Engagement in face-to-face meetings

A helpful post from Susan Nurre on the IAF forum points to an article on meetingsnet.com that in turn points to a Cornell University School of Hotel Administration white paper (free registration required) on "The Future of Meetings: The Case for Face-to-Face," by Christine Duffy and Mary Beth McEuen of Maritz*. I'd never thought about looking at this area of literature (hospitality studies), but it might actually be fruitful for my research.

The article focuses mostly on "large-group meetings and events", which are not my area of focus. But the concept of "engagement" is threaded through the article in ways that are applicable to the (primarily small group) kinds of phenomena I'm looking at, tying them to specific organizational benefits:

Amidst the phenomenon of ever-increasing information overload and ever-decreasing speed cycles, attention is scarce and fleeting. In this environment, the lack of a focused and attentive human mind is one of the greatest limiting factors in effectively executing business strategy.

and (citing John Medina):

... when people are engaged with information in multi-sensory environments, they are more likely to remember the information (compared to single-sense experiences) and creatively come up with solutions.

Some interesting (and true in my personal experience) observations on the disadvantages of virtual meetings for particular purposes:

Participants stated that the significant temptation to multi-task during virtual meetings was distracting and had an impact on the meeting objectives being achieved. While this may not be a significant problem when the goal is to share information to which people can refer later, it is a real problem when the goal is to initiate something new, whether that is new learning or a new set of priorities that require a shift in attitude and action.

Since my day job is working primarily on the design of new user interfaces, I have seen over and over that getting designs off on the right foot really does require face-to-face interaction. It somehow does not gel right without that.



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* Way back in the beginning of my career, when I lived in St. Louis, I almost did a video and writing project with Maritz. It would've been my first freelance project and was quite exciting. It didn't pan out (for reasons I don't recall).

Paying attention to a representation -- or not

An interesting photo and comment from Eugene Eric Kim about participant attention (or the lack of it) in a graphic facilitation session. Of course the photo depicts just one moment out of a session that might have had periods of direct participant engagement, but it's a good illustration of the main questions I am trying to get at with the research:

• What (and when, and how, and why) does a practitioner do to promote engagement with the representation?
• How do they make it of value to the participants?
• What makes the difference between something that (however virtuosic) is just background to the main discourse, and something that is (or becomes) integral?

Great posts on improvisation & visual practice, and dialogue mapping from child's point of view

Two posts that both, in different ways, take a child's viewpoint that illuminates a) 'rote' practice, skill development, improvisation, and graphic facilitation, and b) dialogue mapping.

a) from Jeannel King in her blog Process Arts and Facilitation: The Practice Will Set You Free

b) from Kailash Awati in his blog Eight to Late: What should I do now? A bedtime story about dialogue mapping

Making Representations Matter -- a mini-workshop at the Knowledge Media Design Institute (5 Aug 2010)

I recently gave a talk and mini-workshop at the Knowledge Media Design Institute, University of Toronto, titled "Making Representations Matter: The Practice of Shaping Participatory Media Artifacts." The session started with a review of the research to date (see slides below), but the bulk of the evening was spent with the attendees doing a collaborative exercise followed by a discussion using some of the presented concepts.

For the exercise, the participants broke up into two groups and were assigned to pick facilitators and engage in a collaborative representational task of their choosing, using markers and whiteboards, for about 30 minutes. I roamed back and forth and took notes on facilitator moves and participant responses. We followed this by over an hour of reflection and discussion. The audience, composed of researchers, grad students, and practitioners (including a few people from the community with no direct tie to KMDI), seemed to really engage with the ideas.

Participants working on their collaborative representations

One helpful idea that came out of the discussion was to make an explicit distinction between the "interactional" aspects of facilitation -- e.g. those having to do with facilitator actions that create better communication and discussion among participants -- and the "representational" aspects, particularly those that have to do with ensuring direct participant engagement with the representation and how facilitators can help ensure that the representation itself ends up with suitably "persistent" qualities -- that is, that it can serve for future audiences as an evocative representation. If this distinction isn't made clear, the discussion tends to veer towards the interactional aspects rather than the representational.

For future work, it's encouraging that giving people an opportunity to experience and reflect on shaping participatory representations, in combination with presenting some of the concepts and findings from the research, seems to work well. This was my second direct attempt to do this, following last year's initial foray at the IFVP conference. I had learned from that to make sure there was enough time for both the experiential and reflective portions of the event (and not too much time given to the initial presentation), and this time that worked well. In fact, the discussion went way over the allotted time and on into the following dinner at a nearby Thai restaurant. It's good to see that the constructs from the research can apply to non-software-based representational forms, like whiteboards and markers.

