partum intelligendo

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.

Moving from robustness to resilience – new Risk and Resilience video available from Cognitive Edge

Firstly - thank you to Harold and apologies to others: the link to the slides that I posted on Friday didn't work. It's fixed now, so they're accessible from Capturing an organisation's narrative.pdf (3573.9K).

There's an excellent new video up at Cognitive Edge's website and on their YouTube channel:

Today Cognitive Edge is happy to present a short video introducing the importance of organisations making strategic moves from systems built around principles of robustness, to systems that are built on the principle of resilience.

Traditional management has tended to focus on developing robust systems which try to prevent failure. However, in light of increasing interconnectedness of events and the complexity this introduces, the ability for systems to plan for the avoidance of all foreseeable incidents has become limited.

In this video from Cognitive Edge, called Risk and Resilience, Dave Snowden highlights the strategic importance for organisations to refocus on the creation of resilient systems. Whereas robust systems try to avoid failure, and become crippled in the event of it, resilient systems accept that failure is inevitable and move from focusing on prevention to focusing on early detection of events and fast recovery from them.

This video can be found in our Videos section. You may also follow this link to all the Cognitive Edge videos on YouTube, for our previously released videos on Introducing SenseMaker®, How to Organise a Children's Party, and the Cynefin Framework, amongst others.

Details of Dave's regular one-day seminars entitled "Leading Through Complexity" can be found here.

[From Moving from robustness to resilience – new Risk and Resilience video available from Cognitive Edge]

Resilience is a topic I've been thinking on recently - and there's a blogpost due on exactly that shortly. (But there are a couple of projects that need attention first...)

A new approach to corporate culture - scrap the values statements

This time last week I was in Brussels, talking about internal communications - and made the point I always do about the problem with corporate values. They don't work. There's no context, they're generally meaningless (who's ever going to argue with them) and they're too easy to twist around.

This week, Dave picks up on the topic coincidentally - and offers more structure to my comments last week. Stories - parables even - and archetypes is a better route. (It's a topic I'm picking up at the moment with some colleagues working on a global culture change project - instead of going for the standard approach of "The Future is Blue and Round, so let's give everyone paint brushes, pots of paint and sandpaper and measure their progress towards Blue and Round" they're going with "Let's look for where there are some brilliant success stories, share them and have people work out how to come up with ways to create stories like that where they are. Blue and Round is our general intention, but along the way we may find out that Indigo has more going for it and that Ovoid is more flexible.")

[That metaphor needs work. Lots of it.]

Pithy comments from Dave's post as he sowed, some fell by the wayside are here:

Aside from the fact that I have yet to see a set of organisational values that were not a set of well meaning platitudes, all you are really doing is teaching the politically manipulative the language of power.

...it doesn't follow that I don't think we shouldn't articulate values, but we need to do so in a way that carries with it necessary ambiguity so that the statements can adapt to context, and also so that their form allows for verification of actions, not just linguistic form.

The point here is that a story carries context with it, as well as the ability to create resonance. Critically it allows for ethical validation; saying that action X was consistent with a mission statement is easy, matching it against a story is far more difficult.

So what form could this take? Lets summarise a few:

• Parables are the basic method in the New Testament to convey complex ethical principles
• Fables are a long standing type of parable, but using animal proxies.
• Archetypal stories and characters represent complex learning and cultural statements in most societies. Anthropologies use the archetypes present in traditional stories to understand the culture of the society from which they have emerged; and they do emerge over time they are not created. One of the most used methods I ever created was archetype extraction, something we teach on the accreditation courses and which is more fully described here. The method also provides something more substantial than persona for software design by the way.

Stories on offer for artists - take these stories and make art from them

Read on - the offer in the title is real.

Just before Easter, I was in New York for an excellent project exploration meeting with Starlight Runner and others. (An opportunity to let out my inner sci-fi geek and talk all sorts of speculative fiction, from Jasper Fforde to Stephen Donaldson. And indulge a little comics talk too...)

One part of the discussion - making stories available for artists to use to produce new art - prompted me of two things.

When we were collecting stories in Pakistan as part of the pilot of Children of the World, the intention was that those same stories would become part of cross-cultural discussion - pupils and students engaged in international debating, but gathering source material from each others' narrative cultures. It's still in the plan for when we get the next tranche of Children of the World off the ground.

And, more recently, at Mat Locke's excellent The Story conference, (reviews here, here and here here here and check out Mary Hamilton's wonderful talk on Zombie gaming here) I talked briefly with Adam Curtis. His talk is neatly summed up here

Adam covered much ground in his talk, but among the elements that resonated with me were his comments about how we experience the world in fragments that only make narrative sense later, how the stories we hear daily are edited versions of the raw stories of people on the ground, how making those raw stories is better. I was keen to talk further, but timed it badly as Adam was headed off to meet someone.

Our brief interchange at the back of the hall, however, made me think. One of Adam's criticisms was that what we had done in various countries - gathering local people's stories, with their explicit meaning attached to each one - was "just information". He was more interested in what is done with those stories to create something new.

Which naturally, led me back to our intention from the Children of the World pilot.

So. As part of the Children of the World pilot, we collected some 1500 fragments of stories from people in Pakistan. These were collected Open Source, so are something I am willing to share - in order to create new art.

If you would like to get in touch to talk about using them, please do. Most are in English and are short snippets of experience in response to ambiguous pictures. They're available as a text file, but get in touch and there may be some interesting things to play with beyond the pure text.

Idiom a deus is dos

In the current climate, the title of this post seems to be increasingly appropriate.

Or it would, if it weren't utter nonsense. It's a fabulous example of people interpreting someone else's words and viewpoint. In this case, someone has entered into an online database the lyrics to a song - in this case, by the Cocteau Twins, a UK band in the 80s and 90s. While some of their material had lyrics, much of it didn't - Liz Fraser used her fabulous voice as an instrument. So sometimes she's just making sounds, not singing intelligible words. That didn't stop someone, however:

Ik does a dashik dozen
Ik does alone cheyenne
Mad at them who tease him scrawling

And I knew deeper darlin
Idiom a deus is dos
Indeared look he loves it
Your elan new sub dearie

The difficulty sets in when we use experts to tell us what was meant by what someone said, or symbols they use, or stories they tell. Sometimes they get it right, but sometimes they're so busy trying to make sense of it, they miss that there was no sense in the first place, just a general feeling. And of course, they can only ever get it to make sense in their frame of reference, their worldview. If it comes from a culture radically different, they will have to either ignore it or distort it to make it fit their culture.

Actually, maybe the idea of reading meaning where there is none is pretty appropriate in the current climate after all...

False images of the world

Great conversations at a two-day meeting in Miami. On the flight on the way over, I finally got around to starting Joshua Cooper Ramo's The Age of the Unthinkable (subtitled "Why the New World Disorder constantly surprises us and What we can do about it"). It looks to be an interesting reflection on diplomacy and international relations from a complexity perspective. I suspect it's broader than that, and I'm always slightly wary of books that claim to cover complexity and then turn out to be systems and solutions. This one starts well though: "The goal of this book is not to give stylized, simple answers - what honest thinker would hope to answer questions that are still being created and that exist outside our current language?"

A few quotes have struck me early on:

Our image of the world now, constructed by people we once thought we could rely upon for such work, is false, actually and philosophically false. It's time to replace it with an image that actually works. What we need is a framework for the sort of change that fits our world - and lays a foundation for the widespread personal involvement of millions of people that will make such change useful, durable and sustainable.

A dynamic and accurate view of power now can offer a way to engage our world that is not only more reliable but also - and this is crucial - more decent.

The temptation to read "reliable" as "predictable" is strong - and wrong. I can see where he's aiming but wonder whether "resilient" might have been better. But that's my trying to understand what he was aiming at, which I can't do.

I'd also add one further piece to that last sentence in the quote. From my experience, the ways to engage our world can often be more straightforward - and more social, making them easier and more personal than most people assume.

Complexity

Hearing voices again

The standard response of many people is that they know what others need/want. It's an easy trap to fall into - it requires less effort on our part to go and find out (which can seem expensive and time-consuming), it allows us to continue in thinking that we know them well (possibly even better than they know themselves) and it means we can give them what we've already got/know we can provide.

The problem is, we're often wrong.

"All my life, all I've ever really wanted was to help people. But you can't help anyone unless you understand what they want, what they need, how they feel. Otherwise you'll never do the right thing. It's like-"

"Like when you bought me those shoes last Christmas in a color I'll never, ever wear."

The couple in question here are Clark Kent and Lois Lane from a recent issue of Superman, but let's face it they could have been any one of us.

The other thing, of course, is that we often assume that's what is needed is something bigger and more complex than people on the receiving end really want. We saw that in some recent work with a client salesforce - it wasn't about more detailed product information or better sales training or any of the other things that our colleagues had in mind. Instead it was a chance to sit and talk with peers, to share horror stories and success stories.

The best example I've seen recently was the work by Irene Guijt, Rockefeller Foundation and GlobalGiving using SenseMaker™. Irene is caught on video here, talking about her experience. The work had been done in Kenya to understand the impact and effects of community projects. Citizens across Kenya shared over 3000 stories, some about funded community projects, some about "grassroots" community efforts, and some about life in general. The results - what people on the ground wanted - was very different from what aid experts (and funders) had expected (and been geared up to provide).

Full details - including project files and the final report - are available at Cognitive Edge's website here.

An unexpected trip to the Memory Library

  A slightly frustrating day yesterday turned out to have its upside.

Having journeyed to meet with clients, it turns out their PA hadn't put the appointment in their diaries. So one person was in Denmark, the other in France while I stood at the front gate, resigned to spending two hours travelling back the way I'd just come.

A quick check with the taxi driver back to the station, however, revealed that Sutton - my teenage stomping ground - was nearer than I'd thought, so I decided to pop back there to revisit old haunts. I wasn't optimistic about how it had changed ("Oh, we call it Slutton these days..." from the driver) but decided to go all the same.

Walking down the High Street, there were some expected changes: my first bank, the NatWest by the station was of course now a pub called The Old Bank. (I could have done without the adjective.) Safeways, of course, is Morrisons. And there are more gaming/gambling venues than there were.

Sometime in the 90s, Allders of Sutton had left its two buildings and moved into the new St Nicholas Centre further on down. The main building (shown here) had been a confusion of levels and staircases.

My first paid job had been as a lift attendant here on Saturdays back in the 80s. The lift had been small and automatic, but someone still thought it worth having a young man stand and press buttons for people. It didn't last long and I was soon transferred to the Radio and TV department on the top floor where I spent every Saturday for a few years happily carrying TVs, hifis and the new-fangled video recorders (Betamax, VHS and Philips' V2000 formats) down to people's cars, tuning televisions before delivery so that customers could just turn it on and magic! all three channels were there. (The increase to 4 made little difference.)

And I was the first port of call for repairs - I'd brought my screwdrivers and soldering iron in and demonstrated a degree of proficiency with electrical equipment which meant that before sending anything back to the workshop, I'd take the back off, check for loose wires and obvious problems. (Made much easier by the fact that many suppliers included circuit diagrams in the product manuals.)

Radio and TV was on the top floor on the corner of the building shown here. Directly below us on the ground were the Perfumes department - war paint and hairsprayed glamour girls waging their own chemical warfare on unsuspecting pedestrians. Saturday staff - particularly male ones - were beneath their notice, for which, in retrospect, I'm very grateful. They were well-coiffed sharks patrolling the spaces between their glaring white sales stalls.

Waterstones is a much better alternative.

There were inevitabilities further down the High Street - the arcade with the brilliant record shop that would decamp to the actual High Street every Christmas for the sale has long been demolished, along with the extensive market stalls that did everything from cheap German pressings of current albums to leather flying jackets. My black double-breasted shirt and grey fake suede winklepickers came from there. (This was the early Eighties - colour was anathema to most teenagers, but we learnt to see the world in shades of grey.)

Times Square, the shopping precinct built in the early 80s before being relaunched as Times 2, is back to being Times Square again. It doesn't feel like it's taken off yet - and has given up trying. At this point, I didn't feel much like feeding my pessimism any further and headed back up the High Street.

Before heading back to the station, however, I decided to stop off at the Central Library. In the 80s, it was the biggest public library in Europe (or so the rumour went). Finding the stairs from the underpass bricked off and unable to see how to get in at first lowered my spirits somewhat.

Once in, however, I was relieved to discover that it still sprawled across five levels (between Allders and the library, Sutton seems to have an aversion to numbering floors, but an attraction for mezzanine levels). The ground floor had a corner of chess tables laid out for casual players to stop by, complete with chess clocks. Two older gentlemen were engrossed and it's been too long since I played with any degree of seriousness so I decided not to offer any challenge.

At the top of the building, the study cubicles were fully occupied - as they were when my father matched my Allders wages to ensure I spent Saturdays studying for my A-levels. The collection is substantially smaller than it was - in the mid-Eighties it was good enough that I was the only person on my degree course to have the out-of-print textbook by one of our lecturers on electrical networks. The solid islands of non-fiction that made up the central space below the cubicles are now sparser and mostly fiction, but it's encouraging that the essence of a great learning space is still there.

I've never come across a better local government-funded library than Sutton. While the collection and content were important, the real benefit was always in the physical space - somewhere to sit and study in quiet, out of the home and out of school. As the focus on libraries returns at the moment, it's worth bearing in mind that content without the learning environment is available via the Internet in bedrooms - it's the space that makes all the difference.

Rules should define the space, not fill it

John Kay's column in the Financial Times today chimes with a quote that struck me recently:

"Rules are good. They define the edges of things"

It made me think, specifically, about how rules are used in different domains of Dave Snowden's Cynefin framework. In the Simple (Known) domain, rules dominate - things are completely predictable, as long as the environment doesn't change. In the Complicated (Knowable) domain, order still predominates - and the temptation of experts and managers will always be to build edifices of rules.

In the Complex domain, however, things should be different. I've tended to say that rules are not applicable here, but on reflection, that's in part a reflection on my own tendency to push back against them. What the quote above illuminated for me is that there is a place for them - in setting boundaries. Rules have a positive role to define the space in which actions can take place - making some things out of bounds.

The problem is that in an attempt to control what goes on in a complex space, the temptation - particularly for those with a background in a Complicated discipline - is to fill the space with rules. Which doesn't work - as John Kay points out in his article, using the faintly ridiculous (but uncomfortably familiar) example of office dress codes.

People will always stretch the limits of whatever specific rules are implied, and in doing so violate the spirit of the regulation as they adhere to its letter

We had a similar problem at IBM Greenock in the 1990s - dress-down Fridays were becoming the rage in many other parts of the technology industry. But we were manufacturing and engineering - dyed-in-the-wool old school management. Too difficult and contentious a decision to take from the Site Director's office, a survey went out (to managers only) asking about whether we should have dress-down days. In the comms team, we were gearing up to announce the results (a resounding no) when Lou Gerstner - IBM Chairman and CEO - appears in a Wall Street Journal front page article "IBM's not a strict dress code place anymore - we're more relaxed". Cue much gnashing of teeth in Greenock.

When we finally announced that dress-down was now an option, the tone of the communication was distinctly "...if you feel you must." And was accompanied by a clear set of guidelines to go with it. This was the start of my waistcoat phase - in part because nowhere was it directly proscribed.

As Kay goes on:

In the regulation of business affairs, from dress codes to rules on takeovers, it is always tempting to try to translate general principles – do not expose major financial institutions to excessive risks, treat customers fairly, refrain from anti-competitive behaviour, set reasonable prices – into specific rules. But the world is rarely sufficiently clear and certain for this to be possible, and if it seems so today it will have ceased to be so tomorrow. There will be many people who will stretch the limits of whatever specific rules are implied, and in doing so violate the spirit of the regulation as they adhere to its letter.

Rules, despite my resistance, have their place. Replacing common sense with rules, however, implies a lack of trust and a desire to control in areas where trust is essential and influence the better tool.

Complexity

SenseMaker™ nominated for award

Congratulations to Jochum and Masja for the success of their big Philips project. Gathering material around gardens - all to inform lighting decisions. A great example of the need to research around an issue, not directly at the question!

SenseMaker® project by Ferro Explore! nominated for Prosper Riley-Smith (PRS) Effectiveness Award 2010, issued by the Association for Qualitative Research

Ferro Explore! is nominated for the PRS Effectiveness Award 2010, a prestigious award issued by the Association for Qualitative Research (AQR) once a year. From more than 25 entries, three finalists are selected by a professional jury. A tough job as, according to the jury, “The calibre has been very high”. Ferro Explore! earns the nomination for the research case ‘Connected Insights Philips Lighting’.

The narrative research method was key in this research project, of which the target was to gain strong consumer insights in order to develop new concepts for garden lighting. Jochum Stienstra and Masja Notenboom conducted the research in collaboration with an interdisciplinary team of Philips Lighting, of which all members were closely involved during all phases of the research process and concept development. This innovative method led to highly valuable results, underlining the strength of this innovative research approach.

The winner of the PRS award will be announced at this year's MRS / Research Awards Dinner in London on the 13th of December.

[From Cognitive Edge - News]

SenseMaker

Ferro Explore! is nominated for the PRS Effectiveness Award 2010, a prestigious award issued by the Association for Qualitative Research (AQR) once a year. From more than 25 entries, three finalists are selected by a professional jury. A tough job as, according to the jury, “The calibre has been very high”. Ferro Explore! earns the nomination for the research case ‘Connected Insights Philips Lighting’.

The narrative research method was key in this research project, of which the target was to gain strong consumer insights in order to develop new concepts for garden lighting. Jochum Stienstra and Masja Notenboom conducted the research in collaboration with an interdisciplinary team of Philips Lighting, of which all members were closely involved during all phases of the research process and concept development. This innovative method led to highly valuable results, underlining the strength of this innovative research approach.

Ferro Explore! is nominated for the PRS Effectiveness Award 2010, a prestigious award issued by the Association for Qualitative Research (AQR) once a year. From more than 25 entries, three finalists are selected by a professional jury. A tough job as, according to the jury, “The calibre has been very high”. Ferro Explore! earns the nomination for the research case ‘Connected Insights Philips Lighting’.

The narrative research method was key in this research project, of which the target was to gain strong consumer insights in order to develop new concepts for garden lighting. Jochum Stienstra and Masja Notenboom conducted the research in collaboration with an interdisciplinary team of Philips Lighting, of which all members were closely involved during all phases of the research process and concept development. This innovative method led to highly valuable results, underlining the strength of this innovative research approach.

It's not the Bad Apple, it's the Rotten Barrel

The University of Prius offered up another gem as I was driving to work this week - this time from ABC's great All in the Mind podcast. For copyright reasons, the 3rd July 2010 episode was a re-run of a 2007 piece with Philip Zimbardo, titled When Good People Turn Bad. Zimbardo was the Psychology Professor at Stanford University for the infamous Stanford Experiment - where students played the roles of guards and prisoners for a few days with controversial and disturbing results for all concerned. The podcast is good - his reflection on the flaws - and his flaws - in the experiment makes for interesting listening.

Philip Zimbardo: Yes, it's a very common phenomenon that's been widely studied by psychologists, I know, in Australia as well as in the United States. You know, when your behaviour does not mesh with your values and attitudes, typically what happens is your attitudes and values change to fit the behaviour rather than the other way around. Talmudic scholars would say get people to pray before you try to get them to believe, once they start praying they'll come to believe what they are doing. So a lot of evil done by good people is really more from the evil of inaction

Some of his conclusions are, to put it mildly, disputed - not least by a more rigorous, but televised version run in 2002: The Experiment.

But what did strike me was the degree that people do adapt to fit the community they're working in. It's something I've seen in organisations that I've worked in - my own values being subsumed in favour of other behaviours. Not necessarily because those people around me believe in the behaviours, but rather that they became accustomed to those - and are now passing on those behaviours. And the rituals we follow will shape the principles we hold - not necessarily the other way around.

(I'm not for a second invoking the insidious "following orders" argument - this is rather a recognition that values and behaviours can be subtly influenced and change over time, contrary to an individual's expressed values.)

Where this has particular resonance is when a department or organisation is malfunctioning. We assume that negative actions are deliberate, that individuals are at fault and that the overall organisation will spot these problems and resolve them. And the truth is that none of these necessarily hold true.

When it's an individual, it's easier to see - through surveys and other means - when there's someone that's out of sync. But seeing a group of people on a slow shift towards negative behaviours is far more difficult from without. It's hard to anticipate, hard to detect.

It's often not as a result of conscious decisions, but instead a steady, slow oneupmanship that started heading in the wrong direction and the competition dynamic took too far and too fast. So hunting for the person that made the decision is a poor approach - instead it results in scapegoating.

And often it arises from the environment - the cultural, the economic, the political and the organisational. Processes and targets too play a part - if it's easier to meet a target and fulfil a process than to do the right thing, there are few people who'll do the right thing. And the unintended consequences of targets and processes are regularly the things that trip us up.

The approach that we've been looking at comes back to narrative - what situations are "allowable" and which tip over into "inappropriate". It ties in with David Maister's idea that culture is set as much by what we tolerate as what we aspire to. It's entirely possible to gather stories from people about what's happening, but more useful to present them with examples of behaviour and ask them where those examples sit.

An "ethical audit" this way needs to be done with care - no clear answers from the stories (i.e. it's not obvious what the answer is - "should you lie to a customer to win a contract" is a bit too blunt!). But it allows for department-wide or even organisation-wide assessment of where people are, how ethical they are in their dealings and therefore what might be done.

Complexity, SenseMaker, SenseMaker

DIY Disaster Relief - local level can be faster, cheaper, more effective

One of the things that struck me from the work we did the other year in Pakistan was that current aid and disaster relief often works top-down, with governments and NGOs putting in large programmes and amounts of funding at the national or, at best, regional level. Where control (or the illusion of it) is needed, it is the approach usually taken - predict the needs, assume local responses and plan accordingly.

I can see how that arose - and how tempting that is to run as a model. But I wonder whether there are better ways of providing aid - ones that rely on local, low-level networks, self-organising, specific needs and small-scale funding. The management of these becomes a whole different matter (and the suspicion must be understood that small-scale funds are more susceptible to corruption and disappearing into the ether).

And then today, comes a great article from Fast Company:

Twitter Enables DIY Disaster Relief in Indonesia | Fast Company

A group near the erupting Mount Merapi volcano has been particularly effective at using Twitter for relief. Not long ago, someone sent out a tweet announcing that there were packages of food a neighboring town. Within 10 minutes, over a dozen cars were ready to deliver it. "It was so fast I almost didn't believe it," Akhmad Nasir told Reuters. On another occasion, the group announced a need to prepare meals for 30,000 people; within four hours, it was done.

I particularly like the fact that, through local networks that have organised themselves through early-alert, fast-response communications (in this case through Twitter), aid is faster and more effective - and more efficient. (It's this latter that seems to surprise those of the planning persuasion - letting go of control seems to fly in the face of efficiency...)

Yet, by adopting techniques for managing in a complex rather than complicated space, it's not unusual to see this sort of result - instead of demanding a difficult, costly, system-wide approach, effective results can be achieved by small-scale interventions tailored to the specific circumstances.

It does, however, take a willingness to live with initial uncertainty while you wait to see what is needed. And that, in turn, takes trust and ability to cope with risk.

Complexity, Complexity

Practicalities and applications - SenseMaker in application

Two great sessions last week at the QEII Conference Centre with Dave Snowden of Cognitive Edge. The shift from theory to practical application of new management techniques based on principles of complexity, cognitive neuroscience, anthropology and others has been remarkably swift in recent years - and even for those who've heard Dave in the past few years, there was noted surprise at how far things have come and the scope of the projects where these tools are being applied.

Any 3-hour seminar will be difficult to summarise in a single blog post - and this one even more so than usual. Of necessity, therefore, this will be a skim over the highlights that I picked up - feel free to add your additional thoughts and observations in the comments. Ron's already started over at The Ecology of Knowledge. (Ron mentions the video - we (he) did record the entire session, but it'll be a while before we even sit down to look at the 5 hours of video we've got, let alone think about what we do with it. Ideally, we'll just make it available, but we need to check first. Bear with us...)

The audience was highly diverse - researchers, psychologists, communications experts, innovators, CT specialists, social media analysts and more - but that reflects the diversity of issues that the tools and techniques - in particular SenseMaker™ - is being used to address.

The session started with a short jaunt around the Cynefin framework, in particular covering the difference between Complex and Complicated domains (a detailed partum intelligendo blog on the Cynefin framework is in the works). And then we were off.

Interestingly - and in many cases challengingly - the projects each meet the needs of multiple, diverse groups. Ideal in a world of better for less, but sometimes tricky to navigate the organisational waters.

Key elements from the sessions:

• A crisis is a wonderful thing - it means that we've reached the limits of our current thinking and something new will (has to) emerge. Cognitive, complex approaches look to be the main contender this time around.
• Ongoing, continuous capture of micro-narratives as things happen opens up vast new possibilities for communications, impact measurement, knowledge sharing and giving greater voice and self-determination to groups.
  • It also has implications for those looking for a handful of significant outcomes, but having to deal with vast amounts of data leading to those outcomes (e.g. IED detection in the field, pharma research teams in the laboratory)
• The new techniques allow for abductive research techniques, that reduce expert or interpreter bias
• Early discovery, fast recovery - problems spotted early are quickly (and more cheaply) resolved
• The spread of pervasive computing opens up radically new possibilities
• Narrative research combines qualitative information in quantitative volumes - combining the best of both sorts of research
  • Projects should, however, be run in parallel - each approach has its positives
  • Traditional qualitative techniques are highly biased - focus groups only manage at most 15 minutes before being swayed by facilitator feedback, however well-intentioned
• Pre-hoc, post-hoc approaches are a new approach to increase anticipatory awareness.
  • Collect lots of signified material from a human sensor network in their day-to-day activities
  • When a significant event has taken place, go back and re-signify from an expert perspective
  • That pattern of signification can then be applied to incoming data and used to ask people to linger in the same spot/watch for anomalies
    • It's crucial to understand that this is not prediction or even anticipation (in a complex space, both are unfeasible), but about increasing anticipatory awareness
  • Where there is large volume of data coming in and only a few significant outcomes to worry about, statistical or process approaches will fail, but SenseMaker offers an effective alternative approach

• Obliquity is important in complex environments - addressing the problem directly will not work, but addressing other elements will resolve the problem indirectly

 

Projects that were mentioned included:

GlobalGiving

A project run in a slum area of Kenya, local narratives were collected and signified. (The case study and materials on this fascinating project are at the Cognitive Edge website.) One of the interesting results from it was that, when stories were signified by development experts "as you would think a Kenyan native would signify it", there huge gaps between what locals wanted from development and what the western perspective believed. Locals wanted better social networks and relationships, Western experts believed they wanted better sanitation and clean water. (Locals believed that they would follow from a better social community.)

It's not an unusual element for this form of research to produce results that highlight the differences between expert views and those of the audiences we want to understand.

International social research

An approaching project is expected to collect day-to-day experiences from children in their communities - giving far greater insight into beliefs, mindsets and cultures than traditional research techniques. The original plan had been a small-scale pilot on a subset of European countries, but using SenseMaker the costs to cover all 27 members of the European Union were the same - so a full-scale project is planned. Schools in each country will be the conduit to collect the stories to look at gender issues - and participating schools will also have access to the material for their own use.

Employee engagement/communications research

Collecting fragmented narratives, signified by the teller, applies in all sorts of spaces. We've run projects, there was talk of more - linked to knowledge management and customer insight. An example of field engineers equipped with bluetooth pens and notebooks. Notes and stories - both from engineer and customer - made on the left-hand page, while the right-hand page holds a handful of triads and/or polarities. The stories captured are then good for customer  feedback, engineer training and induction, technical support, product design and - with the addition of a single triad specifically about how the engineer is feeling - employee engagement. All with built-in context, meaning and analysable data.

Suggestion schemes and innovation

A pause to cover innovation - and its non-link with creativity - and the pre-requisites for innovation being:

• Need
• Scarcity of resources
• Change in perspectives

Innovative people are sometimes creative, but creative people are not always innovative. One of the problems relates to mistaking causation and correlation - a frequent mistake by management writers who work from data and produce conclusions along the lines of: "Successful companies exhibit behaviour A. Therefore exhibiting behaviour A will lead to success." In inimitable style, Dave gave a specific example of Chief Executives and bowel movements. The details are unimportant...

For innovation, of course, suggestion schemes are often used - but one of the difficulties that has led to their disappearance has been the need to attend to each suggestion individually. Coupled with that, of course, is that each suggestion is (mis)interpreted by whoever is tasked with going through them. An alternative in play now is to use SenseMaker to signify individual suggestions as they come in, building up patterns of where innovation is suggested/needed over time.

Military knowledge capture and sharing - blogs vs doctrine

Experience from the US Army has shown that, while doctrine continues to be produced, the most effective way to share battlefield knowledge was blogging by Platoon Commanders. In essence, lots of fragmentary data from in situ is easier to use for decision-making than doctrine produced back at base and disseminated outwards.

One of the next steps forward is a project involving SenseMaker to collect and signify material from the field in the field and allow for real-time access to situations and reports.

As an aside, there is also a group working on metaphor-based communications - it is easier and quicker to communicate using shared metaphors and examples. Military history is ideal for the use, building with nuances of territory, geography, tactics, etc. Another example of metaphor-based communication came in the Star Trek Next Generation episode "Darmok". With metaphor-based communication, it's possible to boil down complex situations and tactics to a few words.

 

Two of the most interesting examples were the use of human sensor networks that have people inputing and signifying material around anomalies or anything else they think is significant. Different groups of people with different backgrounds can contribute and the patterns that emerge from the signifying data become extremely valuable. Both work not prediction of events (impossible in complex environments and spaces) but on identifying patterns and then prompting anticipatory awareness - or "keep 'em peeled" as Shaw Taylor used to say.

Child protection in Northern Ireland

Social workers and policemen and others focused on child protection are able to collect fragments and signify them as they're working using handheld devices. The combination of lots of data from different perspectives and a pre-hoc, post-hoc approach make it possible to have a confidential alert come up for visitors to at-risk houses to encourage them to stay another 30 minutes and ask some more questions as overall patterns correlate with previous experiences. It is all about anticipatory awareness again.

Security guards, IED detection

Saving one of the most interesting for last...

SenseMaker technology is currently being integrated into specific handheld devices to allow for anomaly-tagging in particular environments.

For example, airport security personnel see and tag quickly any event or situation they think important. (In previous systems, this would be discouraged - any situation you reported would require investigation, paperwork, interviews, etc) Much of the material tagged is small-scale and results in nothing significant, but the personnel become used to lots of quick and easy tagging of events. The pre-hoc, post-hoc approach means that after an incident actually happens, it's possible to build patterns of prior tagging that can lead to events.

Subsequently, similar patterns of tagging can generate real-time alerts to the hand-held devices triggering higher levels of observation, but without generating self-fulfilling states of unease.

The approach is being looked at around IEDs in Afghanistan and security guards in London.

One application suggested was also to spot bottle-necks of visitors and other hiccups around the 2012 Olympics - volunteers working around the village and events halls could use these to report all sorts of infrastructure elements that would allow for fast (and often cheap and easy) resolutions.

There was naturally far more than this, but this post should give you a sense. If you were at one of the sessions and spotted other elements, please add your comments, as I'm sure I missed much...

And I'd like to say a personal thank you to the Narrate family there - including Ron, engagement facilitator (including employees, pupils and cross-cultural programmes); Jim, communications supremo (including UN agencies, local and central government); Meg, all-round facilitator and speaking coach. The organisation of the whole piece was run, as always, with charm and efficiency (a rare combination) by Anne.

Doing more with less: detecting shifts, spotting weak signals - SenseMaker I

I promised a series of posts talking about using SenseMaker. They'll be interspersed over the coming weeks with others - I don't particularly want to be singing a one-note song and sending you all away in search of diversity...

I railed against targets last week, thinking specifically about the aid and development world. Targets, of course, are not restricted to that sector - recent discussions have been in healthcare and education, community cohesion and volunteering, citizen engagement and security. These are all worlds where proxy targets have been set to measure an impact or outcome - usually one that was seen as difficult to measure directly.

So, in schools, we look at records to see that records are filled in on children, that lesson planning is done. In hospitals we measure time to be treated in A&E, etc, etc. And these miss the point - we want children to be taught well and, where possible, inspired. We want people to be treated for injuries properly.

But the targets have produced something else - teachers who can fill in plans, but can't ignite a pupil's mind; ambulances that sit with patients outside the A&E department so that the clock doesn't start ticking yet.

The narrative (and hence SenseMaker) approach is radically different. Instead of measuring how many times a particular behaviour is met, we collect stories in response to our prompting questions. Usually from the person most effected - the patient or the pupil. And we have them signify their stories, which is both quicker and easier than your average survey form once you've done it a couple of times. And we ask for positive and negative stories.

In the past, colleagues have given iPods to patients and visitors as they arrive, asking them to record a note of anything they think important. And we've had children doing it with audio recorders or, for those old enough to type, entering them directly on a website. And from the signifiers we get great indications of where people are - a good baseline measure.

The great thing is that, once we've done that and the system is in place, we get continuous collection of more data - so we can start to see shifts easily. And that means we can test new approaches, get very quick feedback on what effect it's having and then, if necessary, read the narratives that explain why it's having that effect. Making it surprisingly easy to decide what to do next.

More with less

One approach we've been discussing recently is around finding new ways of supporting local policing arrangements. By gathering stories into SenseMaker around fear of crime and other community issues, we can tell what is giving a particular local community greatest concern. And, in these days of having to do more with less, we can start some simple experiments to see what effect we can have. If burglaries are perceived as an issue, then changing the times of uniformed officers walking in the area might have an effect.

Outliers and weak signals

We can also see where there are narratives and events that sit outside the most common events - stories that show up as being more extreme/negative/positive/inspirational. And by seeing these, we can get insight into what we might encourage or discourage. In schools, these could be indicators of intolerance to sexuality or racial differences; in hospitals, these could be examples of patients feeling more cared-for through small actions.

Impact measurement

Given that these patterns can be seen in SenseMaker, it then becomes possible to use them as impact measures - not targets - that give us indication of what is improving, what is deteriorating. The stories that sit beneath the patterns then have two-fold benefits - firstly, they illuminate what is going on (and frequently why) and secondly, they give us content that allows us to illustrate the desired impacts.

One system, impact measurement, situation explanation and content for simpler interventions. It just requires a leap to understand that mass collection and analysis of narrative is now practical.

Attribution is complicated, targets are unable to see contribution

I'm spending time this afternoon at the launch of the UK office of the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie). While it's a subject I'm keenly interested in, it's not one in which I've got depth of understanding. I struggle sometimes to understand some of the conversations, but many of the issues around things like monitoring and evaluation have distinct similarities with other sectors - like organisational culture, education policy, community coherence/cohesion - that I do understand and work in.

A couple of weeks ago, I was down at the University of Sussex at the Institute of Development Studies for an excellent event called The Big Push Back. The issue at hand was around the need and drive for targets/measures/evaluation of projects - and yet those same targets tend to be over-simplistic.

How many children innoculated, how many wells dug, etc - metrics that are simple for donors and administrators/managers to understand. It's either a) bigger, b) smaller or c) stayed the same.

The consensus the other week - and to some degree today - is that these targets may satisfy donors, but don't meet the agencies' own needs:

• What they want to measure is the impact of programmes, but this has been too problematic - the targets were often introduced as "something we can measure".
• Targets often drive behaviours that distract (or at worst contradict) the real impact that is desired. (If you've got a target of, for instance, children to be inoculated, the encouraged behaviour is to keep inoculating, regardless of need or appropriateness.) Building a well is a measurable piece of a programme, but may disrupt the village economy - there may have been a slightly distant water source with villagers earning small amounts by delivering the water to houses. Result: one well built. Not necessarily used (some villagers will stick with their "local suppliers") and potentially damaging to the fabric of the village.
• The targets carry no context with them - potentially leading to techniques perceived as successful in one area being used to design processes for universal use. But the success may have been due to a specific factor in the first programme. An increase in school attendance may be assumed to be a consequence of a new UN education programme, but may coincide with a poor crop that did not require children for harvest.
• Targets - and donors - want to determine attribution: "Point to the bit you did". But the truth is that these are complex situations - many things make a contribution, but rarely can a single intervention, factor or programme be attributed with making the difference.

[While these descriptions are all of the development world, exactly the same applies in any organisation applying targets to complex situations.]

Targets are often singled out as the problem. Yet that's not really true. There are places where targets may be useful and appropriate. The real problem is that they''ve been applied beyond the limits of where they work. And the application of targets is a symptom of complicated thinking, rather than complex thinking.

At these events, there is an increasing ground-swell driving and exploring new ways of evaluating programmes that works better for all parties. One of the clear applications that we're working with SenseMaker on is a new impact measurement system that collects - quickly and easily - large volumes of narrative and fragementary qualitative data from all participants in a programme - from the recipients to the field workers, the country office, international agency and, ultimately, the donor.

The indications are that it offers significantly better results:

• Gives voice to the recipients, without allowing "experts" to re-interpret their meaning
• Allows measurement of soft impact measures - without resorting to false-reporting direct questionnaires
• Carries context throughout the process - interesting results are underpinned by stories that explain what happened. Making it easier to decide why a programme succeeded or failed - and reducing the risk of making a poor assumption
• Demonstrates the different perspectives of different levels of people.

There are other approaches also being trialled at teh moment - and one of the exciting thing about all of this is the opportunity to see and participate in the evolution of the next generation of M&E tools.

Broken boxes, by initials - MBTI, WTFP

I'm amazed to still see how many people still put any faith into the Myers-Briggs personality tests in business. I remember doing it in 1994, not as part of my work thankfully - IBM weren't that daft, but as a seminar I'd gone along to. Even then I'd struggled with it. I hate being put in boxes - because the boxes don't recognise that my behaviour is different in different situations.

For instance, that first dimension - Intravert/Extravert. Well now. I find lots of social environments tiring, do my best thinking in peace and quiet and find it difficult to concentrate when surrounded by people. Intravert then? Only... I get thoroughly energised on a stage. It used to be on the radio roadshow stage without a script in front of a few thousand people for a couple of hours. Nowadays it can be on a conference platform or at the front of a workshop - and I enjoy it thoroughly. Extravert then? Under stress? Intravert again.

But there's no room for that in the test - pick your box and sit neatly in it.

There's a neat - and short - piece on the mental_floss blog today on it. I particularly liked the comment that it's only "a step or two above astrology" because, after all, the descriptions are usually done in perfect Forer effect fashion.

Part of what’s made the test so popular with the general public is that it’s impossible to fail. While other psychological tests were designed to diagnose mental illness (or at least screen for it), the Myers-Briggs Test assumes that all 16 types represent shades of normal. Everyone who takes the test will classify as one of the types, and all of the types have a place in society.

Of course, this aspect of the test is also one of the reasons why many experts question its usefulness, placing it only a step or two above astrology. They argue that the results aren’t falsifiable, meaning that any of the 16 types could fit any person, given the right interpretational spin. As psychologist David J. Pittenger wrote in 1993, “The descriptions of each type are generally flattering and sufficiently vague so that most people will accept the statements as true of themselves.”

[From mental_floss Blog » Myers, Briggs, and the World’s Most Popular Personality Test]

Frankly, the sooner we despatch this tool to the same box as Phrenology the better.

Oh, and INFP, in case you were wondering...

Who do you believe - the people or the experts?

One of the areas where narrative research can make a real difference is the development world. Recent conversations with colleagues at the World Health Organisation and UNICEF have revolved around how to address complex environments and issues - and the central role that narrative must play in that, given the need to include context and attitude in evaluation and monitoring programmes.

As we've also seen, however, it can meet resistance from field experts. Results taken from the recipients of aid can show radical differences from the opinions of people who have a strong degree of professional status in their knowledge and analysis. And it takes a strong individual to be willing to take on new information that contradicts a long-held position.

Dennis Whittle of GlobalGiving recently ran a project with some Cognitive Edge network colleagues looking at development issues in Kenya. He sums up some of it in the Huffington Post: Dennis Whittle: If You Can Flip a Coin, Can You Be an Expert?. Having compared experts' predictions with emergent issues from the local recipients, he comments on what may lie in store with approaches like narrative research:

It will create an ongoing, iterative conversation between beneficiaries and experts about what is needed, what works and what doesn't, and what that implies about priorities and initiatives in subsequent rounds.

My instincts, from experiences last year, are that we need to find better ways of bringing the experts with us (while maintaining their independent viewpoints, the value of their expertise and - where appropriate - their challenge to ensure our approaches are rigorous and clean). If we can do that, the result will be better ways of working in developing areas, monitoring impact at the most appropriate level (not just the higher level that's easier to reach) and ways of building greater expertise and better judgment at every level - from the field up.

Let's hope.

Being smart doesn't mean you're willing to be wrong - even when you are

A great little story and point from Lorimer Moseley's Body in Mind blog: Does vertebroplasty for osteoporosis-related fractures work

In short:

Clear scientific trials (rigorously done with sham interventions mimicking all but the one crucial element of a real intervention) has shown that a particular treatment was no better than a pretend treatment. The results were presented back to a highly-intelligent audience, who then interrogated the results and the method. And some began to search for the reasons why the research was flawed and why their preconceptions still held.

My favourite phrase from Lorimer is:

Some of the room were observing it all and with open minds voiced that even here, amongst the keener, more learned, more expert clinicians in the country, showing that it doesn’t work, doesn’t work;

There's a part of me that wants to know, in that case, what does work - but the truth of course is that what works in one place won't in another.

But it makes me reflect on much of the work we've done in the past couple of years using SenseMaker and other research methods - sometimes the results come back and tell clients that long-held beliefs are wrong. And it's easy for the results (and the project and our credibility) to be thrown out at that point - it happened on some of the early projects. Increasingly, therefore, the project needs more touchpoints and communication with clients, so that they undertake the journey of exploration with us - meaning that there are moments early on when entrenched beliefs are lightly questioned, when the possibility of alternative options is raised, when those options start to gain ground, etc. A single final presentation (with all the tempting showmanship of "Ta-Daa!" as you throw open the curtains to display your fabulous results) is a sure way to get the results dismissed - and you with them.

The ideal, of course, would be that clients use SenseMaker themselves to explore the results and reach their own conclusions, but that's still a step further than we've managed so far. The talk is always there, but the reality is another matter...

Where do you allow dissent?

I've recently been in a number of environments where everybody has been so keen to encourage positive discussions that I've ended up coming away with a flat, slightly unreal feeling - interesting conversations that never really reached any depth.  It's reminded me of the big "hoorah" sessions that organisations regularly run for people around any one of a hundred different initiatives.  Organisers are (like recent conferences) so focussed on getting everyone excited, they don't allow for some fairly basic human issues.

Like dissent.

In my days as a PR consultant or a communicator, the idea of dissent started off as being a threat to be smothered or diverted as early as possible.  The possibility of someone disagreeing with the corporate line generated a degree of fear and prompted distinctly managerial responses.  After a while,as I became increasingly uncomfortable with the approach this required, I became a (sometimes lone) voice for open discussion of both positive and negative aspects of an issue.

Far better, surely, for people to have a wider reflection of a situation and hence make an intelligent, informed choice about their response than to have some glowing, unrealistic ideal picture that can only generate disillusionment or outright hostility when it, inevitably, turns out to be false.

I find it disturbing still when, as happened on the CommsNetwork recently, people start sharing best practice on how to suppress negative news and opinions in an organisation.

Let's not pretend that that's even possible.  Eliminating dissent in public fora and public communications, in addition to highlighting a dishonest, untrusting approach, merely drives it into informal areas where debate and discussion of alternative perspectives is limited and where the dissenting view will be magnified and spread.

Far better, as part of any comms programme or internal strategy, to build in situations and places for dissent to arise, be debated and dealt with openly.

I wish I could say that the real issue here is where that dissent can best take place (and I would love suggestions and thoughts on that topic) but if I'm honest I don't think we're there yet.  First we need a greater acceptance of the value and need for dissent.

I guess I'm dissenting from the common view of dissent.

Boxing up complex concepts

Tomorrow should see the publication of Melcrum's Practitioner's Guide to Employee Engagement - in which I've contributed the chapter on using stories and narrative.  It's been an interesting experience - having abandoned the attempt to fit a gallon into a pintpot early on, I aimed instead to convey the complexity (sic) and excitement of the issue and some hints of different approaches - only the readers can judge my success.

I also wanted to avoid too strong a focus on "storytelling" - as I say in the introduction to the chapter

Storytelling is a misnomer. It conjures up the image of a passive audience sitting listening to someone with the charismatic, persuasive power to entrance them. It revolves around a carefully-constructed story designed to carry you out of the day-to-day to somewhere else and change your thinking while you’re there.

What is on offer here is more powerful and more positive than that simplistic view. And while it involves storytelling throughout, some of the greatest opportunities for employee engagement lie in listening to stories, not telling.

The real power and opportunity for using stories in organisations is in listening to stories, helping others to create their own authentic stories and making sense of the stories told.

Even that, however, proved problematic.  One of the points that I focus on early in any change workshop or project is that employee engagement and culture change do not fit straightforward, 12-step projects.  And "best practice" varies - what works in one organisation will not produce the same (or, on occasion, even similar) results in another.

The editors - generous in their comments and advice - wanted something simple that anyone could pick up and put into practice.  For me, it felt like the Mullah Nasruddin story that Dave Snowden references here (about 2/3rds of the way down the post).  I've always liked it, but now see exactly how a propos it is.

In the field of communications, I've often felt we do ourselves disservices by dumbing down.  Sometimes we need to stretch to reach that bit further.  Stretch our minds in particular...

 

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