response patterns to our questions suggest that COVID was a chance to re-assess the relationship between the collective, the individual, and the world around us.
This relationship is crucial in climate change, where we continuously grapple with the ideas of action, motivation, and impact. To dig deeper, we will focus on how perceived impact combines with the image people chose to associate with their response. As a reminder, participants were shown a graph of CO2 emissions. The first question we asked them was to associate an image with this graph. The images they could select (seen here as a collage) represented different aspects of the pandemic experience: travel reduction, social movements, contact with nature, lockdowns, and remote work. The triad we will focus on then asked people to situate their collective impression of the emissions graph and the picture they chose in relation to three possible areas of impact: individual behaviour, the economy, or the ecosystem’s needs. The patterns you seen below represent the visual result of how everyone who participated saw the relationship between those three areas. They have not been produced through any algorithmic analysis or machine learning – they are simply the aggregation of multiple, independent human sensors.
What has been affected indirectly also tells us about what affects; if the elements the images represent are perceived as affecting some things more than others (for example, individuals more than ecosystems), this tells us that participants tend to link the theme expressed by the picture (say, travel) with some domains more than others. So what are some specific links we arrived at (pictured in the figure below)?
Impact on individual behaviour is associated with flying and (less exclusively) with the responses to lockdown and physical distancing rules. An interesting further implication to ponder is the degree to which we see the things we went through in the pandemic, the choices we made (freely or because of legislation), mostly through the lens of what happened to each of us rather than all of us – ultimately, were we in this together?
We also asked participants follow-on open questions on the changes they feel they could keep up forever and on their visions of a utopic future. Responses to the former question (on changes) show that consumption habits are seen as a component of individual behaviour. These findings show parallels with the observations of a study from Sitra on how lives in Finland have changed after the lockdown. That study found that Covid has prompted a re-assessment of priorities and more consideration of the impact of small choices and behaviours, resulting in more readiness to take action and responsibility. Travel habits were cited as a part of that shift and are very prominent in the changes listed by our participants.
Going back to our patterns, an impact that bridges the needs of the individual with those of the ecosystem is primarily associated with collective action, while the ecosystem alone takes an even more prominent role among those focusing on nature. This link between levels (large and small, individual and collective) is another element featured in the Sitra report mentioned above, which identified the sense of shared responsibility as a bridge towards the potential for systemic change. Similarly, adopting more sustainable lifestyles is part of a socio-cultural project, not just a personal consumption choice. Another paper from the early pandemic days already connected change and collective mechanisms, such as citizens’ assemblies. Such collaborative action is a way to create a social mandate around individual change so it can be sustained and sustainable.
So far, we have been talking about themes in theory. To close out this section, let’s take a look at peoples’ own words on changes they see as likely to continue, which reflect a lot of the themes discussed above:
“offering a Yoga class online every morning for 3 months straight; spending time without the need for entertainment with family and inner circle of friends; join talks with very different communities and networks globally with a sense of greater connectivity; the readiness to be open, vulnerable, ask open ended questions, admit to being wrong, support others without asking for rewards even in semi-formal groups (work-related, but not part of actual job); the flexibility and willingness to experiment i.e. in hybrid teams and working from home; the chance to stop running, stay home, and breathe”
And we can complement that with a vision of the future:
“Our American communities agreed at local and state levels to focus on sustainable living and eating goals, enabling all citizens to have a safe place to live, healthy food to eat. Cities are redesigned, with space repurposed primarily for housing, secondarily for commerce/organizations. Agriculture is rethought and localized, with a focus on seasonal, local ingredients and self-growing (small hydroponic/grow light devices are found in each dwelling to grow a selection of fruit and veg). Rural areas have local farms and greenhouses carefully planned to provide the food needed by communities in a 25-mile radius. Energy farms have replaced many large-scale agricultural spaces, with a focus on solar, wind, geo-thermal, and other renewable tech, again–providing energy needs for folks in a 25-mile radius.”
We see behaviour as primarily associated with the choices we could (or couldn’t) make: around going out, around travelling, around meeting with particular people in particular places and ways. Yet in collective behaviour and the pursuit of political goals, even when not explicitly described as political, we see more of a possibility to simultaneously impact the needs of the ecosystem and our behaviour. According to a participant, “We now live in a world, where we understand the need to act collectively for a brighter future, COvid has made us understand crisis needs to be addressed in time if we are to avoid disaster.” In our patterns, we see evidence that the lesson is there. Whether it has collectively sunk in is, unfortunately, a different question.