Graphic facilitation from the practitioner's perspective

Check out this post, and its 31 responses (as of today), on Julie Stuart's blog. It's a response to a mostly favorable Harvard Business Review post on graphic facilitation. Several things are interesting to me from a research as well as practitioner perspective.

From the research viewpoint, what's of interest is the way Julie and her community talk about their practice and the ways the aesthetics of their practice intertwine with the way they see the service they provide to their clients and participants -- what I would call their practitioner ethics.

For example, here is Julie talking about the complex of activities -- the stance -- of a graphic facilitator in the heat of the moment of practice:

When I graphically facilitate, I’m listening as a journalist would for the key themes and highlights in the story, organizing the information spatially, instinctually finding the structure, giving visual emphasis and hierarchy to the story as it emerges on the paper. And also paying attention to where the group needs to go next.

And the way her personal experience is uniquely and inextricably tied to the many dimensions that make up her practice (how she is able to listen, shape, and facilitate simultaneously), which is evocative of the way McCarthy and Wright talk about how taking an experiential view moves thinking about practice away from abstracted types and generalizations:

There is no one else on the planet with my particular combination of skills: public policy background + non-profit management + journalism + conceptual art + stock trading + politics + teaching + facilitation.

Julie, and many of her respondents, take issue with the phrase "pricy artist's handiwork" that appeared in the HBR article, and more generally with being referred to as "artists" in the context of graphic facilitation practice:

I don’t think of myself as an artist when I do graphic facilitation work. Yes, there are drawings that depict recognizable icons but art is about a tenth of what’s involved with this work. . . . Art—what we tend to think of as fine art—has original content. Creating visual maps from content that emerges from a group’s collective process and not from me, doesn’t qualify as art, in the original sense.

In this we see the consequence of the reductionist meanings that the terms "art" and "artist" have taken on, that art is something that only fine artists do, and that real art is something you would generally only find in a museum, rather than seeing artistry as something inherent in all levels of human culture. Dewey (in one of my many favorite quotes) said this in Art as Experience:

The intelligent mechanic engaged in his job, interested in doing well and finding satisfaction in his handiwork, caring for his materials and tools with genuine affection, is artistically engaged. (p. 4)

While arguing that the term "artist" is used pejoratively in the HBR article, Julie's post also takes a similar position to Dewey, hoping that when seen without the reductionist implications, graphic facilitators

.... aren’t seen as “the artist,” the person in the room owning the creative process for the group. It is my hope that we will be the enablers of everyone else’s creativity. That we will teach people to make their own pictures so that we aren’t seen as “the artist” but the person able to bring the artistry out of the people we work with who are hungry to express themselves creatively. I believe there is artistry in everyone. As Ellen Dissanayake writes in Homo Aestheticus, this used to be an accepted fact. Our culture has taken the ownership of creativity out of the hands of many and put it into the hands of a few. I would like to return it to the many.

There is more to say about the piece, and the 31 respondents mention many different facets. The number and energy of the responses, most of which are from fellow graphic facilitation practitioners (and participants) brings me to the other point of interest. As a practitioner of another form of visual facilitation, it's amazing to see the level of community and mutual reinforcement I've seen in the graphic facilitation world.

Compendium has had over 80,000 downloads, and there are currently more than 1600 members of the yahoogroup, but we've never seen anything like that kind of energized practitioner community. I think this is largely because most Compendium users are not using it for the kind of facilitative practice with the tool and approach that we originally developed it for. Judging by the entries on our download log, most people are using it for individual work, mostly as a mind-mapping tool. There are certainly facilitative practitioners using Compendium out there, but the practitioner community hasn't gelled in anything like the same way demonstrated in Julie's post and responses. It's something to strive towards. If/when I finish the phd, maybe I can put more energy in that direction; it's been a long while now since I did.

Excellent sheep

“So are you saying that we’re all just, like, really excellent sheep?”
- a student quoted by William Deresiewicz in his The Disadvantages of an Elite Education

It's funny that I just read Deresiewicz's article (following a link from eekim) after reading the novel The Good Son by Michael Gruber, and seeing the movie Inception last week, all while visiting a bunch of colleges and thinking and talking about college with family, friends, and old professors.

The common thread in the article, book, and film is the idea of false consciousness -- we think we're living out an authentic and coherent experience, with autonomy and clear knowledge of what we're up to, but in fact (at least in part) we're inside a hall of mirrors and enforced system of ideas, that has a huge mechanism in place for keeping you thinking you know what you're doing, when you are playing a part written by others, keeping you from seeing the limitations and blinders.

