The New Realities of Engagement - Stories That Drive Action Planning and Implementation

(This post was based on a post developed by Rob Paterson three weeks ago, as we seek to design a pilot project in support of an important multi-constituent project Rob is helping to guide.  His post was aimed at not-for-profit public media; I have genericized it somewhat).

Outlined in the brief article below is a new way of using the Web and web services to gather peoples' stories - anecdotes,  video clips, podcasts, blog posts and all sorts of other snippets - and help not-for-profit organizations move into action planning based on the "raw material" of what people are saying and talking about.

Their stories contain the issues that matter.  The system we have designed addresses how to capture, analyze and assess what matters.

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"Leaders strive to change the way that other people think, feel and act". 

Alan Deutschman - Walk the Walk

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Why should we measure story in a new way?  Because using story well is our great chance in public media to be the leaders of our time. To help Americans take back their power to control their lives and their communities. 

How do we do this? 

Deep change is all about a change in the collective story. It is a change in the way that people, think, feel and act.

• First of of all, there is the the appearance of a new and way-out idea that violates the status quo - such as say Local Food - the 100 mile diet. The idea itself is tested by the immune system of the wider community. Often a breakthrough is accelerated by a good book - for Food: The Omnivore's Dilemma. For the Environment: An Inconvenient Truth. I This is how all new paradigm stories start. 
  

• Then comes isolated action. People take the ideas and start to do things with the idea - this phase is crucial in a new paradigm. Others have to see that the idea can work and that they too can be part of it. 

• Then comes collective action. With enough individual stories, the system "tips" and the Mainstream accept the Story. 

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In these times of great upheaval, as it is becoming more and more clear that these tories we've used for the past century or so are less and less viable, we need new and compelling stories.  We have to get behind the trajectory of story described above, and use peoples' stories to effect more and better change.

To do this we have to be able to measure story in a new way.

Summary: Followed by a more detailed explanation.          

Situation:  We are living in a time of a major shift in culture. The world is so connected, and hence now so complex, that our simple Industrial Institutions can no longer help people. (Katrina - Mortgage Crisis, Healthcare etc)  

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As our Industrial Institutions fail to cope and to help people, we are seeing a new model for coping where people are connecting to each other to find networked and personal solutions to problems. 

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This new model is the antithesis of the model that it may replace. Clear signs of what this new model are all over the place.

(To help explain, we've used diagrams from Geoffrey Moore's widely-accepted "Crossing the Chasm" model for the progression of uptake of new modes of behaviour or new paradigms)

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But for now, it is only the Innovators and the Early Adopters who accept it. We see the Local Food Movement, Slow Money, Local Resiliency all growing. But while these new stories are now visible they are not yet mainstream.

 

If the new story could be aggregated and given momentum, the shift will take place sooner. 

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Mission: To do this a new 'Way-Out" story of self help, of community power and of networks has to become accepted as THE story. 

This is a Paradigm Shift. The shift from Institution to Community is as big a change as the Copernican Shift. History reminds us that paradigm shifts of this nature are not accepted by simply telling the facts. Vis many in newspapers today!

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To connect, we have to design an approach to story that can get through the natural resistance. Only a particular kind of story can do this. This style of story is the antithesis of how media tells stories today.

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To help make the shift, we have to return to a personal POV. The story has to be designed to reach into the heart of people and has then got to motivate them to act.  

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But the stories on their own are not powerful enough. A million stories about local food or Home schooling on YouTube or on blogs are still fringe. 

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It is essential to put power behind the story. To get beyond the Innovators and Early Adopters to the Early Majority, these stories have to have an institutional sponsor (community-or-purpose-based or community-related) that the Early Majority can trust. 

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Execution: To bridge the "Chasm" from Innovators and Early Adopters to Early Majority we have to create a critical mass of story from our stations. To do this we have to add our trust and our power to aggregate the right kind of stories. 

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These stories have to obey the rules of those that can cross a Paradigm. We know what these rules are:

• There has to be an overarching context - why is the current system not working and why the new will work and have utility

• The story has to be told from a personal POV by someone I can personally relate to who uses an authentic voice

• The story has to lead me to help that I can use 

• The story has to have a trusted source 

• The story has to lead to taking action that is in my power 

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  You can see that this is radically different from the traditional POV of Media today where:

• The assumed context is that the answers are in the hands of the institutions and not in the hands of people

• That the POV is from a "detached" observer who is above the situation and outside the story who speaks in an institutional voice

• The solution is always to get more money or resources for the institution in question or to apply power - none of which is in the power of the person

• The Source is owned by commercial or political interests who increasingly use spin 

• The person is left helpless and alienated - This feels like Tiananmen. They fight for democracy, we watch, they die, we change the channel. A Tweet this week on Iran and on the conventional news coverage there.

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We have all been raised in the latter model and know no other. Some intuitively know and use the new model. But making the shift to using the new model as a default, demands constant assistance. 

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We have to make the implicit knowledge of how to do this explicit so that the knowledge can spread more quickly.          

The tool that we are working on provides this support.

• It presents to the programmer an ideal checklist/template that enables those in production to design an offering that has the best chance of breaking through the natural resistance

•  It enables the people reacting to the offering to learn how to "see" in this new way too 

• It enables an prganization to see the landscape of how their constituency is reacting - they can see shifts in support and resistance by mindset, by place and through time. They can make adjustments and react appropriately. The organization can track holistic progress 

• More than looking at any one story, it shows how the collective story is progressing. The Tipping Point comes from the collective.

• It enables organization to show their constituents that the organization is engaged - the organization measures its impact based upon the content of stories.