Banner image by Tara Scahill on Unsplash
I’m starting to hope that this blog is the start of something that will become a tradition. The climate change (nature, sustainability, biodiversity, take your pick) programme periodically releases an open collection. Such collections invite participation from absolutely anybody and offer the possibility of collecting targeted data and accessing them at no cost. The first and original such collection was the Acorn Project, followed by a series of blog posts on the results. Then, amidst lockdowns and uncertainty, the Covid MassSense was released. The post you are reading now is launching a new blogging series to discuss some of the results – you can expect around six or seven, released roughly every other week. And of course, as this collection is closing now, a new open project will be released under the theme of hope, a subject that has been on our minds for a while.
But before we get to the good stuff, some inevitable stage setting so anyone can make sense of this. We will be looking at the results of a MassSense, so I’ll start by explaining what that is. Not long ago, my colleague Beth wrote a blog post covering the various applications of SenseMaker, which I recommend going off and reading. But to summarise the main idea here, a MassSense is a way to employ diverse points of view to assess a single “artefact” (an image, a scenario, an infographic, or even a single phrase). This artefact usually represents a broader theme or area of interest. SenseMaker signification visualises the participants’ assessment in ways we will explore in the upcoming posts. Usually, an invitation to generate micro-scenarios about the future accompanies this assessment. Since, in this case, we wanted to see what people thought about a specific issue, rather than seeking to hear a broader spectrum of experiences, a MassSense was the natural SenseMaker engagement mode.
The theme in this specific MassSense was the relationship between the pandemic (especially in the earlier stages of starting to cope with it) and climate change. In the early days of the pandemic, it was impossible to avoid thinking about this topic – as “nature returned” in cities and people marvelled at their ability to travel less, we had started to wonder how a collection of their understanding of the situation and a longer-term projection would look. This is that collection. The relationship of the pandemic with climate change was expressed in the choice of a sense-making artefact: a graph representing CO2 levels during 2020, the insert image here. A series of images representing different aspects of the pandemic experience (which you will see in the following post) followed this graph. Before we look at the data, we should highlight some of their characteristics as a whole. The first is diversity; in a human sensor network, diverse viewpoints are crucial in identifying different aspects of the problem. Here, we might have a degree of cognitive diversity, but other dimensions of our population are more homogeneous.
At the point of writing, with the collection close to closing, 303 entries have been collected. This number might increase by a bit as the site is still open. The gender distribution of participants is mostly evenly divided, with slightly more men than women. However, Northern Europe (47%) and the US/Canada (31%) predominate among locations. I think it is reasonable to assume that the majority of the audience is fairly similar to the audience of this blog and website. All future discussion then needs to come with the awareness that this is not a systematic sample, carefully collected, and it isn’t representative of anything. Still, it is varied enough to suggest some compelling associations without claiming that they are proving something or are generalisable. Another implication to highlight is that this MassSense eventually took on a slightly retrospective character. Although it launched in the heat of the pandemic, later responses looked backwards at events rather than being in the middle of them. Such a retrospective perspective can make a big difference in assessment.
Each post in the series will focus on an insight or theme and will try to go further than the previous Acorn Project series in two ways. Firstly, I will connect the insights from our data to findings published elsewhere on that same theme and draw some broader reflections from them. A second novelty here is statistical testing. Statistical verification for links or associations spotted through SenseMaker has always been possible. It isn’t a replacement for sense-making – just more fuel in its furnace. But for what it’s worth, every association presented in the following series is statistically significant. Finally, similarly to the Acorn project series, this first post will also serve as an index: as I add new posts to the series, they will all be collected and linked from this one, so they can be accessed from a single location in the future.
PS As this open project wraps up and the Hope project starts, we are experimenting with a new possibility: making all pre-existing open participation projects available to be reopened and reused, still at no cost. So if you want to use them for a significant collection opportunity that corresponds to your needs, get in touch.
Banner image by Tara Scahill on Unsplash
In-text image source cited in caption
Part 2: What could change and how?