Now that I think of it, this was also the theme of another recent read -- The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid. (Spoiler alert -- read no farther if you are going to read the book). I am sure I am far from the only reader who believed through much of the book that the title referred to Islamic fundamentalism and that the narrator -- telling his tale to a mysterious American in a Pakistani cafe -- was going to become a terrorist or the like. However, it actually refers to the narrator's realizations about his job as a management consultant in an elite New York valuation firm, which praised its ability to focus on the "fundamentals" in the businesses it examined (or helped destroy) for its clients. This book, too, talked about the blinders and self-enforced sense of privilege instilled by an elite education (in this case from Princeton, which is one of the colleges we just visited).

In The Good Son, a number of the characters, particularly an NSA language analyst, realize that their successes and ambitions were, similarly, self-reinforcing products of the system that they lived within without realizing (or, more accurately, questioning) it, which fall apart disastrously when push comes to shove.

We visited the University of Michigan, my alma mater, on this college trip. I found myself getting choked up during the information session, especially when they showed a (kind of corny) video, all on the theme of the wonderful and diverse opportunities available to the students. It occurred to me that this was because my years in Ann Arbor were all about becoming -- moving from the person I was before I got there to the (still limited, but far less so) person I was afterward.

Does/did the U of M foster the same kind of entitled blinderedness that the works above talk about? It's not a purely elite institution by any means, but some of that is undoubtedly there. I woke up (in some ways) while there, learned to see many things about our culture more clearly, but -- as with any education or acculturation -- I also have to wonder about what I'm not seeing.

An honest look at participatory design and user involvement

A refreshingly honest article about the realities of participatory design and involving users in systems design projects. It accords with my experiences as an IT/usability/PD practitioner for the last two decades.

"It is time to speak honestly about the gap between our intentions to build working systems and our ability to do so in practice. This gap is typically not caused by a lack of effort on behalf of developers or users, but rather is the result of misdirected efforts. The systems development and implementation process will continue to be overly challenging if we work against the tide by trying to make users fit our theories of how and when they should participate in development initiatives. Instead, we suggest catching waves with users at opportune moments, working to hear what they are saying, and then adjusting our, and their, expectations about when a system is completed." (p. 55)

As the authors say, it's not a matter of not including and involving users -- that has to be done. My own design practices revolve around it. What it's saying is that doing so is not a panacea and does not in and of itself guarantee you any special insight or improved chance at success. You still have to interpret, be flexible, do different things at different times, improvise and make sense of what you are hearing, how you are listening, what the users themselves can and do pay attention to, etc. Doing so is also an ethical stance for design practitioners -- no matter how good, they aren't going to know and perfectly understand in advance what user input means and what has to be done.

The article is Wagner, E. L. & Piccoli, G. (2007), 'Moving beyond user participation to achieve successful IS design', Communications of the ACM 50(12); pp.51-55.

Canny and uncanny people

Something quite compelling in this statement, when reflecting on the ups and downs of pursuing a large, lonely research project:

"Canny people tend to succeed in their own lifetimes; uncanny people tend to be recognized and appreciated only centuries later, because during their time their actions appeared to be either insane or pointless."

From "The new dynamics of strategy: Sense-making in a complex and complicated world" by C. F. Kurtz and D. J. Snowden, IBM Systems Journal, Vol 42, No 3, 2003

One can reassure oneself, during the downs -- the times when one indeed feels that one's efforts are both insane and pointless -- with the idea that one is, in fact, uncanny. Yeah, that's the ticket.

Human Technology journal article now live

In the Special Issue on Creativity and Rationale in Software Design
John M. Carroll, Guest Editor


Our article is: The Practice Level in Participatory Design Rationale: Studying Practitioner Moves and Choices

Albert M. Selvin, Simon J. Buckingham Shum and Mark Aakhus

Unity of purpose, communication, and representation

Further on the idea of integral representations and the role of practitioners in making representations matter...


As I was working through writing up the "how good/successful was the session" question, it struck me that one way to characterize this was by considering how closely three dimensions were unified in each session -- the purpose, or intended (as well as emergent) reasons or goals for each session; the communication, both verbal and non-verbal, the way the participants (as well as practitioners) interacted, and the representation, the visual artifact (Compendium maps in the cases I'm studying, but could be any kind of visual or written representation, or even just a verbal representation if there is some sense of a central focus for the session):



The best sessions see a fusion of the three dimensions. Purpose, communication, and representation become indistinguishable in practice; why we’re doing what we’re doing, how we interact with each other, and the visual artifact appear to be unified:



By contrast, in less optimal sessions, the dimensions are disconnected from each other. For example, people could be talking about something that is more or less removed from the ostensible purpose of the session, and the representation itself is ignored or irrelevant: