Behaviour and Bodies, Systems and Design
Posted: February 20, 2011 Filed under: art & design, behaviour change, complexity, design thinking, health promotion, Systems science, systems thinking | Tags: biological systems, bodies, design, Fascial Stretch Therapy, health, health care, organizational design, systems thinking, yoga Leave a comment »
A book of life and interconnections
Drawing connections between our bodies and our behaviour reveals systems thinking in new ways that can lend themselves to contemplating greater ways to consider the relationship between design and its consequences on human health.
One of the reasons cited for not exercising is pain and discomfort, particularly if you are not regularly active. Yesterday I had the chance to confront this head-on as I lay on the table getting Fascial Stretch Therapy at my gym. I exercise regularly and do my best to stretch, but nowhere near enough as my therapist (painfully) pointed out to me. FST is a technique that involves controlled manipulation of your body to stretch your muscles in ways that go beyond what one might do with regular stretches on their own or through yoga.
FST and yoga are attractive not only to my body — which really needs the stretching! — but also my mind, and not just for the mental relaxation and body awareness that they encourage, but also because they inspire both systems thinking and design thinking. In doing so, it reveals to me how these two concepts so often need to be linked to fully appreciate how systems function and how design can contribute to solutions or problems within such systems.
A technique like FST or practice like yoga are systems-oriented in that they fundamentally recognize the interconnections between groups of muscles, biological subsystems, and the environment in which these intersect. Thus, while there may be discomfort in your back, the cause may be located in the hips or legs or feet — or all three — and that only by addressing these other areas can one reasonably hope to address the problem in a satisfactory manner. This is systems thinking about a biological problem.
The reason these problems persist is a matter of design. I am seeking help stretching my muscles because I work in an environment that has me sitting most of the day in meetings, facing a computer screen typing madly, or leaning up against a wall in the hallway. I do keep active by walking to work and taking the stairs and running back and forth between my research group‘s area and my office, but that only does so much. The design of my space, my job, and the social conditions that frame how both of those interact with my body has real implications for my health and wellbeing. The conditions in which my biological system is changed is a matter of design.
This is a system with a design problem and therefore requires systems thinking and design as the solution.
Speaking with my FST therapist, the distinctions between a systems approach to care and the more traditional models became more obvious than ever. I couldn’t think of an area of medicine that would deal with the systems problem I was seeking treatment for. And while there are many who deal with issues of ergonomics, workplace stress, and the architecture of buildings, I can’t think of any person or group that would deal with the design of my work in a manner that would improve my health at a systems level. Instead, there are many who would deal with a component of the problem, reducing the whole into parts, and treat them independently. In doing so, the amount of effort required to get things addressed increases, costs go up, and the effectiveness goes down. This is our modern health care system.
While FST works for muscles and biology, we need something similar for our social and organizational systems.
What would happen if we took a systems and design oriented approach to these problems, looking at our social systems like my therapist looks at my body as a biological system? What can we learn from more holistic approaches to treatment that can be applied to social systems and prevention? And how can design help us bring those together in a cohesive manner?
Until we ask these questions and vigorously pursue the answers to them, tight, inflexible and uncomfortable may be terms used for more than just our muscles.
** Photo (Untitled) by history-art-photos, used under a Creative Commons License from Flickr.
A Complex View of New Year’s Resolutions
Posted: December 28, 2010 Filed under: behaviour change, complexity, design thinking, health promotion, psychology, social systems, systems thinking | Tags: behaviour change, complex adaptive systems, complexity, design, design thinking, health, new year's resolutions, simplicity, systems thinking 5 Comments »
A Happy, Simple New Year (CC- WilliamCho)
The end of the year is coming and, despite good advice and the warning about how they don’t work, you’re still determined to come up with a really good New Year’s Resolution and this year, dammit, you’re going to stick with it.
It’s simple, right? Make a commitment, come up with a plan to stick to it, and you’re ready to go.
Firstly, change in human systems is rarely a matter of simplicity, which is why New Year’s resolutions tend to benefit the diet industry and fitness clubs, but few others.
Another reason lays in the meaning of the term simple. Simplicity implies that there are relatively straightforward mechanisms that underlie a cause and consequence, that these can be predicted with reasonable certainty and consistency, and that we can derive “best practices” from such events given their reliability and efficiency. When we see something as simple, we usually have a high level of control.
