This connects both to a recent post here, and to an email conversation between some of Compendium's inner core, where we've been debating some feature/design decisions. One hot topic has been the idea to retire the idea of IBIS / argument node types (Question, Idea, Pro, Con, Argument) in the default set. The debate reaches back to some of the early decisions and motivations when we created Compendium as a new software tool, which certainly took much of its basis from the desire to extend and customize Corporate Memory System's QuestMap, which was built around the IBIS rhetorical method. I thought I'd put some of my contentions here.
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Compendium (as distinct from QuestMap) was designed from the start to allow different kinds of discourse to be interwoven with each other. Certainly affording, but not limited to -- or necessarily including -- argument mapping and IBIS.
What we have seen is that many of Compendium's users don't see a lot of the benefits and functionality of the software, in part because there are still remnants of the user interface that foreground IBIS, even though the rest of it has moved beyond that. People get hung up on the "argumentation" aspects, and if they are not interested in argumentation per se, they lose interest in Compendium.
On a software level, it also makes us preserve a lot of structure that really doesn't fit into the tool as designed/intended.
We want people to use Compendium for representing multiple ways of looking at issues, ideas, etc. If IBIS or other argumentation methods are part of their methodology (or if they discover IBIS on their own after adopting Compendium), the software should support it. But IBIS -- or any other single method or representation scheme, such as mindmapping (by far the majority of our downloaders that disclose their reason for interest in Compendium) -- should not be seen as the front door that potential adopters have to go through.
Users will come to IBIS if it makes sense to them (Jeff Conklin's work goes farther than anyone else's in that regard). But they won't use it just because the software shows them some node types that they may or may not use.
Part of what we've built into Compendium now is the ability to create branded versions with custom startup maps and other materials, so making an "IBIS Compendium" that looks like it is (only) an IBIS tool is now completely available. But many people want to use it for widely varying reasons, and we want to support that.
To me, the real brilliance of QuestMap as software was the ease and rapidity with which people could create and manipulate a hypermedia information space. What Compendium was about, from a software development point of view, was taking those hypermedia aspects and extending them in many directions.
From that point of view, IBIS, great as it is, is not a central aspect. It's transclusions (which we're going to rename to "embed" to catch up with the Web), templates, and tags, coupled with extensibility and customization, along with a host of new capabilities and concepts that have come from many different sources, which are central to Compendium as software.
Sunday, July 05, 2009
Friday, June 05, 2009
Compendium is more than argumentation, or mind-mapping, or ...
Based on the discussions on the compendiuminstitute yahoogroup, and even more on the "nature of interest in Compendium" entries in our download log, there's been a surge of interest in Compendium in recent months. Much of this falls into two categories: people who are interested in Compendium's argument-mapping capabilities, or -- the larger category -- people who are investigating Compendium as an alternative to mind-mapping tools.
These are both great uses of Compendium, but there is a lot more to the software.
By intention, design, and functionality, Compendium provides many ways to link things together. You can start with making a single map that follows a particular scheme, such as IBIS or mind-mapping. As you build up more maps, you can use techniques like tags, transclusions, and templates to add many levels of connections. Compendium supports the creation of very large information spaces that can hold things like sets of pictures and photos, links to files, free-form text and writing, sound and movies, and tie them together in both formal (argument maps, models, structured views) and informal (let your imagination be the guide!) ways.
At its heart Compendium is a way to connect all sorts of views, ideas, images, and other resources together, in all sorts of ways. I encourage people to explore all the things they can do with it.
These are both great uses of Compendium, but there is a lot more to the software.
By intention, design, and functionality, Compendium provides many ways to link things together. You can start with making a single map that follows a particular scheme, such as IBIS or mind-mapping. As you build up more maps, you can use techniques like tags, transclusions, and templates to add many levels of connections. Compendium supports the creation of very large information spaces that can hold things like sets of pictures and photos, links to files, free-form text and writing, sound and movies, and tie them together in both formal (argument maps, models, structured views) and informal (let your imagination be the guide!) ways.
At its heart Compendium is a way to connect all sorts of views, ideas, images, and other resources together, in all sorts of ways. I encourage people to explore all the things they can do with it.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
Levels of looking
A few weeks ago I facilitated a Visual Explorer session for a social services agency for mentally disabled children and adults in the Hudson Valley. A friend is the IT director at the agency, and asked me to help run a communication session for the IT group and its internal clients.
This was the first time in several years that I've done a true, extended VE session with enough time and mandate to set it up and introduce it properly. There were 10 attendees, half from IT and half from other parts of the agency. We did two rounds, the first on the question "What's the place of IT in the organization?" and the second, after discussion, debrief, and a break, on "How can IT best support the organization (and vice versa)?" We spent about 2.5 hours in all.
