Ladder of Inference

A visual practitioner must continually orient their inner landscape and seek to SUSPEND beliefs and judgements that block clear listening and an Open Mind. This requires ongoing self check-ins and mental model alignment, as related to ourselves, the content, the people in the room, the organization(s), and even the sector or region of the world represented.

It is far too easy to get tripped up by our own way of thinking, and inadvertently close off to what is actually happening. A room of 50 men in blue suits does not necessarily indicate a group of businessmen – it could be a NY Yankees reunion! or, or, or….. There could be dozens of interpretations, depending on our background and sorting mechanisms.

One fundamental framework to keep in mind is Chris Argyris’ Ladder of Inference, which describes the scale of thinking between experience-based data and belief-based action. Though all steps exist in the “now”, the top of the ladder tends to waver more abstractly in memory, and the bottom lands more solidly in the present moment.

Here is a breakdown (with reference to Google definitions):

Beliefs: Acceptances that a statement is true or that something exists.
ie: For someone to recognize a bird, I need to represent it in flight

Conclusions: Judgment or decision reached by reasoning.
ie: Birds fly.

Assumptions: Things that are accepted as true or as certain to happen.
ie: Cardinals, and all birds for that matter, must fly around a lot.

Added Meaning: What is interpreted as meant by a word, text, concept, or action.
ie: Cardinals must travel to many backyards in a day for food.

Selected Data: Chosen facts and statistics collected for reference.
ie: Cardinals eat off flat surfaces and come and go freely.

Observable Data & Experience: Practical contact with facts or events or occurrences.
ie: Sometimes my brother and i watch cardinals feeding in his backyard.

Reflexive Loop: Confirms bias. Beliefs influence data we choose to select in the future.
ie: I draw birds in flight, and watch birds coming and going, but not birds on branches.

Reflective Learning: Looking more closely to increase our understanding.
ie: I have serious challenge drawing animals, but if i more closely observe real birds in a variety of settings and notice their range of forms, my drawing will improve.

A purely behavioral example, not applied to scribing, would be something like this – starting at the experience and jumping around, as it can happen in real life:

I call my mom and ask how she is doing. (Data) “Fine,” she answers. (Data)

But i think to myself, “Her voice is low and her words are slow. (Data) She does not SOUND fine…” (Added Meaning) “Uh-oh. This is going to be one of THOSE kinds of uncomfortable conversations, loaded with innuendo.” (Beliefs)

See how fast i made that jump?!?!

Then i ask,”Is something going on?” I’m trying to inquire to scale down back to data.

“No, i am getting ready for XX today and the plumber is coming and XX etc.” (lots of data)

But in my body, in my heart, I sense gaps in this data, and am hearing something else behind the words, in her tone, and still can’t help think there is something more going on. (Conclusion)

I am substituting my reality (Selected Data) for hers – and i’m getting fixated that i am right about my interpretation.

“My mother is hiding something. Maybe she is trying to protect me, or not bother me. And clearly she does not want to talk about it now! All she wants is banter; this will not be a substantive conversation. (Belief) I might as well get off the phone now. (Action)”

Again – see how quickly i scaled back up?! And, in doing so, got lost in my own story about the call, became reflexive, stopped listening to my mom, and prematurely ended the call.

Back to how this applies to scribing…

To inquire into the situation, in order to surface the data, requires “scaling down the ladder.” As graphic facilitators, we must always return to actual words, no matter our triggers or wishes for the outcomes of a session. If something is not clear, pause. Slow down. Wonder. Check the reasoning. Turn away from the board and mentally move closer to the words, to the person speaking, to the data. Put yourself in their shoes. Inhabit another vantage point. Resist the urge to draw until you return to ground.

This kind of real-time inquiry risks getting in the way of our needed liquid state; to be checking what we heard for accuracy can break the momentum of attending to the next words, and the next after those. But one spot-on interpretation against 100 misrepresented ideas in invaluable. A picture is only worth 1000 words if it lands in an array of reference.

In the domain of Perceiving, in A Practice Model for Scribing, the Ladder is key.

The Ladder of Inference was first put forward by Chris Argyris and expanded in Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline. For additional reading, see: The Ladder of Inference by Rick Ross, excerpt from The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook. Copyright 1994 by Peter M. Senge, Art Kleiner, Charlotte Roberts, Richard B. Ross, and Bryan J. Smith. Original illustration by Martie Holmer.

