partum intelligendo

The content/meaning distortion

Posting from the lounge in Cologne/Bonn airport after a meeting with a potential client around supporting a leadership/collaboration approach addressing and using some key issues around nationality and function. (At some point it will no doubt be worth a separate blog. But now's not that point.) I don't recall ever having been to Bonn before, but it's a city that feels like it's lost much of its identity since Berlin reclaimed the role of Germany's capital.

One of the key elements to the approach that Narrate uses when collecting stories is the "signification framework". Essentially we ask people to give us an experience or example and then place that example/story/experience into a framework. It allows them to attach meaning to the qualitative material they give us - in ways that allow others to understand their meaning without interpreting the material itself. It's a human process - "tell me how you see your story" - that prevents them being mis- or re-interpreted by supposed experts.

The problem is that most people assume that the meaning of a story is in the content - that the words that people use are enough to understand. From my experience, it's not true - and huge amounts of meaning can be read into tiny details that are superfluous, while big themes are missed because of a cultural mis-match.

Let me give you three examples (there are others) where the content does not match the meaning:

Metaphor, irony/sarcasm and in-group evolution of language

Have you seen Star Trek? In particular, do you remember the original William Shatner/Leonard Nimoy version? If so, you'll recognise the sort of situation they find themselves in here:

A quick glance at the picture makes one individual apparent - the guy at the back in the red shirt. As any regular Star Trek watcher will tell you, wearing a red shirt is not a good idea if you're beaming down the planet - he won't be beaming back up... In this instance, "red shirt" is less a fashion observation as a statement about life expectancy. And metaphors are one thing that can't be picked up accurately by experts, far less some of the automated content analysis systems - there's just no way to parse the various meanings.

 

 

The second example comes from the very first Children of the World pilot in Pakistan and UK back in 2009. In response to this picture,
a young man wrote:

the way these children are play with one another the same way the pakistani goverment is playing with the pushtuns of NWFP talib is only a name and its a game of the goverment .civilians are dying who are neither on the side of the taliban or of the goverment . if you want opnion then Islamic laws should be implimented in pakistan as soon as possible to run the systam of the goverment efficiently and al the terrorism and corruption would end in a very short time

(A tip for anyone collecting these narratives - if it hasn't got typos or grammatical errors or spelling mistakes, then it's not authentic. If it's neatly written, someone's been tidying up things that you want left messy.)

Now, at first glance, this is a worrying response to the picture to anyone here in the West. This looks like a young man who is being attracted to a radicalised viewpoint. But - knowing that the meaning is not in the content - I looked instead at the meta-data, the signification framework to understand what he was saying.

First off, the title he gave this story was "Joke". Still ambiguous - is it that his government is a joke? Or that this story is a joke?

Looking deeper - one of the questions we regularly ask is "Who should hear this story?" Options usually range from "The whole world/My leaders/My community/My friends/No one in particular". Another is "How does this story make you feel?"

Now, if this was a heartfelt plea for more Islamic law, I would expect that "The Whole World" or at least "My leaders" should hear it. And that it would prompt some fairly strong emotions.

In this case, however, "My friends" should hear this - and he felt "Meh" about it - not bothered. It's still not 100% certainty, but it looks far more as if this piece is A joke - sarcasm and irony are things that get missed by experts and textual analysis that presume that every word is meant exactly as it appears.

 

The final issue in interpreting content is the most crucial - the evolution of language, particularly within groups. It happens very quickly and can carry lots of layers of meaning. Let me give you an example from my family.

There's a simple four-word phrase that means very different things to different generations of my family. The phrase is, on the face of it, pretty unambiguous:

"Dad's mowing the lawn"

To standard approaches, that would imply an interest in gardening, along with a decision to keep said garden in good condition. However...

When I was growing up, coming downstairs to be told by a sibling "Dad's mowing the lawn" was code for "he's got a major problem from work that he's thinking about." One of the ways he dealt with these was walking up and down the lawn in rigid straight lines, almost meditatively. (If he started to do side-to-side mowing as well, you knew the problem must be a real hum-dinger.)

To my kids, however, if one comes downstairs to be told "Dad's mowing the lawn" that's code for "Give it twenty minutes, make a cup of tea and take it out to him. But be prepared to duck." I have a garden at a 45 degree angle - personally I think it works really well as a meadow, but occasionally I get "encouraged" to go out and cut it. It's not a pleasant experience for anyone (although I have in the past year managed to get elder daughter enthused about how grown-up it is to be allowed to cut the lawn...)

So - three examples where standard approaches would be misinterpreting the content of narratives. Metaphor, irony and sarcasm and family use/adaptation of language.

It's why, when we collect, we have to collect the meaning in a neat envelope that wraps around the story. Of which more in due course.

SenseMaker

Understanding narratives - the reality of counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency

Yesterday, the House of Commons saw some to-and-fro rhetoric between the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition around counter-terrorism in the wake of the Algerian attack and its aftermath. It's important to recognise within the wide context of the news stories and the political analysis that at the personal level there are families across the globe now who have been robbed of sons/brothers/fathers/husbands - and they need support in what comes next for them in their lives.

In the Commons yesterday, there was an expected increase in rhetoric about the need to fight terrorism. The Prime Minister, towards the end of his initial comments, said:

"In sum, we must frustrate the terrorists with our security, we must beat them militarily, we must address the poisonous narrative they feed on, we must close down the ungoverned space in which they thrive, and we must deal with the grievances that they use to garner support. This is the work that our generation faces, and we must demonstrate the same resolve and sense of purpose as previous generations did with the challenges that they faced in this House and in this country."

In response, the Leader of the Opposition:

"In particular, the task is to understand the nature of the new threat, which is more decentralised and fragmented and takes advantage of the ungoverned spaces and security vacuum in parts of north Africa. At the same time, in its response the international community needs to apply the lessons of the past about the combination of diplomacy, politics and security required to help to bring about stability in the region."

"More broadly across the region, countering the emerging threat of terrorism begins with understanding it and talking about it in the right way. The work to deal with that threat will be painstaking: diplomatic and political as much as military; and collaborative and multilateral, not unilateral. Does the Prime Minister agree that we are talking about a number of distinct regional organisations, some using the banner of al-Qaeda and others not, rather than a single, centrally co-ordinated or controlled group? Each of these threats needs to be monitored and countered appropriately."

Taking the two areas of that on which I feel qualified to speak - the understanding element and the poisonous narrative. I believe one is essential and the other is a deeply misleading concept that blinds us to opportunities and threats.

Understanding the region, the people and groups within it, is crucial to undermining support. Having done some work with narrative research in Egypt the year before the Arab Spring, I can say with some confidence that underlying dispositions arise from small grievances and historical events - usually things that sit well below the radar of analysts sitting far away. It's the coalescence of common grievances and perspectives that tends to drive social movements, and these are only visible at the personal, the local level. It's why we gather experiences and narratives about day-to-day life, not grand events (although those can crop up in the material we collect).

For monitoring, it's more useful to watch for emergent clusters of narrative around common themes - letting the people on the ground tell you what is bothering them. Pre-defined categories and questions can be too directive - gaining us at best answers that fit within our previous suspicions, at worst allowing the people we're hearing the opportunity to give us the stories they think we want to hear. (cf The Hoaxing of Margaret Mead)

The poisonous narrative is a tempting but dangerous notion. It's also a simplistic one that is easier to fit into newspapers and popular discussion than a more difficult, more nuanced one. The truth - as I pointed out some time ago at a conference - is that there is no single terrorist narrative. There are many narratives - each one different in its inception - that, as people become part of the movement, is co-opted and shaped to fit a bigger motivation. It's an end-result after radicalisation, to my mind, less of an instigating motivation. In essence, one person's dissatisfaction with their life warps over time to become "the West is keeping me down".

To mistake the end-point as the motivation is deeply misleading.

There are other problems with this approach too. If we as observers approach the subject with the concept of a single narrative, we emphasis and activate our own cognitive biases - we go into the problem counting basketballs and risk not seeing guerillas. If we're looking for the early signals of rising dissatisfaction and potential radicalisation, a single narrative will blind us. We will miss the early warnings - but more crucially we may miss early opportunities, moments when small incidents addressed quickly will dampen down ill-feeling and dispositions towards violence.

If we see a single poisonous narrative, the temptation is to find a cure or a counter-narrative. And as Dave and I have both commented on in the past, this is a Bad Idea. There won't be a counter-narrative - but there may be multiple local narratives and thousands of micro-narratives. Countering and curing are both approaches that define something as negative and look for that which will eradicate it. Instead, by looking at all those different narratives, the better approach is to amplify some - through action, through diplomacy, through aid and, yes, through military options where necessary - and dampen others.

The approach instead is an ecological one - how do you encourage the plants you want in your garden, weeding out those you don't want early and while they are small. Wait until they've coalesced into something large and its roots are too deep to remove easily.

[At some point, I need to write that article on Gardening and Narratives - I've only been contemplating it for 20 months now. Elephants have shorter gestation periods...]

The motion of Heavenly Bodies

Busy writing proposals today - a series of workshops on leadership, collaboration and culture; an exploration of national attitudes in Africa; and a debate on the role of narrative in defence and military operations. Nothing if not diverse, but not much room to write a proper blogpost.

In the research this morning, however, I came across this Isaac Newton. A perfect piece for distinguishing between the Complicated world, where prediction and analysis apply, and the Complex world, which relies instead on understanding where the emergent patterns of a system might lead next. (And not just relying on a society being the summation of individuals...)

"I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people"

Isaac Newton

Begin where you can...

Helping with homework last night, I was confronted by a trigonometry question a little like this one:

Now, I used to enjoy these things in my youth, but faced with a segment of a hexagon around a pentagon with angles marked up last night, I blanched. I could see where I (we - it wasn't my homework, after all) had to get to, but working out the route there was tricky.

Until I sat back and recalled a little of how I used to attack the problem: start with what I could do and see where that led. On reflection, I often used to just work out all the bits that were do-able and then see what that allowed me to do next. And quite quickly, I'd then find a path through to the answer I was looking for. (I was sufficiently geeky that I would often go back, if time allowed, and fill in other elements to the problem just because I could not because they were in any way relevant to the problem.)

To my mind, this approach tallies closely with the approach required in complex situations - we talk about "the evolutionary potential of the present" rather than constructing an idealised future state and reverse-engineering a path to it. It contrasts with much managerial practice, to my mind. There are undoubtedly places where planning and engineering are applicable, preferable, even essential. But there are other areas where they are not - indeed they can be deeply misleading and more costly.

For a complex result, better to know where there is the opportunity to make progress today and take that opportunity. It will, in turn, lead to others that can be chosen with the overall direction/end in mind - it crosses over with my earlier post on strategic narratives here.

• For employee engagement (how I hate that phrase), don't get bogged down with defining a mission statement, but start with the realities of people's experience that you can affect.
• To support local change, don't start with a grand plan for the next five years, but with a map of the current niggles.

It opens up new possibilities as small steps lead to new - and often quicker and cheaper - possibilities that would have been missed if a grand plan were being followed. It also offers a new approach to strategy-making - set direction, but then look for the small, granular ideas and problems as the starting point.

Strategy as the emergent direction of many projects and programmes undertaken within constraints - an idea that we'll be pursuing this year with colleagues and partners, so expect to hear more...

All assistance short of actual help

... or "Monitoring and watching without action is an intrusive waste of resource"

Over Christmas, I heard a story via a convoluted but accurate route about an individual who had something of a "family situation" take place - one that involved the police and a frustrating visit to a hospital to deal with a family member's mental health issues. The outcome was highly unsatisfactory - largely due to ineffective handovers between shifts, large amounts of admininstrative detail and over-attachment to hospital process without consideration of the prospective patient and their family. There is, no doubt, a story to be told there - but it's one that we are all familiar with. (And I'm aware too that there are also many alternative experiences that people have had - the context/location/workload/timing matter greatly in these events.)

What surprised - and disturbed me - was what happened next.

On returning home, the phone started to ring. One agency after another - ChildLine and others - rang to express concern about the home environment and in particular the potential effect on younger members of the family. So far, so good - an efficient system had picked up that there were young children in the house and that there were problems in the household that presumably matched their category system that said "potential threat".