In the first round, the small groups got engaged quickly and the discussions were lively. Even people who hung back at first got excited as it went on. One of the IT guys was at first reluctant to engage and didn't even pick a picture during the browsing period. But after the first two people in his small group took their turns, he jumped up and grabbed a picture, and ended up giving one of the more evocative and insightful descriptions.
In both large group rounds, the discussion was engaged and (as far as I could tell as an outsider) did enable people to talk in ways they normally don't to each other. A number of themes emerged, such as the separation between the different groups, surprise by non-IT people about how the IT people felt about their work and their relationships with the rest of the agency, how to better communicate about the goals and benefits of IT projects and deal with resistance to change by helping people to see what they could get out of the new capabilities, etc. Afterwards, a number of the people said that it had been valuable and that the pictures enabled them to have a better and deeper dialogue with each other.
I noticed a paradox in the session, which I've seen before. It involves differing levels of looking at and talking about what people see in a picture, and how the picture relates to their situation and concerns. It's relatively easy to get people to talk about what they see in a VE image on the level of what the picture "says", what they think the story of the picture is. This is a wonderful human capability -- something a computer could never do (e.g. "these people are happy because they just won a race", "nothing's really clear, the racers and the audience can't see each other well, there's such a frenetic pace" etc.). But the paradox is that it's not so easy to get people to go to the next level, to really look at and talk about the actual 'physical' details in the picture -- to engage with and talk about what they really see rather than the story or ideas that are suggested to them.
In other words, people relate almost instantly to what they see as the "story" of the picture, suggested by the images, facial expressions, etc. -- the visual detail that strikes us on a sub-verbal level, all the time, in conversations with others (for example, the way we "read" other people's moods and interpret what that might mean for us, as we scan their faces or listen to their voices in a meeting).
But to go farther -- to be able to say exactly what visual and aural nuances might have given us this impression (the crease of a brow, the elevated pitch of part of a spoken sentence) takes an extra effort and does not come readily for most people. I often think of what I had to learn in film classes in college -- not to just let a film "wash over" me in a tide of impressions and effects, but rather to pay close attention so I could see what techniques the filmmaker used to give me those impressions -- the small details of editing, sound, lighting, composition, color, and many others. This can lead to a deeper level of insight and articulation.
As the practitioner in the VE session I'm describing here, I tried to inculcate this to some extent. As people were working in the small groups, I walked around and made a few suggestions, such as pointing out specific visual details and getting the groups to look at them, when it was apparent that the group was in 'story' mode and could benefit from taking a closer look. That did seem to shake things loose a bit and move the conversation to a more engaged level.
This same dynamic occurs with other forms of collaborative media. Getting people to look closely and talk about what they see requires a level of effort -- for both participants and practitioners -- beyond what is easiest to do. The "story" level is also a good thing and generates dialogue that takes people out of their normal way of relating, but going farther is where a lot of the potential lies.
This was the first time in several years that I've done a true, extended VE session with enough time and mandate to set it up and introduce it properly. There were 10 attendees, half from IT and half from other parts of the agency. We did two rounds, the first on the question "What's the place of IT in the organization?" and the second, after discussion, debrief, and a break, on "How can IT best support the organization (and vice versa)?" We spent about 2.5 hours in all.
In the first round, the small groups got engaged quickly and the discussions were lively. Even people who hung back at first got excited as it went on. One of the IT guys was at first reluctant to engage and didn't even pick a picture during the browsing period. But after the first two people in his small group took their turns, he jumped up and grabbed a picture, and ended up giving one of the more evocative and insightful descriptions.
In both large group rounds, the discussion was engaged and (as far as I could tell as an outsider) did enable people to talk in ways they normally don't to each other. A number of themes emerged, such as the separation between the different groups, surprise by non-IT people about how the IT people felt about their work and their relationships with the rest of the agency, how to better communicate about the goals and benefits of IT projects and deal with resistance to change by helping people to see what they could get out of the new capabilities, etc. Afterwards, a number of the people said that it had been valuable and that the pictures enabled them to have a better and deeper dialogue with each other.
I noticed a paradox in the session, which I've seen before. It involves differing levels of looking at and talking about what people see in a picture, and how the picture relates to their situation and concerns. It's relatively easy to get people to talk about what they see in a VE image on the level of what the picture "says", what they think the story of the picture is. This is a wonderful human capability -- something a computer could never do (e.g. "these people are happy because they just won a race", "nothing's really clear, the racers and the audience can't see each other well, there's such a frenetic pace" etc.). But the paradox is that it's not so easy to get people to go to the next level, to really look at and talk about the actual 'physical' details in the picture -- to engage with and talk about what they really see rather than the story or ideas that are suggested to them.