Part 3: Age and the anticipation of change
Part 5: Double feature, twice the inspiration and provocation
As promised I did try and get all of this into a process map last night while getting through the last three episodes of The English (worth watching and the linked review is a good summary). One of the reasons for that is that the type of system I am describing pretty much exemplifies what I call messy coherence and I picked the banner illustration to make that point, Converging footsteps in the snow contrast with yesterday’s single footprint in the sand. If you design a knowledge management (KM) system correctly then its a lot of objects and a lot of interactions so that any application can emerge. Too many KM approaches, whatever the stated intent, end up creating a system based on how the designers think people should work. Better to create opportunities for contextual interaction within a fairly basic design and then put in more effort if stable patterns emerge. In that respect, quite a few Agile people need to think less about clearing backlogs and more about architecture, less about their being agile in development and more about creating systems in which agility is enabled.
So given that principle, it’s going to be a lot easier to define the objects and interactions and make some suggestions about patterns that could emerge, interestingly I could hand-draw those last night in conversations with myself while (Spoiler alert) contemplating the potential horror of Emily Blunt’s face erupting with syphilitic ulcers. The essence of designing decision support systems, and I’ve been doing that for forty years now, is to keep things simple in execution but allow complexity to emerge. Hence actors and artefacts with defined interactions lead it to that.
One thing up front, everything I am talking about here could be done with technologies other than our SenseMaker®. I happen to think that the high abstraction of our metadata lends itself to abduction and serendipitous discovery which means a better capacity for innovation, as well as discovery but what I am going to outline here, is not dependent on its use. That said SenseMaker® Genba, which is currently in beta has been designed with this type of application in mind and with the parallel development of open APIs that will allow integration with existing operational systems.
I’m using objects as a catch-all term, with a nod to object orientation; yes I could get into inheritance and polymorphism, and I suspect both will be a crucial aspect of long-term use, but for the moment I’m keeping things simple. So they fall into two categories as follows:
My intent should now be becoming clearer and I should add that this type of approach will also require some basic reporting and statistical tools – we have used Tableau as well as R and Excel in our own work. You will also need technical support to monitor use, provide assistance with reporting and access and keep a note of repeating patterns that might justify additional automation.
So let’s take a couple of uses cases to illustrate how this works:
Photo by Daniele Levis Pelusi on Unsplash
(français plus bas / French below)
The following is the story and mostly the lessons learned from a recent conference I gave at the Agile Tour Montreal 2022 event. It may be of interest to:
The Context
I am, or constantly strive to be a better corporate coach, complex facilitator, and public speaker. My centre of gravity is enabling executives, leaders and managers faced with complex situations, problems, and contexts. A few months ago, I was asked to be a keynote speaker at a large Agile event, the Agile Tour Montreal 2022. It is a 2-day event with over 30 conferences and workshops, 1200 participants, various business partners kiosks, and lots of swags and greet-and-meets opportunities. The event’s overarching topic this year was “L’audace d’innover” or loosely translated, The audacity to innovate. Needless to say, I promptly accepted.
I still consider myself a student of complexity and have been constantly reading and educating myself on the topic for many years. As one would expect, I have thus been following the work of Dave Snowden and his ever-growing team. The road has been a challenging one as I never quite understand what Mr. Snowden means when I first hear him speak. But with time some of the concepts are slowly making their way into my thick skull and I find myself more and more at ease with the main ideas surrounding complexity. Working with clients, I have been looking for an opportunity to use the SenseMaker® tool to see how I can use it to further shifts in perspectives on their part. For those who don’t know, SenseMaker® is a program used to gather quantitative AND qualitative data from participants in a way which fosters discussions and collisions of the existing various perspectives with the goal of permitting new perspectives to emerge.
On a whim, I decided to use my upcoming keynote conference as a test bed for SenseMaker®. The event’s main topic was, after all, the Audacity to innovate!