The first call was taken with good grace, until it reached the all-important question

"Thank you for your concern, I share it, what can you do to help?"

The answer was "Well, nothing, really."

The conversation continued slightly disbelievingly, "Well, what do you suggest then?"

"Have you talked to your GP?"

"Yes - that's already been done."

"OK then."

And the call stuttered to a halt. "Talk to your GP" in this case is the equivalent of "Take two paracetamol" - it's a non-advice piece of advice.

Then the second call came in. And followed the same pattern - express concern to an already-concerned parent, present no alternatives, offer no solutions and when challenged what the call was supposed to achieve, offer no real answer.

The third call got rather shorter shrift. And understandably ires were now raised among family members who had no mental health issues...

I understand the need for monitoring, as well as the need for alert systems here. I even appreciate the need for redundancy in response - hence the need for multiple agencies to get the alert and act independently. (Although I think some coordination might be helpful in reducing the load of an already-stressed family.)

The thing that truly worries me is the lack of anything constructive offered. No systems, no people, no advice - just a phone call saying "we're worried." At that point, a stressful situation is only exacerbated because there are now lots of people watching and taking an interest in what happens. But none have any "skin in the game" or are prepared to take action. They're just watching for the disaster we all hope is not coming down the track, but doing nothing to prevent it.

The investment went on systems to monitor, but there was none for human beings to actually intervene and support. And that reliance on systems without human support is extremely dangerous.

I'm conscious that there's a potential accusation that I'm throwing stones from within my own little glasshouse. Much of the work we've been doing recently is around detecting early warning of shifts in attitudes and the like - but as some frustrated individuals can attest, we steadfastly refuse to rely entirely on analysis and results. At the end of a project, there's a hefty human-focussed period of any project, largely based around "What do we do now?" Without that, systems are merely well-funded voyeurs.

The weight of cattle - an extruded parable...

Whenever I'm lucky enough to teach (DC next week for anyone who's interested and Amsterdam in early February), one of the key points we cover on the Cognitive Edge Practitioner Foundations at the moment derives from James Suriowecki's "The Wisdom of Crowds". It's how when using large groups of experts the average answer is better than any single answer, iff: a) every respondent is knowledgeable about the subject; and b) answers are given independently, without seeing others' answers. The example is that of the "Guess the weight of the cow" at country/county fairs.

The essence is this - farmers pass the stall, assess the weight of the cow standing there, write their answer on a piece of paper, fold it up and put it in the box. At the end of the day, the mean of all the weight estimates is usually better than any individual guess.

It's one of the basic principles we use when running projects - getting lots of independent stories/feedback examples gives us a better picture than restricting ourselves to a small group. (Case in point is the current Bangladesh project, where we're gathering hundreds of stories from rural locations about sanitation.)

This week, however, saw the weight-of-the-cow story extended by the author of one of the books I recommend and then that extension broadcast on the podcast of another of my recommended authors.

The extension was by FT columnist John Kay, author of Obliquity, an approach I've mentioned before. The podcast was the BBC's excellent More or Less - hosted by Tim Harford (also an FT columnist and author of Adapt). The episode is entitled "The Parable of the Ox" and it's a must-listen, along with the conversation that follows.

The story continues - market opportunities are seen in guessing the cow(ox)'s weight. Then things start to spiral onwards - into profits and away from the ox itself:

A new problem emerged, however. Once weight-guessing competitions became the rage, some participants tried to cheat. They even sought privileged information from the farmer who had bred the ox ... Strict regulatory rules were introduced. The farmer was asked to prepare three monthly bulletins on the development of his ox ... Professional analysts scrutinised the contents of these regulatory announcements and advised their clients on their implications.

And onwards. And downwards.

The point is well-made and well-presented - in part because it deals with the real problem itself obliquely by using a parable rather than explicit messages/values/rules. A point that I will return to in due course.

For now, listen to the podcast. (And while you're at it, I'd recommend subscribing - the program is excellent at debunking statistics as used in the media and by politicians. A rational, scientific approach in a tabloid, headline-driven world...)