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In short, the beta tool (described in more detail below) shapes the DNA of the right kind of story. This enables us to design how to use story effectively, and helps the broader work to be powerfully engaging. It enables us to test how well we are doing individually as an organization and as a system.

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It offers us a "Map" of how each story affects people and communities. It shows movement in beliefs and acceptance. True change.

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It maps out our plans, our design, our work, the response, our redesign, our work, the response and the overall progress to crossing the Chasm   

 

Demonstrating the capabilities

• The beta tool is ready for testing so that we can see how the inputs work and how the outputs work

• Identify Early Adopter organizations and use a sample of employees and volunteers contribute and  test a variety of stories. This will demonstrate to such Early Adopter organizations.  These organizations will get back the analytic output plus a discussion about what it all means. These organizations will have seen how the beta works 

• Resolve further unknowns and any issues with the design team - determine with the design team the pricing and terms for a wider use. Collectively come up with a strategy for adoptionl

More Details          

This system, known as StoryGarden, is currently involved in several pilot projects with not-for-profit organization in Canada and the USA.  Interest is spreading rapidly, especially as all sorts of not-for-profit organizations and various communities are coming to realize that their future is likely to be more and more different from their past, or what they expected as "normal".

Taken as a whole, they represent the emergence of networked society that is intensely connected locally. The New America(or any other country) may be the Old America (or any other country) Redux:

An America that is a network of networked and resilient communities.

As more and more stories like this are promoted properly there will be a Tipping Point. Americans will start to take back decisions about what is important for them - Healthcare, Education, Employment, Credit, Food - into their own hands.

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So how does this work?

Much of what we know now is the new model, but our knowledge is Implicit. We don't even know what we know so it is hard to spread.

We also don't know how to show funders the real progress that we are make.  Without being able to tell our own story well we will not get the financial support we need.

Each story enters a Sense Making System (a web service and software provided by Cognitive Edge, a global network of practitioners dedicated to helping create meaning and sense in complex situations).

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Then what it means is extracted.  "Filtering" is done through respondents answering a short set of quetions specifically designed to turn the respondents' interpretations into data that is organized and stored in a database.

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The data created by the filtering is then examined and analyzed through various modules of the Cognitive Edge sense-making system.  A wide range of perspectives can be used to make sense of the story.

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The story can then be plotted collectively and dynamically - we can see who, where and progress.

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We can see the larger regional or national view.

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We can see our progress to the Tipping Point!

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Whose Tool is this and Where does it come from?

StoryGarden is a web-based system for gathering and analyzing qualitative information about values and attitudes held by a community of people. Contributors are asked to submit anecdotes to a website, then answer a short set of questions that indicate the significance of the anecdotes to help identify emergent themes and sort them into meaningful collections.

This process is particularly valuable for the development of action plans. 

Collaboration Among Leading Initiatives 

The StoryGarden system stems from a collaboration of designers of software processes and analysts from social development organizations who are interested in community wellness.

Cognitive Edge Sensemaker Suite (TM)

CE Sensemaker provides the underlying theory, rigorous methodology and computer-based tools for the gathering and analysis of anecdotes and survey questions.

The processes being used by StoryGarden are based on methods and processes conceived by Dave Snowdenm co-founding director of the IBM Center for Organizational Complexity.  The processes and tools have been furthered developed by Snowden and colleagues in his Singapore-based company Cognitive Edge, which is providing software and consulting services to StoryGarden.

Social Development Organizations

International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD)

IISD is an internationally recognized not-for-profit policy research institute dedicated to implementation of effective policies by governments and business that are simultaneously beneficial to the human and social well-being and to the global economy and environment.

Other Organizations and Individuals

StoryGarden is in discussion with a number of other organizations interested in the development and well-being of communities.  StoryGarden is receiving valuable input from:

Community Well-Being Index (CWI) - a pan-Canadian initiative led by Roy Romanow focused on the measurement and assessment of community development and sustainability.

Several United Way organizations in Canada

Several professors (computational linguistics, human-computer interaction) at Simon Fraser University, UBC and British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT)

Development Team

Deepak Sahasrabudhe, Project lead 

• well-experienced in developing complex projects involving creative anmd technical personnel and processes, including 22 broadcast TV series, several advanced web sites, books, videos and multi-media learning systems


• 4 TV series have been presented on PBS through APT 


• honoured with over 60 international awards for various TV programs he has produced


• knowledgeable about semantic computing processes


• certified Cognitive Edge practitioner


• founder or co-founder of 5 successful media business initiatives

Jon Husband - Consultant, social networking, software design, learning and development theory and practice

practitioner focused on the impacts of social media and computing on knowledge-based organizations and large-scale organizational and societal change

• authored "Making Knowledge Work - the arrival of Web 2.0", published by ARK Group (UK)


• created the concept of "wirearchy", and writes for several professional blogs about Web 2.0 / Enterprise 2.0


• an active speaker in Canada and internationally about the Web's impact on the structure and dynamics of organizations and their changing role(s) in society.


• Senior Principal in the Hay Group's London (UK) office in the '90's, now an independent consultant located in Vancouver, BC


• certified Cognitive Edge practitioner

 

 

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Comments

[bmo]

ah ha! you have revealed your hand. finally.

this change accelerator is a very dangerous tool. as you know.

very excited for you.

[admin]

Thanks, bmo.

We'll see what happens ...

Re: danger(s), yes have had some good exchanges with people I respect re: the use of such processes and tools for the creation / cultivation / use of soft power in pursuit of all the usual nefarious plots, etc.

[bmo]

re: danger: i was thinking the opposite, actually, in this case, dangerous to the nefarious plottters.

[admin]

That too ...

[Jo Jordan]

Will be interested in the case studies

[admin]

me too, Jo.

Thanks for stopping by.

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