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.

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.

More on "Species of Sensemaking"

More on this post, triggered by some recent responses to a couple of our papers on sensemaking.

"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.

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):

“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.

More Compendium history (part 8): Continued Evolution

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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.

More Compendium history (part 7): Difficulties in Diffusing the Practices

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Despite these exciting developments and collaborations, however, we still faced difficulty, and sometimes even active resistance, in attracting new practitioners. This was the case both within what was by now Bell Atlantic as well as within CCL, as well as other organizations. Demand for us to provide Compendium services within Bell Atlantic continued to increase. Indeed, we ultimately hired and trained facilitators from an outside firm to keep up with demand. But the phenomenon of potential internal practitioners trying it once then giving up, or rejecting it outright, did not abate. 

Within the IT and client organizations of Bell Atlantic, we heard two main objections. The first came especially from the software engineers and developers who were our main training clientele. Most said that the tool was not a true object modeling, database, or “collaboration” tool. We would be asked, "why would we use Compendium when we can use Lotus Notes, or Visio, or Access, or …". It seemed that by asking technical people to act as facilitators and communicators, we were pushing them beyond their comfort zone. There were one or two of our students who (despite being IT people) were gifted communicators, but they tended to feel that their existing toolkit cared for all their needs, and did not see the need to add Compendium to their quivers.

At the same time, within organizations like CCL which had many talented and capable facilitators, the approach appeared to many as “too technical,” too difficult or foreign, too hyper-rational. People accustomed to free-form discussion capture on flipcharts and whiteboards did not like the idea of constraining their representations to what they thought that Compendium could provide. 

For both constituencies, capturing and representing complex issues in the software, in front of a group of people watching one’s every move, choosing node and link types and performing complex operations on the fly, trying to keep up with fast-moving conversation, just seemed too hard for most people to do.

Next and last: Continued Evolution

More Compendium history (part 6): Creativity Takes Center Stage

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As we were puzzling about this paradox of having a powerful, successful, flexible technique that we could not convince many others to take on for themselves, a further major influence came into the picture. In 1998 and 1999 we began several collaborations with outside groups. 

One of these was with the New Lenses on Learning research group at the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL), connected by one of our executive internal clients who also served on an advisory board at CCL. This group, particularly our primary contacts Chuck Palus and David Horth, shared a similar interest in “putting something in the middle,” using image-rich visual artifacts in group dialogues to foster creative thinking and exploration of complex challenges.

Their use of manual and paper techniques and ours of software-based issue maps seemed more complementary than opposed, and we began looking at ways to combine our approaches. An early development was adding the capability to display digital photos and images to Compendium, so that the evocative images in CCL’s Visual Explorer toolkit (then existing only on paper) could be loaded into our software and manipulated, adding to the discussion, model, rationale, and issue maps we were already working with. We experimented with different ways to use our combined approaches in the experiential workshops that CCL conducted in different organizations.

The other chief collaboration that began at that time was with Simon Buckingham Shum of the Knowledge Media Institute at the Open University in the UK. Simon’s long background and deep research interest in IBIS, QOC, and related tools and approaches led to a highly generative research collaboration, both exploring the approaches we had developed to date and expanding them in new directions. 

Taken together, the KMi and CCL collaborations held out the promise of integrating creative exploration, issue mapping, model-based design, rationale capture, and meeting facilitation together in one tool. We generated many research papers and formed collaborations that continue to this day. The potential seemed (and still seems) enormous.

Next: Difficulties in Diffusing the Practices

More Compendium history (part 5): Developing the Software

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We soon began to identify desired enhancements for the software, and tried to work with CMSI to build them in to the tool (by then renamed "QuestMap"). QuestMap offered great speed and capacity for navigating even very large maps, and worked extremely well for managing IBIS (argumentation) nodes and links. We wanted greater ability to access and manage the underlying database as well as to be able to create richer representations, especially to support business process modeling. QuestMap was developed with an encrypted, embedded database that did not allow direct access or manipulation by users, and there was no way to add different kinds of icons or images, or to extend or customize the software in other ways. We also wanted to make greater use of transclusions, which we felt were the true "secret sauce" that allowed the tool to be used for multi-dimensional representations. However, CMSI felt that their core market was in IBIS mapping and did not want to extend the software in those directions. 

Despite the limitations, though, we were able to support some very large projects with the existing software coupled with the Conversational Modeling approach. These included both small group and multi-team analysis and design projects. A few small software development teams that we were members of used the approach to manage their work over longer periods. One of these, that built a forecasting tool, used the approach to manage all of its work over a couple of years, growing a large repository of models and issue tracking with both clients and developers, capturing a great deal of rationale along the way.

To work around the limitations and help connect the work we did in QuestMap with material developed in other applications and settings, we developed small “glueware” extensions, particularly in the areas of importing and exporting content from applications like Microsoft Office and Visio. Most of these were written in Microsoft's Visual Basic for Applications, which transformed QuestMap's exported text files into forms that other programs could use, or formatted material from other programs into QuestMap's import file structure. VBA let even someone like me, with elementary (at best) programming skills, create tools that let us produce richer representations than IBIS maps. When we needed to use these on critical projects (such as a large Y2K contingency planning effort that required us to generate data-flow diagrams in Visio based on our Conversational Modeling maps), real developers like Maarten and Bea Zimmermann were able to beef up my dining-room-table attempts considerably.