In other words, people relate almost instantly to what they see as the "story" of the picture, suggested by the images, facial expressions, etc. -- the visual detail that strikes us on a sub-verbal level, all the time, in conversations with others (for example, the way we "read" other people's moods and interpret what that might mean for us, as we scan their faces or listen to their voices in a meeting).
But to go farther -- to be able to say exactly what visual and aural nuances might have given us this impression (the crease of a brow, the elevated pitch of part of a spoken sentence) takes an extra effort and does not come readily for most people. I often think of what I had to learn in film classes in college -- not to just let a film "wash over" me in a tide of impressions and effects, but rather to pay close attention so I could see what techniques the filmmaker used to give me those impressions -- the small details of editing, sound, lighting, composition, color, and many others. This can lead to a deeper level of insight and articulation.
As the practitioner in the VE session I'm describing here, I tried to inculcate this to some extent. As people were working in the small groups, I walked around and made a few suggestions, such as pointing out specific visual details and getting the groups to look at them, when it was apparent that the group was in 'story' mode and could benefit from taking a closer look. That did seem to shake things loose a bit and move the conversation to a more engaged level.
This same dynamic occurs with other forms of collaborative media. Getting people to look closely and talk about what they see requires a level of effort -- for both participants and practitioners -- beyond what is easiest to do. The "story" level is also a good thing and generates dialogue that takes people out of their normal way of relating, but going farther is where a lot of the potential lies.
Saturday, March 21, 2009
Tilburg part 2
The jazz-and-gado-gado-fueled conversation in Tilburg with Aldo de Moor was permeated with his ideas about “activating engagement.” This is what’s needed to activate a collaborative effort, especially over the web, where many start with great ideas and tools, then peter out. Active engagement is what makes such efforts rise to the level where things start jumping, infused with active energy.
We did a short Visual Explorer (VE) session on the question of “what does it take to activate an argumentation effort?” We spent less than ten minutes on that exercise, but even in that time there was a rush of energy and insight. We built on each other’s readings of the pictures we selected (hands on African drums and seabirds taking off in flight), with that rush of cascading insight that characterizes a successful VE session.
It reminded me of what motivates me in the work I’ve pursued – that moment of ignition, when engagement in dialogue, co-inquiry, synergy takes place. Without engagement there is no knowledge art as I think of it, because it’s inherently collaborative and participatory. It’s what happens when people work, talk , think, and shape a representation together, of something they care about, something that does or will symbolize the dimensions and nuances of their interests and creativity. I love those moments when the spark strikes, and when it gets reflected and embodied, even temporarily, in the something in the middle, the representation that they are holding in their hands.
That is one of the things that's so good about Visual Explorer. Somehow it really helps bring forth what people care about, what activates them in their life and work, and gives them a means to engage with each other and build off each other’s insights and excitement. The pictures themselves become touch points, almost talismans, even for those brief moments. At least that’s what can happen when the engagement is activated.
We did a short Visual Explorer (VE) session on the question of “what does it take to activate an argumentation effort?” We spent less than ten minutes on that exercise, but even in that time there was a rush of energy and insight. We built on each other’s readings of the pictures we selected (hands on African drums and seabirds taking off in flight), with that rush of cascading insight that characterizes a successful VE session.
It reminded me of what motivates me in the work I’ve pursued – that moment of ignition, when engagement in dialogue, co-inquiry, synergy takes place. Without engagement there is no knowledge art as I think of it, because it’s inherently collaborative and participatory. It’s what happens when people work, talk , think, and shape a representation together, of something they care about, something that does or will symbolize the dimensions and nuances of their interests and creativity. I love those moments when the spark strikes, and when it gets reflected and embodied, even temporarily, in the something in the middle, the representation that they are holding in their hands.
That is one of the things that's so good about Visual Explorer. Somehow it really helps bring forth what people care about, what activates them in their life and work, and gives them a means to engage with each other and build off each other’s insights and excitement. The pictures themselves become touch points, almost talismans, even for those brief moments. At least that’s what can happen when the engagement is activated.
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Leading jazz in Tilburg
On a recent trip to the Netherlands, I spent a very enjoyable evening of Indonesian food and conversation with Aldo de Moor in Tilburg. After the meal we walked through the streets to find a jazz cafe. Aldo had heard of a performance by some students and faculty of a local jazz academy.
We arrived in the middle of a set. There were more people on stage than in the audience, about nine players. The performance had clearly not been rehearsed much, but there was some good playing.
