Rebuilding Babel: Sensemaker® in the classroom to close the gap between Intent and Impact: Part 1

June 5, 2023

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:

  • Contemporaneous feedback for the presenter/student on their presentation, so they can decide what the feedback means for them, what the learnings are, and how to adjust moving forward.
  • The act of giving feedback leads to a depth of learning through observations and codifying those observations in Sensemaker® as they do 35-40 entries over the course of a class.
  • Seeing the feedback from the entire class has value. This means a student can learn by comparing what they do and what their colleagues said about a particular speaker, as well as looking at how they were seen both qualitatively and through signifiers compared to the class as a whole and making sense of it.
  • A tool for the teacher (me) to see the trends in thinking in the class and the difference that I believe exists between next or high-level communication skills and the current perception by the class of their skills.

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.

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Banner image credit: The Tower of Babel, Wikipedia

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