partum intelligendo

What's in 4,000 stories? What about 100?

Two contrasting weeks working on very different narrative projects - both fascinating in their own right. And both doing SenseMaker™ analysis under time pressure, but with datasets that couldn't have been more different.

1. At a conference with friends in the US, we gathered people's feedback on a particular organisational issue. Over two days, we collected just over 100 stories - about 8,000 words. Two of which were swearwords - I love it that people drop the pretence when they give feedback like this. Closing the survey at 8pm on the Thursday night, I had a few hours to analyse and feedback to the plenary session on the final day.
   
   The analysis itself was actually straightforward and fascinating - the difficult bit was deciding what had to be left out in the final version - I had only 20 minutes to present. And then generating the slides from the material. The results were well-received - and as always happens with narrative research, there were plenty of "oh! Really?" moments, as well as humorous ones
     
2. The second project has been a much larger affair. Over 4,000 stories collected over the past couple of months. Initial analysis of topline trends and outliers is easy - and equally fascinating. Again, it's possible to get headlines and interesting materials quickly from this much material but then you get into the nuances and hypotheses that arise from the first cut of results.
   A different difficulty arises here - there are so many interesting routes to take through the analysis:
3. 1. What happens as level of education goes up? Age?
   2. If I combine ideas about the future with ideas about poverty how do the results look? And then level of education? And age?
   3. How do all of the above change depending on a) time of day b) day of the week c) where we collected

The answer to both is, of course, to know what's interesting to the project owners and put degrees of focus in those areas after the initial top-level analysis. And to look for evidence around some of the key assumptions - are they right or misjudged? And to indulge in a small amount of exploration according to my own instincts - after all this time working in this field I've got a good (but not infallible) sense of spotting oddities and anomalies that need to be highlighted.

Egypt - social media was not a silver bullet

I've just seen another article about how social media caused change in Egypt. (I'm not going to link to it - or any of the others - as I don't want to encourage the causal thinking behind it.) The other element I've seen mentioned as important in the Egypt changes earlier this year is that "everyone stayed on message."

Now, the former element had a role to play - but it's too tempting to assign it too much importance in the piece. The second - staying on message - is just wishful thinking on the part of someone who wants to convince their salary-payer to stick to the script - which is a dangerous and seriously wrong interpretation that doesn't stand up to any scrutiny of the facts.

There are two important elements here that intertwine:

• Social media increased the level of interaction between people and groups - creating favourable conditions for conversations and information to flow quickly and to wider audiences than was previously the case. It created an echo chamber that would respond to whatever messages started to resonate with the people interacting in the networks. In that sense, it seems to be a preferable, but neither necessary nor sufficient condition for mass change.
  
  One of the products of a spread of mass social media in Egypt was creating an environment in which events that were small-scale could serve as catalysts to the change. There were probably many potential catalysts, but notice is usually only given to the ones that actually take hold and trigger events. Any full-scale analysis of the Egyptian situation would need to look at huge volumes of data, paying particular attention to the outliers - to events that were briefly talked about but petered out before taking hold on a large scale.
    
• Messages - in fast-changing, diverse situations like a fermenting country - are rarely designed, planned and executed. Or at least, they may be, but that's rarely a successful strategy. The second fallacy I mentioned above arises from looking at an end result (i.e. an apparent clear message*) and thinking "How was that successful?". That thought, for people who spend their lives planning communications, leads to the assumption that the communication was planned - and that everyone stuck to the message. (It's tempting, but roughly equates to assuming that life is the product of "Intelligent Design".)
  
  Instead, I offer this: in the vast, inter-connected echo chamber mentioned above, many and diverse messages appeared from thousands of different people. Some were picked up and re-transmitted, increasing the echo factor and making them louder. As this happened, weaker messages that did not have the same appeal diminished, making the dominant messages seem even louder - increasing the number of people hearing them. At some point, these messages reached critical mass, drowning out other messages (which would still have been being generated, but would have had a higher bar to reach in order to be heard) - and outsiders observing the system at that point would note that "everyone is on message."

While this doesn't apply everywhere - bounded applicability after all - I do think that if you're facing a dynamic, fast-moving complex environment, planning can only show you roughly what not to do and broadly what might be worth saying. More specific than that, I don't believe that analysis and planning can take you.

Instead, I think a better, faster and more effective route is to take an evolutionary approach - diverse (but coherent) vehicles and messages, fast feedback loops to show what effect is being had and then rapid adaptation. Not with the goal of finding a single message or a best practice, but to develop a constantly evolving, more resilient approach.

*Which I would disagree with at the most basic level - the appearance of a clear message is more down to misinterpretation from a non-Egyptian cultural perspective, missing nuances and differences in varying communications.

Giving voice to everyone - avoiding overload, cacophony

One of the great truisms in communications and development work (these days, I seem to be having conversations in both areas and am aware of their similarities) is that "we want to hear from everyone, give everyone a voice". The principled, idealistic side of us believes that, but the pragmatic side veers away from it - if everyone had a voice, the result would be nothing more than noise. Single voices would be drowned out, and all that anyone listening would hear would be the general hum of thousands of conversations - with the occasional howl of outrage emerging from the sonic ocean.

One of the benefits of using SenseMaker™ - as was shown last week in an interesting environment - is that it allows for lots of voices (over a hundred in this case, thousands in another current project) but allows for patterns of meaning to emerge, without getting trapped in the individual words.

While the voice that is collected is personal, contextual and authentic - allowing people to say what really matters and why - the next step is all-important. They then then put tell us what that story, that narrative, actually means - by simply putting it into a simple framework. Often, as last week, it's a simple mark on a triangle. And it's then the accretion of marks from hundreds or thousands of stories that produces the emergent patterns - the overall voice of the population.

(With some judicious demographics collection it's then possible to see how different groups' voices tell different stories too.)

And from the patterns, it's then easy to drill back down to the individual voices - meaning that everyone's voice is heard and recorded, that everyone's voice has equal weight in the emergent patterns, but we can hear the overall voice of the people rather than just a cacophony.

It's opening up some truly interesting projects - more on which in due course...

Feet on the ground once more

A nice feeling this morning - I realise that (for the moment at least), I've got two full weeks in the UK to work on projects - the first time I've had that long a chunk of time in one place since June/July. Hence the silence on the blog.

The upside of all the travel has been some great projects and sessions - most of them in North/South/Central America with the odd excursion to Europe - but I realise that when I'm doing substantial travelling and working, I'm not (yet) good at staying on top of email and other communications routes. I'm better than I was, but still - too big an inbox for my comfort, so one of the things to work on in the next fortnight (in addition to final reports and new projects) will be clearing out the emails. So, if you sent me something and haven't heard back, I'm not ignoring you - and there's a good chance you'll hear from me this week or next.

I'll also be back on the blog more - with opportunities for people who have schools nearby that might want to join in Children of the World. We're about to launch phase 2 of the project and would welcome anyone wants to get their local school involved...