What was striking, for the purposes of this blog, was the role played by one of the performers, a woman on tenor sax (wearing a skirt in the center of the above photo). She also sang, in English, on one song ("Autumn Leaves").
Whether by arrangement or by inclination, she was clearly the leader. This manifested itself in several ways. There were some typical bandleader-style gestures, such as pointing at the next person to take a solo, or patting the top of her head indicating it was time to go back to the main melody, or waving back and forth to cue the other players when to come in when trading fours with the drummer. She used a variety of facial expressions to show when the others weren't getting either the feel of the song or the right way to approach it, as well as giving approval of some of the solos.
But more interesting than these were the ways her leadership was expressed through her sax playing and singing. When she played a solo, there was a perceptible leap in authority and resonance, in the connection to what the song was supposed to be about. She focused the energy dissipated by the more lackluster, or less inspired playing of some of the others. Your eyes went right to her; if you'd been talking you stopped and listened. There was something more defined, like she was the center, radiating out what the song and the music was meant to say. She seemed to put purpose and assurance in every note, and it came out in style, tonality, and volume -- authoritative without being loud or blaring, as if the authority was in the music itself rather than trying to play or sound a certain way.
This came across just as much, though in a different way, when she sang. She took the mike away from the stand where it sat for the horn players' solos, and sang skillfully and soulfully in English, with a beautiful voice that sounded that it got that way more via practice than natural ability. It was loaded with nuance and feeling for the song, without artifice. She communicated "this is how it's done" without showing off or grabbing the spotlight, giving the song and the music the feeling, skill, and resonance it deserved.
Somehow, by these actions she set a bar, something for the players to aspire to, but without making it seem like she was above or better than them. With most of the other players, through lack of equivalent skill, experience, or ability, you'd lose interest in their solos almost from the start, but your eyes and ears went immediately to her when she started playing or singing.
Her leadership came through embodying the meaning of the effort: play as if it matters in the ways it's supposed to matter. It's what I mean by a "practitioner": someone who takes on the success of the whole effort, and has a repertoire of tools and skils and -- maybe more important -- an ability to personally be in the moment, to bring to bear what is needed, when and how it's needed, to make the thing work.
Music is too often seen as ephemeral, easily trivialized, or made without meaning. For it to matter, the meaning needs to be evoked, to brought into being in the moment. It isn't inherent in the doing or in the songs, as evidenced when she wasn't actively engaged in the playing. It needs to be brought forth and brought out of the people involved, infused into the "representation" that they're putting their hands on (in this case, the music). A leader, a practitioner of the type I am trying to describe, can make that happen.
We arrived in the middle of a set. There were more people on stage than in the audience, about nine players. The performance had clearly not been rehearsed much, but there was some good playing.
What was striking, for the purposes of this blog, was the role played by one of the performers, a woman on tenor sax (wearing a skirt in the center of the above photo). She also sang, in English, on one song ("Autumn Leaves").
Whether by arrangement or by inclination, she was clearly the leader. This manifested itself in several ways. There were some typical bandleader-style gestures, such as pointing at the next person to take a solo, or patting the top of her head indicating it was time to go back to the main melody, or waving back and forth to cue the other players when to come in when trading fours with the drummer. She used a variety of facial expressions to show when the others weren't getting either the feel of the song or the right way to approach it, as well as giving approval of some of the solos.
But more interesting than these were the ways her leadership was expressed through her sax playing and singing. When she played a solo, there was a perceptible leap in authority and resonance, in the connection to what the song was supposed to be about. She focused the energy dissipated by the more lackluster, or less inspired playing of some of the others. Your eyes went right to her; if you'd been talking you stopped and listened. There was something more defined, like she was the center, radiating out what the song and the music was meant to say. She seemed to put purpose and assurance in every note, and it came out in style, tonality, and volume -- authoritative without being loud or blaring, as if the authority was in the music itself rather than trying to play or sound a certain way.
This came across just as much, though in a different way, when she sang. She took the mike away from the stand where it sat for the horn players' solos, and sang skillfully and soulfully in English, with a beautiful voice that sounded that it got that way more via practice than natural ability. It was loaded with nuance and feeling for the song, without artifice. She communicated "this is how it's done" without showing off or grabbing the spotlight, giving the song and the music the feeling, skill, and resonance it deserved.
Somehow, by these actions she set a bar, something for the players to aspire to, but without making it seem like she was above or better than them. With most of the other players, through lack of equivalent skill, experience, or ability, you'd lose interest in their solos almost from the start, but your eyes and ears went immediately to her when she started playing or singing.
