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:

Integral representations

As I've been working through writing up the comparative analyses, one thing that's struck me is that a key differentiator of practice styles and expertise is how much (and in what ways) practitioners make the representations themselves matter to the participants and to the proceedings, as opposed to being (in varying ways) a sideshow, background, or decoration.

For example, one of the Shaping aspects in Category B (practitioner interaction with participants) is the "degree of intervention to get participants to look at the representation". It occurred to me that, while all of the studied practitioners used various physical and verbal means to do this, the style, purpose, and strength with which they did this varied greatly. Both of the 'expert' sessions (Hab Crew and Remote Science Team) did this frequently and in depth throughout the session, but also did it with a degree of naturalness. They did not have to use much special force or emphasis because, due in large part to their expertise, the representation was integral to the proceesings, embedded in how and why the group was working.

This isn't something that comes for free and takes a lot of factors to achieve, but the phrase integral representations (seemingly widely used in mathematics) seems to me to sum up a lot of what this research is aiming toward: how to make such representations integral to their participants and audience, how to make them matter, and in what ways.

And the final 'raw' cross-session analysis artifacts

Cross-session Shaping comparisons (table version) (Compendium version)

Cross-session Framing comparisons (table version) (Compendium version)

CEU comparisons

Some 'raw' comparisons of the "CEU" (Coherence, Engagement, and Usefulness) analyses across sessions are here.

Next and final step for the comparative analysis -- create a summary of the cross-session Framing analysis.

Comparative framing analysis

Compendium version here.

One more piece of cross-session analysis to go -- CEU comparisons. I hope to finish those tomorrow, then it's on to start writing up the first draft of the analysis chapter.