The Preparation
So, two things I did in rapid succession, first contacted Quentin Chevet on the organising committee, to ask if he was ok with me trying something different for my conference… to which (credit to him) he readily agreed. And contact someone at the Cynefin Co to see how, if at all possible, we could make that idea a reality. That someone turned out to be Beth Smith a long-time consultant at Cynefin Co. I take this opportunity to mention how awesome Beth was in this adventure. Her responsiveness, enthusiasm, willingness to adapt and tweak as required and professionalism were the reason this project was possible. So a huge thank you, Beth! Beth told me that the tool had been used at conferences before, but usually only by the staff at The Cynefin Co, and more commonly over the time of the event rather than live *in* a conference. This was the first time using the new improved SenseMaker® platform, so this was to be the first iteration for everyone!
Finding the right questions
The main takeaway for current or future SenseMaker® users.
The selection of the questions to use to interact with the audience was for me the most difficult part. As Beth aptly said the questions are the scaffolding for everything else afterwards. Having already built my presentation before I had the SenseMaker idea, I tried to adapt the questions to what I already had, which, in insight, was not the best way of doing it. If I were to do it again, I would start with the question or at least, build the talk structure at the same time as I would choose the questions as they are entangled together. In the end, I had 4 questions, 2 of which were in the end somewhat uninteresting and two of which were a lot richer.
The Conference
The main takeaway for speakers
With a QR code, the tool is super easy for participants to access using their smartphones. Answering the questions is quick and intuitive as is submitting the answers.
You need to coordinate with the technical staff and give them prior access to the dashboard as they need to refresh the data and switch screens for you to present the results to the crowd. Some rehearsal is necessary here to make sure everybody understands what needs to be done. But overall, it’s relatively simple.
The main benefits of a speaker are many:
The risks:
The main risk is finding out with the participants at the end that nothing has shifted following your talk. You need to be prepared in your talk for such a possibility.
What we learned from this first iteration:
This said Beth tells me that a lot of these items are already being addressed and implemented by the SenseMaker team.
The Learning
My talk was about “uncomfortable conversations” and their importance in the innovation process. There were two main elements leading to an overarching theme.
Participants were asked to think about their current project when answering the questions.
The first question was:
The flow of the project is… Sequential, according to a plan……….. Flexible, iterative
Here, surprisingly, even though their project had not changed in the 60 minutes of the talk, we still notice that participants adjusted their perception of their project based on the talk, sliding a little more towards the Flexible and iterative side
The second question was:
The project requires: That you continue doing what you are doing……… Do differently
Again, interestingly, something in the talk made the participants adjust their perception towards the need to do differently. Notice the change in the scale which went from 100 to 150, hence a significant increase at the end.
The third question was:
The key to the project resides in: Process and procedure / Strategy and vision / People and behaviours
Here, I presume that because I talked about innovation and strategy and the need for uncomfortable conversations, we can clearly see that a polarization towards the space between strategy and people happened. This could be seen as a direct corollary between my talk and the audience’s change of perception.
The last question was:
The result of the project is: In the hands of your colleagues / In your hands / In the hands of the executives
Again, interestingly, something in my talk helped the participants realise that they perhaps had more control over the situation than what they believed initially, as we see an increased concentration of answers shift to the space between my hands, my colleague’s hand and our collective hands. Fewer participants believed at the end of the talk that the answers lay solely in the hands of their colleagues or executives.
Finally, there was a last question which asked what was your overall takeaway from this talk (a qualitative question) When we regroup the answers into large clusters, we notice that:
23% of respondents appreciated the part where we created a common vocabulary around complexity
22% of respondents focused on the importance of the link between innovation and strategy
20% of respondents underlined as a takeaway the necessity to be better at uncomfortable conversations and the balanced took away either unrelated things or focused on minute other details.
This brings back to mind the notion that as leaders, communication is a key lever of movement. And NO, it’s not because you said it once that they all understand the same thing!
Conclusion
I’ll let you draw your own conclusions from all this, but on my part, based on the overall data we collected, I am quite pleased with the outcome. I believe that most of my message got across and had a significant impact on the perceptions of the participants.
Is there room for improvement? Always! And using such a tool in a live conference opened up for me a whole new way of thinking about how I will prepare and use my public speaking opportunities in the future.
The main takeaway for Innovation practitioners
Innovation is not a big project here and there. Innovation is an ingredient that we can incorporate into everything we do. It is so easy to say “not this time”, “or this is too risky”. Innovation starts with trying something different and the opportunities for that are ever present. It is up to us to seize them when they present themselves.