These helper tools only took us so far, though, and required a lot of manual intervention on the part of the user. In 1998 we decided to begin developing our own software tool that would combine QuestMap’s capabilities with the features and enhancements we wanted. The early software design, taking advantage of then-new Java, envisioned a fully-featured mapping tool combined with over-the-internet groupware capabilities.

Around the same time we dropped the “Conversational Modeling” name (which we liked, but few others did) in favor of the friendlier term “Compendium.” This became the name of both our approach in general and the software in particular. We had toyed with a variety of other names, most of which were even more turgid and obscure than Conversational Modeling. While laboring one day at the aforementioned dining room table, I asked my non-technical wife Debbie what she would call a method that let you create collections of ideas related together. She suggested "Compendium", and it stuck.

Next: Creativity Takes Center Stage

More Compendium history (part 4): Conversational Modeling Takes Hold

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We (mainly Maarten Sierhuis and me) began experimenting with this approach. With growing excitement, we found that the approach seemed to hold together, and even to scale to be able to handle weeks or months of working with a project team. Working “undercover” mostly at first, we applied the fledgling approach in a variety of contexts. Each time we met enthusiastic reception from the people we were working with, and learned more about the best ways to represent and manage models, project management materials, and discussions without leaving the CM/1 software.

I wrote a long technical memo that spelled out the various techniques in detail, which I later summarized in a paper for a 1996 hypertext workshop, which even later became a journal article. This was the first public exposure for the approach.

One of our early successes was working with a cross-functional team from Human Resources that needed to come up with a toll-free hotline for employees to use to access HR resources. We were not only able to use Conversational Modeling to help the group build collaborative representations of the different departments and functions that needed to be incorporated in the “Helpline”, simultaneously recording and working through issues and arguments in the shared display, but we were also surprised to find (based on their comments) that members of the group seemed to be listening to each other, and learning about each other’s work and concerns, with more attentiveness and concern than they had been able to do before. We began to think that perhaps this approach could not only be used for “rational” activities like modeling and analysis, but for group development and mutual learning as well.

After some time and more successes, we went “public” and began offering this approach and toolset as an internal (to NYNEX) consulting service. We also offered the approach free to educational and other external groups. 

Ultimately we conducted hundreds of sessions in dozens of project settings, small and large, over the next several years. We developed training classes (some of that work lives on in these training materials) to spread the competencies we’d developed more broadly within the company, training several dozen people in a number of two-day workshops.

Still, though, we did not see broader take up of this approach, at least in terms of others adopting the approach and becoming practitioners themselves. While client groups were quite happy to have us come in and be the practitioners for them, they did not show much interest in picking up the tools and practices themselves. In some cases we were able to train people who did apply the approach themselves on a single project, but they never used it again once that project was complete. 

The many attendees of our training workshops, despite their initial enthusiasm, fell prey to the same pattern we’d seen in the beginning. They’d try the approach in a meeting or two, fall behind or otherwise get stuck, and give up. This experience seemed to be in accord with many of the reports in the 1996 Moran and Carroll book as well as other early work in hypertext and design rationale approaches, which emphasized the cognitive overhead involved in creating representations of design rationale. Many of these researchers seemed to despair that the difficulties could be overcome.

Next: Developing the Software

More Compendium history (part 3): Combining Modeling with IBIS

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At the same time as our experiments with CM/1 were occurring, another thread in the lab was concerned with developing a model-based approach to system and business process design, influenced by traditional systems analysis methods a la Yourdon, the European knowledge modeling methodology called CommonKADS, and other approaches such as Soft Systems Methodology. 

As with the explorations of CM/1, there was a good deal of ferment about this as we looked for ways to reap the benefits of such structured approaches while contending with the cognitive overhead of having to work with such frameworks. At the same time, we were limited by the lack of availability of good software tools for such modeling, especially in the area of CommonKADS for which no tools yet existed. 

Coming out of this mix of influences, we’d developed a hybrid modeling framework called World Modeling which prescribed relationships between current state and future state, “implementation” and “essential” (abstract), and other sorts of models. We were quite excited about its potential to organize the work of the project teams we were engaged with, if only we could find a good tool.

One day in early 1993, I was sitting in a meeting in Manhattan, listening to a group of people from New York Telephone debating approaches to redesigning their capital investment process. I had developed a good deal of facility with the software by this time and was easily able to keep up with the discussion, recording ideas and representing them in IBIS format as the discussion proceeded. As usual, the conversation was a mixture of ideas for process design, systems changes, resource issues, problems and opportunities, arguments and brainstorms. It suddenly occurred to me that CM/1 itself could be used as the tool for World Modeling. 

Beyond providing a way of mapping and managing IBIS, CM/1 had some very powerful hypertext features, including the ability to copy nodes from one map and paste them in another such that a true “transclusion” was made – the same object appearing in multiple places, changes made in one place would appear immediately in all the views that object appeared in, and you could right-click on the node to see a clickable list of all the “containing views” for that node. 

This was a key requirement for World Modeling. We needed to be able to show, for example, how a piece of data used in one business process was used in another, without losing the connection or identity of that piece of data. At the same time, we could get the benefit of IBIS argumentation and design rationale capture within the same tool – attaching rationale to model elements as we went, recording debates about how models should be constructed, and the like. 

We came up with ways to tag nodes with searchable annotations (e.g., identifying nodes as “tasks”, “problems”, “resources” and the like), and used CM/1’s export/import capability to build templates of questions corresponding to different model types (e.g. organization models, process models, object models, etc.). It started to look like the good tool was within our grasp.

Next: Conversational Modeling takes hold