Her leadership came through embodying the meaning of the effort: play as if it matters in the ways it's supposed to matter. It's what I mean by a "practitioner": someone who takes on the success of the whole effort, and has a repertoire of tools and skils and -- maybe more important -- an ability to personally be in the moment, to bring to bear what is needed, when and how it's needed, to make the thing work.
Music is too often seen as ephemeral, easily trivialized, or made without meaning. For it to matter, the meaning needs to be evoked, to brought into being in the moment. It isn't inherent in the doing or in the songs, as evidenced when she wasn't actively engaged in the playing. It needs to be brought forth and brought out of the people involved, infused into the "representation" that they're putting their hands on (in this case, the music). A leader, a practitioner of the type I am trying to describe, can make that happen.
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Documentaries and ethics
We watched "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" last night. While it was certainly damning, and infuriating to watch these con men smoothly invoking moral rectitude while they stole hundreds of millions of dollars and manufactured the California electricity crisis, I found the film disappointing. Although it showed many people talking about the scams and frauds and the crooks who perpetrated them, it didn't really explain them. Mostly it said, in effect, bad things were going on, it was all about manipulating the stock price, it was a house of cards, the people were sneaks and liars, etc., but never gave clear explanations and descriptions of what they really did and how the frauds really worked. That was left to extrapolation or perhaps assumed background knowledge.
Obviously the filmmakers and their informants knew the subject matter intimately, but they did not translate that knowledge into terms the uninitiated could clearly follow. The feelings of outrage come across, but not the substance that underlay them. As viewers we see a lot of bad people doing bad things but we never really get brought into what those bad things were made up of. You're just supposed to know already, or be content not to understand but let your feelings be plucked regardless. You're left with a sense of anger and a (probably healthy) skepticism at the statements and public posturing of ostensible titans, but not tools with which you might interpret events for yourself, beyond the emotional level.
Michael Moore's films also disappoint for a similar reason. He takes a lot of cheap shots at his targets, making them look bad through filmmaking trickery (this is not to say that I don't agree with his ideas, in large part I do). He's very effective at making people look like crooks and charlatans, but not in enabling viewers to see what is going on for themselves.
Documentary filmmakers have a responsibility to get their subject matter across in ways that help viewers think and understand, not just get angry or condemn. When they fail in this dimension, the films sink down into manipulation. To me that is an ethical lapse that detracts from the effectiveness of the social concerns that such filmmakers undoubtedly possess. The films become more about entertainment -- giving you an emotional experience -- than about giving you tools to develop insight. Not that this is easy to do -- it isn't. But to take the stance of the social documentarian, in my mind, requires taking on this dimension as well.
Obviously the filmmakers and their informants knew the subject matter intimately, but they did not translate that knowledge into terms the uninitiated could clearly follow. The feelings of outrage come across, but not the substance that underlay them. As viewers we see a lot of bad people doing bad things but we never really get brought into what those bad things were made up of. You're just supposed to know already, or be content not to understand but let your feelings be plucked regardless. You're left with a sense of anger and a (probably healthy) skepticism at the statements and public posturing of ostensible titans, but not tools with which you might interpret events for yourself, beyond the emotional level.
Michael Moore's films also disappoint for a similar reason. He takes a lot of cheap shots at his targets, making them look bad through filmmaking trickery (this is not to say that I don't agree with his ideas, in large part I do). He's very effective at making people look like crooks and charlatans, but not in enabling viewers to see what is going on for themselves.
Documentary filmmakers have a responsibility to get their subject matter across in ways that help viewers think and understand, not just get angry or condemn. When they fail in this dimension, the films sink down into manipulation. To me that is an ethical lapse that detracts from the effectiveness of the social concerns that such filmmakers undoubtedly possess. The films become more about entertainment -- giving you an emotional experience -- than about giving you tools to develop insight. Not that this is easy to do -- it isn't. But to take the stance of the social documentarian, in my mind, requires taking on this dimension as well.
Saturday, February 14, 2009
The big news
I've been neglecting this blog for a while, so it's fitting that the first post of 2009 should announce the BIG NEWS: Compendium will now be true open source, under the LGPL license. This is something that Simon and I have been working toward for a long time, slowed by the inherent inertia of huge institutions concerned with larger matters. But the stars aligned, good people helped, and the right thing has at last happened. There are a number of people to thank but they probably would not want their names broadcast, so I'll just say that if you read this, you know who you are, and you have my deepest thanks.
I fondly hope that legions of open source aficionados will now build out many of the features and capabilities that Compendium still lacks, unfettered by the chains of our heretofore insufficient source code license. Ye have no excuse, now. The enhancement requests on the support site lie waiting for your perusal. Contact me, or us, if you want to discuss anything.
In smaller news, it's funny that the membership of the Compendium Institute yahoogroup seems unable to break the 1300 barrier. Despite 5-10 new members a week, we've been hovering in the low 1290s for months. Why is this?
I'm looking forward to spending the week after next in a deep dive into the research, which I've only been able to steal a few minutes here and there for since December. Beyond working through the Ames and Rutgers analyses, I've had to let some good publication opportunities lapse because there has simply been no time apart from regular work to devote to them. Not complaining, the work has been absorbing and, within its context, important, but it has left little time for anything else. From time to time I think of connections between my "day" job in software usability and my other life in Knowledge Art, but have not had time to come up with anything profound to say. Perhaps something will occur while sipping Delftian coffee the week after next.
I fondly hope that legions of open source aficionados will now build out many of the features and capabilities that Compendium still lacks, unfettered by the chains of our heretofore insufficient source code license. Ye have no excuse, now. The enhancement requests on the support site lie waiting for your perusal. Contact me, or us, if you want to discuss anything.
In smaller news, it's funny that the membership of the Compendium Institute yahoogroup seems unable to break the 1300 barrier. Despite 5-10 new members a week, we've been hovering in the low 1290s for months. Why is this?
I'm looking forward to spending the week after next in a deep dive into the research, which I've only been able to steal a few minutes here and there for since December. Beyond working through the Ames and Rutgers analyses, I've had to let some good publication opportunities lapse because there has simply been no time apart from regular work to devote to them. Not complaining, the work has been absorbing and, within its context, important, but it has left little time for anything else. From time to time I think of connections between my "day" job in software usability and my other life in Knowledge Art, but have not had time to come up with anything profound to say. Perhaps something will occur while sipping Delftian coffee the week after next.
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
More on "Species of Sensemaking"
More on this post, triggered by some recent responses to a couple of our papers on sensemaking.
What do people mean when they talk about sensemaking? There are several types of definitions, which seem to touch each other only peripherally.
Many treat sensemaking as largely the province of information retrieval: there is a problem or question, there is a body of information that relates to it that one has acquired (or has been thrust into) through some means, and there is a need to develop an understanding of it. There is much worthwhile research and tool development being done in this vein, but it is not the only type of sensemaking research. Since it largely focuses on tools and people as users of those tools, there is a tendency to treat the human dimensions of sensemaking in a somewhat uniform, or even mechanistic manner. Given certain types of situations and certain types of tools, people are seen to respond and behave in certain ways that can be more or less aided by different sorts of a priori approaches.
Another, only partially related, vein of sensemaking research is more generally a qualitative or phenomenological approach. This has more to do with the human experience of being brought up against a discontinuity of some kind, something that prevents you from moving forward as you want or need to. This conception is identified in large part with Brenda Dervin but also related to the broader organizational sensemaking described by Karl Weick, in which the ways in which people in groups encounter disasters and catastrophes play a large role.
In this approach, one moves through time until encountering a gap or discontinuity. What you do at the moment you encounter that gap is what's of interest. Each such situation is unique for the people in it; there is nothing uniform, mechanistic, or monolithic about it.
My own research has sometimes been taken as being the former approach. Although I am writing about the human experience of creating participatory representations, a process that is inherently rife with challenges, obstacles, and gaps no matter what sort of tool is being used, some readers assign the focus to the tools and approaches themselves, and the tools’ success or failure in creating seamless experiences in information manipulation. These readers see any problems the people described encounter as lying with the tools or methods themselves. Better tools or improved methods would avoid the problems. If users of the tools I write about encounter sensemaking problems, in this view, it must be because the tools themselves don’t provide adequate support.
But that is not my focus. Further, it is not my belief. No collaborative tool or process provides seamless support to its users, especially when used in live sessions. Tool use, and the creative process itself, seen from the perspective of actual individual people attempting to create participatory representations, is inherently messy and idiosyncratic. What happens in sessions is unpredictable, unless the process is so tightly controlled and over-determined as to give the lie to the idea of “participatory” altogether.
In actual practice things don’t always go smoothly. The unexpected happens. Discontinuities rear their heads, and the actors must respond. These responses can take many forms, ranging from giving up, to falling back on rote prescribed actions, to asking for help, to accepting suggestions, to coming up with fresh creative innovations on the spot.
What I am looking at is the ways that people attempt (sometimes unproblematically, but usually not), to construct collaborative representations, and what types of obstacles confront them in the process of doing this. I take as a given that each such attempt is a new sallying forth into a sea of potential problems, inherent when trying to foster coherence, engagement, and usefulness with a group of independent and intelligent people who may or may not conform to your ideas of how they should behave or contribute. Or the problems can be with the materials or tools – something doesn’t go right or as expected; to salvage or correct the situation something has to be done.
The interesting part for me is what the people do at those times, or how they construct things so as to avoid the problems. Sometimes the problems are major and bring matters to a halt; sometimes they are minor and easily dealt with, a momentary swerve from productivity; still other times, through a combination of skill and luck, they are avoided altogether.
Some researchers treat groups engaged in participatory representations as, in effect, monoliths all bent on a single quest with a single aim. Although that can be the case, it usually isn’t. Groups are complex beasts with multiple identities (people as individuals always have multiple identities) and can’t be reduced to a single information-seeking machine. Particular members of a group may act “groupy”, but they are also, always, individuals with their own aims and goals, their own experience of the proceedings, and their own perspectives on the meaning, relevance, and interestingness of specific events. What for one person is deeply engaging is for another of little or no interest; what for one seems an exciting change of direction is for another an annoying distraction.
The focus for my current research is not on the group members, the participants themselves, although they are just as interesting in their own right. Rather I am looking at the particular sensemaking experience, the particular kinds of discontinuities that occur to people in the role of "practitioner," "caretaker", or "facilitator" of the event – those who have some responsibility to the functioning of the group and event as a whole. People inhabit this role and respond to discontinuities with a wide, even infinite variety of styles and modes of action. It’s the surfacing and describing of some of this variety that interests me. Not to reduce it to a set of patterns that can be uniformly supported. I don’t believe that’s possible.
"As an individual moves through an experience, each moment is potentially a sense-making moment. The essence of that sense-making moment is assumed to be addressed by focusing on how the actor defined and dealt with the situation, the gap, the bridge, and the continuation of the journey after crossing the bridge."- Brenda Dervin, “From the mind's eye of the user”
What do people mean when they talk about sensemaking? There are several types of definitions, which seem to touch each other only peripherally.
Many treat sensemaking as largely the province of information retrieval: there is a problem or question, there is a body of information that relates to it that one has acquired (or has been thrust into) through some means, and there is a need to develop an understanding of it. There is much worthwhile research and tool development being done in this vein, but it is not the only type of sensemaking research. Since it largely focuses on tools and people as users of those tools, there is a tendency to treat the human dimensions of sensemaking in a somewhat uniform, or even mechanistic manner. Given certain types of situations and certain types of tools, people are seen to respond and behave in certain ways that can be more or less aided by different sorts of a priori approaches.
Another, only partially related, vein of sensemaking research is more generally a qualitative or phenomenological approach. This has more to do with the human experience of being brought up against a discontinuity of some kind, something that prevents you from moving forward as you want or need to. This conception is identified in large part with Brenda Dervin but also related to the broader organizational sensemaking described by Karl Weick, in which the ways in which people in groups encounter disasters and catastrophes play a large role.
In this approach, one moves through time until encountering a gap or discontinuity. What you do at the moment you encounter that gap is what's of interest. Each such situation is unique for the people in it; there is nothing uniform, mechanistic, or monolithic about it.
My own research has sometimes been taken as being the former approach. Although I am writing about the human experience of creating participatory representations, a process that is inherently rife with challenges, obstacles, and gaps no matter what sort of tool is being used, some readers assign the focus to the tools and approaches themselves, and the tools’ success or failure in creating seamless experiences in information manipulation. These readers see any problems the people described encounter as lying with the tools or methods themselves. Better tools or improved methods would avoid the problems. If users of the tools I write about encounter sensemaking problems, in this view, it must be because the tools themselves don’t provide adequate support.
But that is not my focus. Further, it is not my belief. No collaborative tool or process provides seamless support to its users, especially when used in live sessions. Tool use, and the creative process itself, seen from the perspective of actual individual people attempting to create participatory representations, is inherently messy and idiosyncratic. What happens in sessions is unpredictable, unless the process is so tightly controlled and over-determined as to give the lie to the idea of “participatory” altogether.
In actual practice things don’t always go smoothly. The unexpected happens. Discontinuities rear their heads, and the actors must respond. These responses can take many forms, ranging from giving up, to falling back on rote prescribed actions, to asking for help, to accepting suggestions, to coming up with fresh creative innovations on the spot.
What I am looking at is the ways that people attempt (sometimes unproblematically, but usually not), to construct collaborative representations, and what types of obstacles confront them in the process of doing this. I take as a given that each such attempt is a new sallying forth into a sea of potential problems, inherent when trying to foster coherence, engagement, and usefulness with a group of independent and intelligent people who may or may not conform to your ideas of how they should behave or contribute. Or the problems can be with the materials or tools – something doesn’t go right or as expected; to salvage or correct the situation something has to be done.