Maybe it starts with an uncomfortable discussion with ourselves?
Acknowledgements:
For further details, information, or accompaniment needs please do not hesitate to contact us:
Modulus-Excellence
JF Lavallee (info@modulus-excellence.ca)
Modulus-Excellence is helping leaders make better conscious business decisions in an increasingly complex world by offering: executive coaching, strategic counsel, leadership development programs and workshop conferences. For the last ten years, we have been working hand-in-hand with leaders and executives, enabling them to become proactive in ever-changing environments by learning to make sense of the world which surrounds us.
The Cynefin Co
Beth Smith (beth.smith@thecynefin.co)
The Cynefin Co is an action research hub that enables individuals and organisations to navigate and make sense of uncertainty by providing tools and methods based on scientific theory. We are the developer of SenseMaker® The first and original distributed ethnographic approach to sense-making, allowing for large-scale capture of narrative subject becomes their own ethnographer. SenseMaker® combines the scale of numbers with the explanatory power of narrative.
Ce qui suit est l’histoire et surtout les apprentissages issus d’une conférence que j’ai eu le privilège de donner dans le cadre de l’événement Agile Tour Montréal 2022.
Le contenu du présent article s’adresse aux personnes suivantes :
Le contexte
Je suis, ou j’essaie d’être, le meilleur coach d’affaires, facilitateur en environnements complexes et conférencier que je puisse être. Ma plus grande préoccupation est d’aider les leaders, les gestionnaires et les cadres supérieurs qui font face à des situations, à des problèmes et à des contextes complexes.
Il y a quelques mois, on m’a demandé d’être conférencier principal à un grand événement de la communauté Agile, l’Agile Tour Montréal 2022. C’est un événement de 2 jours offrant plus de 30 conférences et ateliers aux 1200 participants, un parterre de partenaires ayant des kiosques, beaucoup de petits cadeaux de présence et d’innombrables opportunités de réseautage.
Le sujet de l’événement cette année était « L’audace d’innover ».
Nul besoin de vous dire que j’ai accepté immédiatement.
Je me considère toujours un éternel élève de la complexité, et ne cesse de lire des livres et de suivre des formations sur le sujet. Comme certains pourront s’en douter, je suis donc inévitablement de près les travaux de Dave Snowden et son équipe sans cesse croissante. Cette route n’est pas facile étant donné qu’il m’est difficile de bien saisir son propos à première écoute. Mais au fil du temps, les différents concepts semblent finalement faire leur chemin au cœur de ma dure cervelle, car je me surprends à être de plus en plus à l’aise avec les grands principes entourant la complexité.
Travaillant avec plusieurs clients, je cherche depuis un bout de temps une opportunité d’utiliser l’outil SenseMaker afin de mieux les soutenir dans la transition qu’ils tentent d’effectuer.
Pour ceux qui ne connaissent pas SenseMaker, c’est un outil de collecte d’informations quantitatives ET qualitatives permettant aux participants mêmes d’interpréter les résultats provenant de leurs propres réponses et d’ainsi favoriser les échanges et les collisions de perspectives dans le but de faire émerger de nouvelles possibilités.
Sur un coup de tête, j’ai décidé d’utiliser cette conférence comme une occasion de tester le SenseMaker. Le sujet principal du colloque était « L’audace d’innover » après tout!
La préparation
J’ai donc effectué deux choses rapidement l’une après l’autre. D’abord, j’ai communiqué avec Quentin Chevet du comité organisateur pour lui demander la permission d’essayer quelque chose de différent lors de ma conférence… ce qu’il a tout de suite accepté et qui est tout à son honneur.
Ensuite, j’ai contacté quelqu’un au Cynefin Co (la société à l’origine du SenseMaker) pour voir comment, si même possible, nous pourrions faire de cette idée une réalité. Cette personne était Beth Smith, consultante de longue date chez Cynefin Co.
Je saisis cette occasion pour mentionner comment fantastique a été Beth durant cette aventure. Sa proactivité, son enthousiasme, sa volonté d’adapter la situation selon les besoins et son professionnalisme sont la raison principale pour laquelle ce petit projet a pu voir le jour. Alors un gros merci, Beth!