Discern

3 Comments

10 years ago

In the “Know” domain of A Practice Model for Scribing, four moves* mark a facilitator’s choice around what to do with the volume of content we hear streaming in the air. The actual choosing process is completely subjective, and it is a scribe’s listening skills that inform the real sifting ability. This framework merely offers categories to consider while holding broad swaths of information, to inform decision-making of what to draw, when.

Bypass: In the service tracking with the flow of conversation, you move over topics that might be confusing or might not yet seem to fit in the picture.

Let it go! The easy road here and sometimes the path of least resistance. If the content is in support of another main point, redundant, or completely confounding…. quickly decide not to include it in your picture or even retain in your mind.
Come up with alternative ways to reveal the topic. Maybe this can be a short list and not a picture, or written in a smaller font or lighter color.
Seek to maintain balance. If things get heated, you can ease the flow by careful and reductive use of language to represent content, or draw less of what is growing (like when one person might be on a rant or in a monologue…)
Deepen your own inquiry and hold the container. Just pause. Reflect quickly in the moment and try to sense into what is actually going on.

Name: Bring attention to content by naming it, without judging or evaluating. You don’t have to elaborate at this point. It might feel like you should capture everything, but you don’t! Maybe the content is not yet all out in the air, and is still emerging, therefore only ready to be noted.

Listen (Level 2) in an objective way. Suspend your opinions or beliefs in order to hear as clearly as possible.
Draw literally. Use specific visual language that maps accurately to the speaker’s words and watch your level of interpretation.
Keep an ear open to content repetition, reinforcement, and differentiation. When something seems to keep looping back, make sure to include it.

Engage: Enter the dynamic to further surface patterns, to deepen the inquiry, and to expand the container.

Listen (Level 3) from the perspective of the room, of the speaker(s).
Identify unclear verbal streams in service of uncovering their sources.
Reveal structures of interaction, as explained the in the Iceberg model.
Explore what is at risk, what is not said, and what might actually seek expression.
Note: Requires a higher degree of facilitative skill and a stronger container

Transform: Make facilitative container-building moves to shift the dynamic, even if you are on the side of the room, silent. You have influence here to either disrupt or stabilize through your drawing. Transform with great care!

Listen deeply (Level 4) to space between the words, for what wants to surface.
Trust that a deeper meaning will arrive and be ready to include it.
Notice the sequence of voices and/or the flow and sounds.
Seek beyond the content to engage with the dynamic.

Lastly, considering system dynamics layered into this framework, as visual facilitators we can have a subtle influence on a room by either increasing or decreasing awareness to certain content.

If something has already been expressed a number of times, then we can further reinforce that point by writing it up again and again (amplify), or we can decide to only write it once, or include only a few keywords (attenuate), which in effect balances the dominance.

Depending on the needs of the crowd, we can use a more synthetic approach, taking in lots of content and organizing it into clusters, carefully framing and making connections, aiming to reduce the complexity and offer cohesion.

At other times, we can use a more deconstructive approach, intentionally taking one concept and breaking it into parts, so that what seems like a knot is more easy to parse out. This would have the direct opposite effect of synthesis, as the approach aims to surface and amplify complexity – to expand a conversation and prompt new thinking.

Either approach – balancing or reinforcing – weaves in along the entire path of bypass-name-engage-transform.

The key point is that, as we make sense of what we hear and what is called for in the room, we can actively choose how to respond.

Bypass-Name-Engage-Transform comes from my work in the late 90’s with Bill Isaacs of Dialogos, and I have mainly taken it from the original context of verbal facilitation and applied it to visual practice. The original framework was conceived by Diana M. Smith. Learn more in Divide or Conquer, Chapter 9.

The Iceberg

2 Comments

10 years ago

20160113 Addendum – Have been doing a LOT more drawing and thinking re: iceberg since i first wrote up this post. Have shifted to think of water (oceans) as a natural key source, above that containers we humans form, and within those, the experience of icebergs. I suppose source would weave through all, including sky, at the very tip. That would make sense. Anyway – here is a drawing from late 2015 that tries to picture it. Originally ~16′, dry erase. Laid over, also, is thinking from Senge & Scharmer re: Mind/Matter split and reintegration.

The iceberg model, used in system dynamics, is a base note to our scribing practice. To diagnose a room and reveal where sense-making of the spoken word is most needed, we can refer to these tiers: Events, Patterns of Behaviors, Structure, Mental Models, and Vision. With this framework, we surface leverage points where the system – and the scribe – can place attention to facilitate desired outcomes.