The interesting part for me is what the people do at those times, or how they construct things so as to avoid the problems. Sometimes the problems are major and bring matters to a halt; sometimes they are minor and easily dealt with, a momentary swerve from productivity; still other times, through a combination of skill and luck, they are avoided altogether.
Some researchers treat groups engaged in participatory representations as, in effect, monoliths all bent on a single quest with a single aim. Although that can be the case, it usually isn’t. Groups are complex beasts with multiple identities (people as individuals always have multiple identities) and can’t be reduced to a single information-seeking machine. Particular members of a group may act “groupy”, but they are also, always, individuals with their own aims and goals, their own experience of the proceedings, and their own perspectives on the meaning, relevance, and interestingness of specific events. What for one person is deeply engaging is for another of little or no interest; what for one seems an exciting change of direction is for another an annoying distraction.
The focus for my current research is not on the group members, the participants themselves, although they are just as interesting in their own right. Rather I am looking at the particular sensemaking experience, the particular kinds of discontinuities that occur to people in the role of "practitioner," "caretaker", or "facilitator" of the event – those who have some responsibility to the functioning of the group and event as a whole. People inhabit this role and respond to discontinuities with a wide, even infinite variety of styles and modes of action. It’s the surfacing and describing of some of this variety that interests me. Not to reduce it to a set of patterns that can be uniformly supported. I don’t believe that’s possible.
Saturday, November 22, 2008
Sensemaking example
One of the sessions at the Ames workshop was particularly problematic for the practitioners. In an oft-seen pattern, the discussion veered away from focusing on the map almost from the very beginning of the session. In the debrief afterwards, one of the facilitators said the following (note: not a native English speaker):
This is a good example of the kind of disruption that, in the hands of a more experienced or skilled practitioner, can trigger sensemaking and actions toward a successful resolution. As in this case, practitioners with less experience or skill in managing a group conversation struggle to come up with effective interventions, and often give up trying.
“One of the problem I always have, I don’t know how to face, is how do, I mean when you [start] a new topic, normally, there are a lot of people, and they are bing, bing, there is an explosion of idea and people they want to say something, maybe at the beginning they hold, and then when you say that’s your time, it’s [boom] and they start not being [cooperative]. . . . So my main problem is, how, I mean I don’t know how to stop them ... they always have very good ideas, so I don’t want to stop and break the normal flow of the discourse. But at the same time I’d like to find a way to pull them back … so it’s a main problem... you know, I don’t want to block them but at the same time I’d like to find a way to bring them back to the theme.”
This is a good example of the kind of disruption that, in the hands of a more experienced or skilled practitioner, can trigger sensemaking and actions toward a successful resolution. As in this case, practitioners with less experience or skill in managing a group conversation struggle to come up with effective interventions, and often give up trying.
Sunday, October 19, 2008
More Compendium history (part 8): Continued Evolution
This is the last of a series.
Time moved on. By 2001, the original team of Compendium practitioners and developers at what was now Verizon had mostly moved on to new responsibilities or left. Various mergers and reorganizations left the effort without executive sponsorship.
We were able to license the software development to KMi, where Simon Buckingham Shum was successful in continuing the development, funding a full-time programmer, Michelle Bachler, who significantly expanded the tool’s capabilities over the next several years. We continued to find new applications and approaches to complement the existing ones, and formed an international group of interested people called the Compendium Institute, holding annual workshops and creating a website and discussion group (numbering 1,267 members at the time of this writing).
In 2003, Verizon granted permission for the Open University to distribute the software, and eventually the program code, freely. As the number of downloads grew (more than 50,000 by November 2008), new applications for Compendium were developed by others outside the core group, with exciting work being done in public policy exploration, e-Government, e-Learning, and many other areas.
Within the core group itself, innovation and exploration continued, reaching into areas such as collaborative e-Science combining software-based input with on-the-fly group mapping, personnel rescue support, mapping the Iraq debate, and many other areas. Compendium has taken its place among the leading knowledge cartography approaches. The Compendium community, approach, and software continue to grow and evolve in ways both satisfying and, often, surprising to its originators.
Research and development continue on many fronts and in many places, with universities and individuals around the world making contributions. In 2003, I turned my own attention to a set of research questions that felt key to understanding the practice dimensions and, eventually, to finding better ways to support the training of new practitioners. I'm interested in the ways people find to shape Compendium maps into expressive artifacts, to craft expressive hypermedia knowledge maps on the fly, with groups of people, inviting their engagement, reaching into analysis, modeling, dialogue mapping, creative exploration, and rationale capture as necessary and appropriate. That work is the chief subject of this blog.
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