Beth m’a mentionné que l’outil avait déjà été utilisé auparavant lors de conférences, mais normalement seulement par le personnel du Cynefin Co, et plus souvent au cours de l’événement plutôt qu’en direct pendant une conférence. Comme c’était la première fois qu’on utiliserait la nouvelle plateforme améliorée du SenseMaker, ce serait une première itération pour tout le monde!
Trouver les bonnes questions.
Apprentissage pour les utilisateurs présents et futurs du SenseMaker
La sélection des questions utilisées pour interagir avec les participants a été la partie la plus difficile pour moi. Tel que Beth me l’avait mentionné, les questions sont l’échafaudage sur lequel est bâti tout le reste.
Ayant développé la présentation avant d’avoir l’idée d’utiliser le SenseMaker, j’ai essayé d’adapter les questions à ce que j’avais déjà, ce qui en rétrospective, n’était probablement pas la bonne approche. Si j’avais à refaire le processus, je commencerais par les questions ou, du moins, je les choisirais en même temps que je préparerais la présentation, les unes étant indissociables de l’autre.
En fin de compte, j’ai utilisé quatre questions : deux semi-intéressantes et deux autres qui ont favorisé une discussion plus riche.
La conférence
Apprentissage pour les conférenciers
Avec un code QR, l’outil est super facile d’accès et convivial pour les participants qui utilisent leur téléphone intelligent. Répondre aux questions est rapide et intuitif, de même qu’’enregistrer les réponses.
Il vous faudra coordonner le tout avec l’équipe technique de votre conférence en lui donnant au préalable accès au tableau de bord de la plateforme, afin qu’elle puisse la mettre à jour avec les réponses des participants et faire le transfert d’écran pour que tous puissent voir les résultats. Une petite répétition est fortement suggérée afin que tout le monde comprenne le rôle qu’il aura à jouer. Grosso modo, le tout est relativement simple.
Les avantages principaux pour un conférencier sont les suivants :
Le risque :
Le risque principal est de découvrir en simultané avec les participants que les perspectives de ceux-ci n’ont pas changé suite à votre intervention. Vous devez être prêt pour une telle éventualité.
Ce que nous avons appris suite à cette première itération :
Cela dit, Beth me mentionne que plusieurs de ces enjeux sont déjà en train d’être adressés et implémentés par l’équipe de développement du SenseMaker.
Les apprentissages
Ma conférence traitait de « conversations difficiles » et de leur importance en innovation.
Les éléments principaux sous le thème principal étaient les suivants :
Les participants devaient penser à leur projet en répondant aux questions du SenseMaker.
La première question était :
Le flux du projet est : séquentiel, selon un plan… flexible, itératif
De façon surprenante, bien que leur projet n’ait évidemment pas beaucoup changé pendant les 60 minutes de la présentation, on remarque que les participants ont ajusté leur perception de leur projet en fonction de la conférence, glissant un peu plus vers le côté flexible et itératif.
La seconde question était :
Le projet requiert de : Continuer de faire ce qu’on fait déjà… Faire les choses de façon différente
Une fois de plus, de façon intéressante, quelque chose dans la présentation a incité les participants à ajuster leur perception par rapport au niveau de nouveauté nécessaire au sein de leur projet. Remarquez le changement dans l’échelle du graphique qui est passé de 100 à 150, et qui confirme un déplacement révélateur vers la droite.
La troisième question était :
La clé du projet réside dans : Processus et procédures / Stratégie et vision / Personnes et comportements
Ici, l’on peut présumer qu’étant donné que j’ai souligné lors de la conférence l’importance du lien entre la stratégie et l’innovation, et de la nécessité d’entamer des conversations difficiles, c’est la raison qui explique la polarisation des réponses vers l’espace entre stratégie et personnes. Cela pourrait donc être perçu comme une corrélation directe entre le contenu de la présentation et le changement de perspective des participants en lien avec ce sujet.
La dernière question était :
Le résultat du projet est : Entre les mains de mes collègues / Entre mes mains / Entre les mains des cadres
Ici aussi, on constate que quelque chose dans mon discours a permis aux participants de reconsidérer leurs implications et impact dans leur projet par rapport à leur perspective de départ, car le graphique illustre qu’une grande partie des réponses qui gravitaient dans l’espace des « entre les mains de mes collègues » ou des « entre les mains des cadres » se retrouvent en fin de compte concentrées « entre mes mains » et « entre les mains de mes collègues ».
À la fin de la conférence, les participants étaient moins nombreux à penser que la solution à leur projet résidait exclusivement dans des mains autres que les leurs.
Pour conclure, nous avons demandé aux participants ce qu’ils avaient retenu de l’exercice (une question qualitative).
Lorsque nous consolidons les différentes réponses, nous remarquons que :
23 % des répondants ont apprécié le segment où nous avons créé un vocabulaire commun autour de la complexité
22 % des répondants ont souligné l’importance du lien entre la stratégie et l’innovation
20 % des répondants ont souligné la nécessité de devenir plus à l’aise avec les conversations difficiles
Et les autres ont fait ressortir soit des éléments non mentionnés, soit d’infimes détails.
Ces constats nous rappellent, qu’en tant que leaders, la communication est un levier fondamental du mouvement; et que non, ce n’est pas parce que nous l’avons clairement dit une fois que tout le monde a compris et compris la même chose!
Conclusion
Je vous laisse tirer vos propres conclusions; pour ma part, selon les données que nous avons amassées, je suis assez satisfait du résultat en fin de compte. J’ai l’impression que la majorité de mon propos a été reçu par les participants et, qui plus est, a eu un impact significatif.
Peut-on faire mieux? Toujours!
De plus, l’utilisation d’un tel outil lors d’une conférence m’a ouvert les yeux sur une nouvelle façon d’envisager de tels événements et comment mieux utiliser ces opportunités magiques de s’adresser à un large public dans le futur.
Apprentissage pour les praticiens en innovation
L’innovation, ce n’est pas un grand projet mené ici et là. L’innovation, c’est un ingrédient qu’on incorpore dans tout ce qu’on fait.
Il est toujours facile de dire « pas cette fois », « c’est trop risqué ». L’innovation commence par l’essai de quelque chose de différent, et les occasions pour le faire ne manquent pas. C’est à nous de les saisir lorsqu’elles passent.
Peut-être le processus commence-t-il par une discussion inconfortable avec soi-même?
Remerciements :
Merci à Quentin du comité organisateur d’Agile Tour Montréal pour son invitation et son ouverture à essayer quelque chose de différent.
Merci à l’équipe technique de Solotech qui a accepté de me soutenir grâce à leurs connaissances techniques durant la conférence.
Merci à Beth et au Cynefin Co d’avoir rendu le tout possible.
Et finalement, un énorme merci à tous les participants qui ont assisté à cette conférence. Vous avez sauté avec moi à pieds joints dans cette première itération, vous avez rigolé avec moi durant l’attente de l’affichage des données, et vous étiez tout aussi absorbés que moi lorsque nous avons découvert ensemble les résultats finaux. Vous avez été géniaux!
Pour de plus amples détails, information ou besoins d’accompagnement, n’hésitez pas à nous contacter :
Modulus-Excellence
JF Lavallée (info@modulus-excellence.ca)
Modulus-Excellence accompagne les leaders afin de consciemment prendre de meilleures décisions d’affaires dans un monde de plus en plus complexe en offrant : coaching d’affaires, accompagnement stratégique, programme de développement du leadership et ateliers-conférences. Depuis dix ans, nous travaillons main dans la main avec les dirigeants pour leur permettre de demeurer proactifs dans un environnement en constant changement en apprenant comment donner du sens au monde qui nous entoure.
The Cynefin Co
Beth Smith (beth.smith@thecynefin.co)
The Cynefin Co est un centre de recherche-action qui permet aux personnes et aux organisations de naviguer dans l’incertitude et d’en tirer du sens, en fournissant des outils et des méthodes fondés sur la théorie scientifique. Nous sommes le développeur du SenseMaker®, la première approche ethnographique distribuée du « sense-making », permettant la capture à grande échelle de la narration, le « sujet » devenant son propre ethnographe. SenseMaker® combine l’ampleur des chiffres au pouvoir explicatif de la narration.
Cognitive Edge Ltd. & Cognitive Edge Pte. trading as The Cynefin Company and The Cynefin Centre.
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