In describing our encounter with a particular subject, we don't just describe what happened, we load our description with layers of meaning that reveals much about our beliefs, attitudes, and shared cultural patterns.
Compared to conventional question and answer surveys, stories about experiences with products or services contain valuable information for organisational decision makers looking to understand not just "what", but "how" and "why".
Form a complexity point of view, collecting narrative fragments provides multiple points of insight into the prevailing conditions at play in the heart of the system of interest.
What was old is new again
Naturalistic sense making and narrative
We strive to act as naive agents in the narrative collection process, using a pre-hypothesis method of enquiry that leaves the field open for the broadest range of responses.
We prompt for stories, but never direct them, encouraging wider and more relevant issues to be canvassed than could be achieved by a formal questionnaire.
We ask the original story-teller to explain the context surrounding their anecdote at the time they contribute it, removing the possibility that we might mis-interpret the story-teller's intended meaning during later analysis.
We tightly constrain both the original, unedited and uninterpreted anecdote together with its supplied context, building an evidence base of tens, hundreds or thousands of narrative fragments. We then represent them visually to allow decision-makers to quickly identify common patterns within the collected stories. And having seen or sensed a pattern, the original narrative fragments can be instantly revealed and read, to understand more of the context underlying the pattern.
Engagement:
We have always shared our experience of the world through stories:
Our stories warn us of danger, help us to understand change, motivate us and inspire us. Although many civilisations have evolved without the wheel, none have evolved without sharing stories.
-Dave Snowden
CSO, Cognitive Edge
Naturalistic Sensemaking
Sensemaking is the process of making sense of our environment, so that we can act effectively within it. It's most commonly the automatic process we use to observe the situation around us, consider how it might evolve over time, and what actions, threats and opportunities are possible. We then decide how best we should act.
In the organisational context, sensemaking involves understanding the connections between people, places and events, in order to gain the facts necessary to undertake effective actions. Narrative provides the richest source of this sensemaking data.
Organisational sensemaking comes in two main flavours; normative and naturalistic: Normative sensemaking concerns itself with predetermining an ideal future state, and applying expertise or previous experience to 'close the gap' between current conditions, and that ideal future state.
Naturalistic sensemaking on the other hand, recognises that in the domain of complexity, control and structure give way to the emergence of new and fresh patterns which will not fit easily into the established mould of traditional or normative ways of acting or thinking.
Narrative is the principle way naturalistic sensemaking seeks to gain enough common experience of the present conditions to explore for, stimulate and monitor the emergence of new, beneficial future conditions.
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