Yet, it is the very nature of human systems that makes control such an elusive concept when wish to change something. Complexity science provides us with a different way to handle these problems. It provides a means of understanding complex situations — those where there are multiple causes and consequences that interact and change dynamically — that represent the lives of human beings. Rather than predict what is going to happen based on flawed assumptions of control, complexity science helps anticipate change and prepares people to adapt to these changes wisely.
Diet and exercise tend to be near the top of New Year’s Resolutions. Typically, people will make a resolution to start an exercise plan and reform their diet all in one swoop. The thinking is akin to “go hard or go home”. The problem with this is that what we eat, how we eat, and the activities that we do on any given day are part of a complex weave of activities that shape our lives. Few of us have jobs or lifestyles where everything is the same day to day. If you have children, you’ll know firsthand that even with the most regimented schedule for them and you, every day brings new surprises. But for the most part, these are little surprises that happen consistently and, consistent with a complex system, you adapt.
If your diet consists of a lot of take-out food, pre-prepared foods like frozen dinners or canned goods, the idea that you will suddenly start cooking at home, eating healthy meals and changing the portion sizes right away is setting yourself up for failure. This change alone requires shifts in your time (now you need to shop, cook, clean, and plan in advance), which suddenly changes how you use the rest of your time as it might impact upon work, play, social activities and so on. This isn’t to suggest that such investments in this new lifestyle are not worth it, but that simple shift will drastically change not just your diet, but your lifestyle as a whole all at the same time. That’s a lot of stress to put on the system that is your life.
An alternative is to make small shifts, ones that don’t upset things too much like perhaps making one meal on the weekends. Once that is in place, perhaps change the meal to allow for leftovers so that one day or two you pack a lunch instead of eating out. Maybe then shift towards changing the lunch options you choose when you do eat out one or two days per week. The key is to take one thing, do it and do it well and then build upon it by introducing another thing. Over time, your schedule will adapt and you’ll find the ways to make the changes without them feeling so big.
Exercise is the same way. Rather than sign up for a year’s membership at the gym and workout 2 hours a day for the first week only to find yourself so sore and tired that you can’t imagine going back, try upping the activity level you engage in with different strategies. If you don’t go to the gym at all, starting there might not be the best option. Try walking a little more around your neighbourhood or take the stairs when there is an escalator. Maybe get off the bus one or two stops early and walk the rest of the way home. Once you start doing that, try a day pass a gym and do some very light weights or some simple cardio workouts like walking on a treadmill. As you build up over time, you will find what works and doesn’t work in terms of your likes and dislikes and what seems to be effective. This is called feedback, another critical component of complex systems.
By paying attention — being mindful — of what you’re doing and how it is working, you can start to build a longer-term strategy or pattern of activity that moves you along to where you want to go. It also prevents you from the let down at having not achieved your goals, but setting yourself up for success rather than failure. In doing so, you work with the complexity of human systems and our daily lives rather than against them.
Change as a Social Movement: Lessons for Mental Health?
Posted: August 1, 2010 Filed under: behaviour change, complexity, emergence, public health, social systems, Systems science, systems thinking | Tags: complex adaptive system, complexity science, health, health equity, health promotion, HIV/AIDS, mental health, public health, social movement, systems thinking 1 Comment »
My colleague Laura O’Grady recently blogged about her reflections on the HIV / AIDS movements and how far its come in 25 years and how much further it has to go. With the 2010 world AIDS conference having recently wrapped up in Vienna, it is worth considering how something that was virtually unknown 30 years ago (AIDS) has become arguably the most high profile health issue on the global stage.
One of the touchstones of progress has been the way that HIV-related stigma has eroded over time. It still has a ways to go as the picture above illustrates*, but focusing on the positive aspects, its easy to see that change has come through the HIV / AIDS movement:
One of the most important shifts in the AIDS movement was the legitimacy and status of those infected. How many remember the Four H club: homosexual, hemophiliac, Haitian and heroin user? The shift away from this stigmatizing labeling was a slow process. A handful of people publicly disclosing their status, many (e.g. Ryan White, Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Glaser) because they were forced to so. No doubt this helped bring a face to the disease. But there was still much stigma, especially centred around transmission. Camps between those who “got it the right way” (e.g. by transfusion) separated themselves from others who engaged in behaviour considered deserving of certain death. It was a great time for the “holier than thou” crowd.