My very first step when working with an organization – of ANY scale – is to figure out where the person, panel, team, or whole group is coming from, what they are aiming to achieve, and how i might intentionally scribe to facilitate within their comfort zone and also stretch it, if possible/helpful. (See also: 4 Levels of Scribing) Usually i go one tier deeper: if they are functioning at a behavioral level, for example, i will scribe to try to reveal the structures. If that expands the boundaries of the conversation, i will tune into the mental models in play, dancing down the iceberg to create results we want all to see.

Here is a breakdown, as applied to visual practice, and clearly this is highly interpretive. (A zillion interpretations of the Iceberg are out there. Search on Peter Senge or Daniel Kim to get a feel for the origins of this thinking.)

Events

Events are like data, actual occurrences that we see, above the metaphoric waterline, like noticing a lone bird flying. In the spoken word, i think of events as individual notes – words or phrases, single statements, stand-alone ideas, comments, parts. These combine to tell stories and can be most readily represented through illustration and more literal pictures, combined with words. An example might be something like this, representing human migration:

Patterns of Behavior

Patterns convey parts moving within structures. A flock is a formation based on a need, for example, to migrate with weather. Adapted from Kevin Kelly, Out of Control, Chapter 2: “Hive Mind”:

“A bird on the fly, however, has no overarching concept of the shape of its flock. “Flockness” emerges from creatures completely oblivious of their collective shape, size, or alignment. A flocking bird is blind to the grace and cohesiveness of a flock in flight…. In the 17th century, an anonymous poet wrote: ‘…and the thousands of fishes moved as a huge beast, piercing the water. They appeared united, inexorably bound to a common fate. How comes this unity?’… A flock is not a big bird. Writes the science reporter James Gleick, ‘….High-speed film [of flocks turning to avoid predators] reveals that the turning motion travels through the flock as a wave, passing from bird to bird in the space of about one-seventieth of a second. That is far less than the bird’s reaction time.’ The flock is more than the sum of the birds.”

We can look for flock-like behavior in patterns of speech too. This occurs when one idea or person follow another, for example: “We live on 1 planet Earth, but our footprint on average is 1.5.” And then: “This will lead to turmoil and chaos, and eventually human migration.” – John Sterman (whose talk on Systems Thinking and Sustainability is the source of all these images…) The words come out with causal relation, and one concept FITS with another to form a gesture or new shape of it’s own, only a pattern because of grouping.

Structure

Structure shows how pieces of the picture form and relate. This is the land of dance, where every part of the picture holds together in a natural coherence. Connections surface across gaps, and it’s our place to organize them into an order that we perceive. We don’t look for one bird; we look for two, for three, four, forty birds and then inquire into what holds them together. Are they a couple? Siblings? Friends? Of different flocks? Adversaries? Do they face each other, turn away? Join? Avoid? Does one communicate to another bird on another branch? In another tree? What are the conditions of the tree? Protected? Exposed?

All these aspects (and many more) are components of the structure INSIDE a story, dialogue, conference theme, multi-year project. Every piece has context. Find it. Draw what is relevant to surface the inherent structure, or relationship of the parts, that wants to be revealed.

Mental Models

This is the domain of thinking and beliefs, “deeply held theories about how the world works” – Daniel Kim. This might be a more subtle territory, not at all explicit, where a deeper, almost non-verbal, listening is required to understand where people are coming from. In the iceberg drawing above, I drew an egg and a bird to represent the age-old question of “Which comes first?” that challenges our idea of where life begins.

If we take the scribed sustainability image as an example, the ENTIRE picture represents a mental model that the current climate change crisis is induced/amplified by human behavior. Some people think otherwise! But knowing (and sharing) the belief of Prof Sterman, my own mental model was very aligned with the presentation. I have also been in situations where my mental model entirely clashed with that of the presenter. Without going into detail, it required much suspension in order to be open to what ideas were being shared that i wanted to accurately represent.

This territory is fine and subtle; the beliefs are in the room and they are in us. As scribes, we are there to help represent the room, and resist layering in our own theories. That said, it is possible to help reveal biases in order to activate reflection, and, perhaps, shift mindsets.

Vision

This is the deeper territory of aspiration, hope, calling, that which can set the tone for all else pushing upward through the iceberg. I see this less as a space for projection of vision, where an aim might be set to be reached or strived for, and more as a domain of possibility, into which a scribe can sense, and then hold in spirit (even without drawing!) to really join the system as it’s future self, and share the intent for the vision to come to form through the thinking and action of the people.