Dr. O’Grady makes the distinction between getting HIV “the right way” and those that might have “deserved” it because of their choices. I couldn’t help but read this post and consider the parallels to mental health and the role that stigma plays in governing our interactions with the various conditions and people who wrestle with such conditions. Although much has been written about how to change behaviour related to HIV risk (here, here, here and here for examples), the focus of change is too often directed at individuals. Individual change is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for population health improvement and one of the more weaker forms of intervention. Studies looking at individual-level change rarely account for even half of the variance in change explained using traditional models. Systems change is where it is at for true impact and HIV / AIDS shows this more than anything. A movement is needed and even then, it is slow going.
Mental health is a puzzle. On one hand, the absence of any clear ‘mode of transmission’ has always made mental health a more insidious and mysterious problem to wrestle with. Historically-rooted myths have abounded about ‘catching’ mental diseases, but that largely subsided in the 20th century and was replaced with a true individual-focused model. This new approach put blame on the individual, or the family, as the root cause of mental illness. This new vision for mental health stopped short of placing those individuals in a context and thus, ignored the role that factors such as work demands (or under-employment or unemployment), poverty, racism, social support, gender inequity, access to services and other social determinants play in contributing to mental wellbeing.
What we are now learning is that the brain and society are both complex adaptive systems, suggesting that the moods and thoughts emerging from such systems might best be understood from the lens of complexity science and systems thinking. If this is the case, then the entire issue of mental health needs re-thinking in how we address the problem. Taking a systems approach leads to very different strategies and questions about where mental health problems emerge from and how they are best addressed. It also means that we’re all responsible, whether we like it or not.
HIV/ AIDS, even though the disease mechanisms are now well known and indicative of a complicated process, the social context in which AIDS exists is truly complex. There are the myriad overlapping issues of fear of the others, gender inequality, homophobia, racism, poverty, geo-political discrimination, the community vs. clinic debate among many others that make tackling HIV a challenge because the context is so varied and global.
Like HIV / AIDS, we need a movement in mental health because of the same issues. The challenges of understanding mental health in a globalised and multiculutural climate were eloquently discussed on TVO’s The Agenda with guest Kwame McKenzie from the Centre for Addiction of Mental Health in Toronto. He pointed to the research that shows how conditions that are more commonplace in North America such as depression have no parallel in some cultures. Just like HIV, the way in which depression is understood and treated is vastly different from place to place, even within Western countries that are often thought to be similar.
Movements occur when diverse actors come together under a common (but not always unified) banner to advance issues of shared importance. Like HIV/AIDS, there are great divisions within the mental health community about certain definitions and approaches to addressing the problem, but there is also widespread areas of agreement and a shared desire for a plan. Is now the time? It might be worth considering what HIV / AIDS community did to serve as lessons for those of us striving to advance mental health promotion.
* The photo above is from Reuters using the PicApp service under license and is captioned as: a man living with HIV covers his face to avoid being identified due to fear of discrimination at a Saudi Charity Association for AIDS Patients in Jeddah July 19, 2010.
Knowledge Translation or Just Better Marketing?
Posted: March 27, 2010 Filed under: Education & Learning, research, Social media, social systems, systems thinking | Tags: communication, health, health communication, information, information overload, innovation, knowledge translation, marketing, research, Seth Godin, social marketing, systems thinking, tobacco industry 1 Comment »
How Much Marketing Can We Take?
This week at the CoNEKTR Lunch and Learn at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, the focus of discussion was on knowledge translation and the theme I discussed in a previous post. It was a lively discussion and one that emphasized the limits that one hour and many great minds presents for exploring a big topic like KT.
The discussion around the room focused on the challenges of taking what it is we know and transforming it into practice, policy and research innovations that work in the everyday. While the subtext of the presentation was initially focused on systems issues, building on Russell Ackoff‘s phrase about “doing the wrong things righter”, the bulk of the conversation was on whether or not we are dealing with issues that have to do with marketing and simply being better at it.
That is, if health sciences just got better at packaging the materials they produce, delivering them more effectively (or more often) and doing so by understanding the user better, things would get done. One could view this argument as proof positive that as a field, we are so wedded to the idea of shoveling content that we no longer see that this is just doing different versions of the same thing over again. But a closer look suggests that social marketing might provide us with a middle ground between the largely content-driven approach that dominates the literature (which suggests that if we just package the best content better, people will listen to what we say because it is, after all, the best content) and a systems change approach that looks at redesigning the way we interact with knowledge and produce it in the first place.
A finer look at marketing suggests that there is something different from the traditional view. A marketing perspective is less concerned with the quality of the product (i.e., content) and more about process of how to get this content to people and get them to use it. The crassest example of this can be seen in episodes of Mad Men and how they brazenly craft messages around toxic substances like cigarettes to seduce people, fictional representations of the very real world work of the tobacco industry does to reach youth , racial minorities and women alike. But unlike the callous marketers who don’t care about their audience’s health, health professionals very much do. And so do some marketers.
By focusing on the process of getting information to the intended audience, a marketing perspective gets closer to the spirit of what knowledge translation is intended by some definitions. What it fails to do is question or even challenge the underlying structures that create the barriers to knowledge application in the first place. Emphasis on clever, creative means of getting around these barriers is a start, but just a start. The supposition here is that people are simply distracted or busy and that they are not able to attend to the messages around them due to volume. This has some merit. As anyone active in social media use, spent time in front the TV, visited a “free” website, or having visited public places like Times Square (pictured) can attest, the volume of information we get exposed to on a daily basis is enormous. It sounds good, but as any marketer can tell you, today’s effective and innovative strategy is tomorrow’s overused, ignored delivery system. Once widely adopted, a marketing strategy often loses its lustre and something new must replace it, which is why marketing is such a dynamic field.
A systems-oriented approach is also dynamic, but one that aims to transform the structure of the relationships and processes within the system rather than work around the existing ones.
Perhaps the question is less about whether social marketing is knowledge translation, but whether social marketing is enough given the information climate most health professionals and consumers exist.
Diversity and Structure Meets Systems and Design Thinking
Posted: March 2, 2010 Filed under: design thinking, public health, systems thinking | Tags: design thinking, health, healthcare, hospitals, leadership, management, systems thinking, Texas Tech Leave a comment »
The past few days I’ve had the privilige to speak to future healthcare leaders in the Health Organization Management Program at the Rawls College of Business at Texas Tech University. With every conversation I had with faculty, students, and researchers I was reminded of the value of diversity and the challenge that structure poses to encouraging the best aspects of diversity to emerge.
The positive side of diversity is that bringing together people from different backgrounds to bear down on a topic of shared interest in study (and practice) is an energizing experience. Last night I had the pleasure to speak to students who were getting their MBA’s with a healthcare focus. This group included pharmacists (and former deans), current physicians, training physicians, nurses, and even those who already had Masters degrees in other subjects like Public Administration. It was, by the standards of a usual healthcare education course, a pretty diverse audience. And as so often happens when diverse, engaged people come together, interesting conversation and learning happens.
The class was on systems thinking and its application to health care and public health and it provoked a series of discussions about how we too often structure our systems — particularly those in higher education and healthcare — to reduce the very diversity that leads to insights and engagement (the kind of thing we had last night). Because of issues of convenience, efficiency, and power (sharing or retaining) we often reject concepts that diverge from the norm, despite evidence or argument that they might succeed. An idea becomes habit and then soon is entrenched in what Jaron Lanier calls, ‘lock-in’. It becomes something we no longer question or we cease to challenge because it seems too hard to challenge.
A great example we discussed was the modern hospital. Hosptials are designed to reduce diversity in variation and service, create environments that support consistent ‘best practices’, and create a critical mass of service providers that is also efficient. While those ideas have some merit, they also embody an absence of systems thinking in their design at a fundamental level. Consider the very idea of putting all these people who are immunocompromised and often contagious together in one building. How wise is that?
Designing hospitals — or systems — like this suffers from a locked-in mindset that says healthcare needs to be delivered in large institutions for some of the reasons mentioned. It is so entrenched, that we don’t even consider that there could be many other ways to do this. Maybe some of those alternatives are more humane, safer and efficient. We don’t know, until we consider new ways of thinking and reclaim the diversity in the thinking that guides the structures we create.
Complexity and the Information Landscape
Posted: December 5, 2009 Filed under: behaviour change, complexity, Education & Learning, environment, health promotion, psychology, public health, research, Social media, social systems, Systems science, systems thinking | Tags: climate change, complexity, education, H1N1, health, health behaviour change, health education, health promotion, learning, literacy, public health, science, statistics, system dynamics, systems thinking, teaching 8 Comments »
This morning the newswires are buzzing with a story that alleges Britain’s Climatic Research Unit fudged some of its climate change data and suggesting that a ‘bunker mentality’ took hold in the unit, which led to this kind of skewing of the data and science. One scientist told Doug Saunders from the Globe and Mail that “It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that this has set the climate-change debate back 20 years.” Indeed, with the Copenhagen Climate Summit about to start, there is real concern that these allegations – whether proven true or not — will impair the delegates’ ability to reach a deal.
On a different, yet related note, yesterday I went and got my H1N1 shot and was told by the official guiding people through the clinic that about 37 percent of the population of Toronto have had the vaccination. I went to the downtown clinic and waited about 2 minutes to see someone, which is in stark contrast to what we saw a few weeks ago.Why? The threat of H1N1 seems much less in the here and now than it did a few weeks ago when, in the span of one weekend, when U.S. President Obama declared swine flu a national emergency, and two young people in Ottawa died from H1N1. Towards the end of October, H1N1 seemed a lot more scary and that made the issue a lot simpler: get protected or die (or so it seemed)
So what do these two stories have in common? Both illustrate the problem of complexity in the information landscape. H.L. Mencken is quoted as saying: “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong“.
The problem that public health and scientific research faces is that it is in the business of complexity, yet the business of the media is too often in simplicity. This caused that. That person is bad, this person is a hero and so on. The archetypes and stereotypes come in spades and that is the problem. On the issue of climate change, most scientists worth their salt looking at the data are concerned about what is happening to our climate, not because they know for sure, but because they don’t. In a complex system like the environment, the overlaying causes, consequences and potential confounders of data make it impossible to say for sure that something causes something else in a specific dose. What can be done is that we can observe large scale patterns of behaviour and anticipate changes based on models developed using past, current and possible future (estimated) data and scenario planning.
In public discourse however, this makes for a less compelling story. Many like to think that buying a hybrid car, recycling, and carrying a reusable shopping bag will help solve the problem of climate change, when the truth is an entire system of small changes needs to take place if we really want to make a difference. This speaks to a fundamental lack of understanding of complexity.
With the H1N1 example, complexity is less about the cause and effect relationship of the disease and host and more about the vaccine developed to help prevent it. There are an entire littany of websites, pundits and voices who have turned something that is complicated like a vaccine, with potential complex outcomes in rare events such as allergic reactions, into overly complex issues around patient safety, conspiracy theories and the like. I commented on some of these issues in a previous post. At issue here is a fundamental lack of understanding of statistics and probability.
The problem is that the two are related. For those of us in public health, this is an issue that can lead to sleepless nights. How to both make complex information accessible and interpretable to those without the interest, time or ability to sift through it and make reasoned, informed decisions AND how to enhance people’s understanding of probability? Just yesterday in my course on health behaviour change a student in epidemiology remarked that even something as fundamental as an odds ratio to her field gets debated and misunderstood among her peers. John Sterman at MIT has studied his students — ones that learn about system dynamics — and found that many of them have difficulty grasping the fundamentals of the ‘bathtub problem’ and accumulation, which I discussed in a previous post.
I would argue that this is one of our most fundamental challenges as educators, scientists and members of society.
Think you know about stats and complexity? You might be surprised (and entertained) by how randomness creeps into our lives by listening to the recent podcast on recent episode on stochasticity, or randomness, from WNYC’s Radio Lab.
Amazing Stuff: The Film and Video Edition
Posted: December 1, 2009 Filed under: Education & Learning, eHealth, Social media | Tags: engagement, film, health, health promotion, healthcare, innovation, public eHealth, Social media, TV, video, Youth Voices Research Group, YouTube 2 Comments »
Last week my class on Health Behaviour Change was on the topic of eHealth. So to make the point about how information technologies can play a role in supporting change I decided to create a series of YouTube-sized bits of content for my students rather than give a lecture. The ‘lecture’ became a series of short videos starring some of my teammates at the Youth Voices Research Group and brilliantly shot and edited (with next to no time) by our uber-talented resident health promotion videographer, Andrea Yip. This experience, plus exposure to a number of serendipitous videos over the past week had me thinking that a special film and video edition of Amazing Stuff was warranted. So to welcome the month of December, the darkest month of the year for us here in the North, I thought I’d share some sites to visit when you’re huddled inside looking for knowledge, inspiration or amusement:
1. TED. This is fast becoming THE site to waste time on and learn about amazing things from. Originally started as a meeting of artistic and creative types in Monterrey California in 1984, this annual meeting (now spawned into many international meetings) features some of the leading thinkers in such diverse areas as design, science, the arts, politics and public life. You’ll come for one talk and stay for a dozen. This is must-see Web TV.
2. Fora.tv. This newish web channel is another feed for the soul of those interested in science, the economy, technology and other issues that are particularly nerd friendly to us academics. There are some high-quality videos here and some insightful lectures.
3. Current.com is Al Gore’s digital cable channel. There are some interesting things on it, but nothing and I mean nothing beats Infomania; my favourite show on TV, or the Web, or both . Sadly, Infomania is taking a break this week, but the witty satire of the entertainment biz will return in early December.
4. The National Film Board of Canada is one of this country’s gems. It is a treasure-trove of high-quality material and insightful documentaries on a wide range of topics. Perhaps the one that has my interest most piqued is the Filmmaker in Residence program that Kat Cizek has held for the past few years. Kat and her colleagues have done some amazing work at highlighting the perils of homelessness, inner-city health, and the plight of new mothers living in poverty. This is really health promotion video at work and something that I’d like to see a lot more of.
5. And lastly, I came across Publicvoice.tv this past week as I attended the Ivey Centre for Health Innovation and Leadership’s first annual Global Health Innovation conference in Toronto. Publicvoice has a great set of speakers and interviews with people out to change the world and influence Canadian and international public policy. The entire conference and interviews with the key leaders are available at Publicvoice.tv or will be available at the conference’s ongoing Ning community of practice site.
Now if anyone can help me find the time to watch all of this…
Storytelling in the Age of Twitter
Posted: November 27, 2009 Filed under: complexity, Education & Learning, public health, research, Social media, social systems, Systems science, systems thinking | Tags: complex adaptive systems, complexity theory, health, innovation, knowledge translation, leadership, narrative inquiry, research methods, Social media, storytelling, systems thinking, Twitter 1 Comment »
Storytelling has been on my mind this week. Not the kind of stories that many of us had a children like those in Mother Goose, but rather the ones that we more often tell through chance encounters in the hallway or Tweet about over the Internet. However, like Mother Goose many of the stories we tell include narratives that feature archetypes and draw on a long history of shared knowledge between the storyteller and her or his audience. Unlike in cultures where storytelling is fashioned in a manner that requires sustained attention and considerable skill and practice (think of the many First Nations & Aboriginal communities worldwide or the Irish Seanachaidhean), tools like Twitter, blogs and Facebook enable us to tell stories in new, short form ways to audiences we might not even know about. Sorting through the tweets of 150 different people per day requires a process of sensemaking that is different from those used to ascertain meaning in a long form story. Both are valuable.
Although it is tempting to privilege long-form storytelling, the kind found in essays, feature films, and books, it may be those tweets that better fit with our cognitive tendencies for sensemaking. If you think about your average day, you might interact with a few dozen people face-to-face and perhaps many dozens more through your social networks. How many of those interactions featured a full-fledged story; one that had a clear start, middle, end and coherence that could only be gathered from the story itself, not past relationships with the storyteller? Probably very few. Instead, we much more often speak, write, and even film in narrative fragments; small chunks co-constructed and contextually bound. Think about any buzzword or catch phrase and you can see this in action. From ‘whassup‘ to ‘getting Kanyed‘, these terms have meanings that go far beyond the obvious and can be conveyed with one or two words. Twitter represents this very well with its 140 character limit.
This past week I spent three days with a great group of people getting learning about complexity-based approaches to sensemaking using narrative fragments, software and a variety of facilitation techniques aimed at taking the science of complexity into the practical change realm with the folk at Cognitive Edge. What this accreditation process did was provide a theory-based set of tools and strategies for making sense of vast amounts of information in the form of stories and narrative fragments for purposes of decision-making and research. What this method does is acknowledge the complex spaces in which many organizational decisions are made and, through the Cynefin framework, help groups make sense of the many bits of knowledge that they generate and share that is often unacknowledged. It provides a theoretically-grounded and data-driven method of making sense of large quantities of narrative fragments; the kind we tell in organizations and communities.
From a systems perspective, viewing knowledge exchange and generation through the narrative fragments that we produce is far more likely to lead to insights about how the system operates and developing anticipatory guidance for decision-making than waiting for fully-formed stories to appear and analyzing those. This, like nearly everything in systems thinking, requires a mind-shift from the linear and whole to the non-linear and fragmented. But thanks to Michael Cheveldave and Dave Snowden and their team this non-linearity need not be incoherent. I’d recommend checking out their amazing website for a whole list of novel and open-source methods of applying cognitive and complexity science to problem identification and intelligence.
Thanks Michael and the Toronto knowledge workers group for a great three days! I’m looking at my tweets in a whole new way.