Usually i leave a 1/3 to 1/4 of surface real estate for vision – it always comes, never fail. Even if faint, listen, trust in it, and you will hear it’s tune.

References: Peter Senge, John Sterman

Visual Practices

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10 years ago

Because folks often ask for ways to develop their scribing practice, and because the field of graphic facilitation seems RIPE for learning, i’m taking a turn to share some suggested processes in a do-it-yourself kind of way. These can be self-guided, in solo or group contexts, and mainly offer ways to explore an intersection of why, how, and what. The when & where, that’s up to you! Hope this is useful. Feedback very welcome. More to come as i refine chicken scratch workshop notes…

All Visual Practices below relate to A Practice Model for Scribing as a primary framework, and of course relate to each other.

Being: Identifying Presence
Click here for .pdf download – Group process, 30-40 minutes

5	Personal Story: Guide	Share an experience accessing your “presence” to get through a challenging situation. Explain: What was difficult? What were you called to do? What did you access internally to find the necessary resource and navigation? How did you feel throughout the experience? What did activating your presence enable?
5	The “Zone”	Explore why presence matters in a systemic context. Refer to post: Presence and the Reciprocal Zone.
10	Personal Story: Learner	Suggest people get comfortable in their seats and close their eyes.“Notice your feet firmly planted on the ground, your torso straight, your head reaching the sky. Breathe in and out, and settle into your body and the moment. Recall an experience where you felt most alive and connected with the world and put yourself back in that picture. What was the scene – what does it look like, smell like, what is the temperature, what colors are around you, what textures? How do you feel? Where is that experience located in your body, if at all? Considering this scene, imagine your sense of awareness increasing. What are you noticing as you take in all that is around you and become one with this time and place? When you are ready, slowly come back to the current moment and open your eyes.” Take a few minutes to write about this experience in your journal. Then turn to a neighbor and each share your story while your partner listens.
5	Practice	Now at a board or with a page of paper, take a minute to get centered again. Recall your scene, get rooted, connect to the room (and system at large) and breathe. Notice when you are in a zone and not, without judgment. This practice is less about what your drawing will look like and more about your quality of being as you hold the pen, approach the blank surface, and let content come through your hand while you draw. In this video, we have someone connecting profoundly with the earth, which is how he feels most alive. Listen to his story without over-thinking it, take it all in, be completely present in a field of awareness for yourself and for him, attend to your state of being, identify what wants to be named, and with that knowledge, draw. Native Perspective on Sustainability – www.nativeperspectives.net
5	Reflect	As a whole group, gather and reflect on the experience (before spending time looking at any drawings.) Possible questions to ask: What did you hear? What was this man describing? How might it relate to scribing? Were you able to find access your presence? Were you distracted, and by what? Where might you find windows of opportunity to deepen your presence in relation to your practice?

Presence and the Reciprocal Zone

5 Comments

10 years ago

When we scribe, on the best of days, we connect with a zone. I call it a reciprocal zone, because it’s not only about how we relate to a certain sense of flow that might come through the air, like fine magical mist to our senses, that we relate to as an individual – but it is also about a web of connection we find ourselves in, inescapably, with our minds, hearts, hands, our drawing surface, our markers, with the people behind us and around us, with the parameter of the room, with the system known to be represented by what’s inside the walls, sometimes with the system at large. All points of connection manifest into a series of positive reinforcing loops, where the insight of one touches the insight of another. While drawing, we know, we sense, this activation – on the best of days.

We are a micro-system that represents a macro-system, and the quality of being we bring to the moment when we face a blank page or wall – that quality ripples out into the mist, reinforcing the enchantment of the surround. This is not to say we are magicians that weave some sort of spell – absolutely not. We are bystanders, and then active participants, WITH the activity of the room and the system, that functions as a path for something ELSE to come into existence and light.

We are not channels or mediums. We are artists. We connect to an inner place of wonder, and thus we are open to recognizing the spirit of wonder in the world around us.

Our presence, our quality of being, allows us to show up for a group at any phase of their process, holding a space of possibility for what might emerge. Part of locating our presence has to do with suspending our thoughts and habits of judgment, letting go of the past and also of the projections of the future, so we can be completely in the moment and show up to join a group where they are and co-create.

To explore presence is to learn another language that is not literal, but IS internal and very much embodied, if initially faintly seen or heard. We might ask ourselves: What is the barrier, the frontier, between fear and fluency? How do we feel differently when we are fluent? When we are in a position to express, what language do we choose to let sing?

This piece of the practice is not about the aesthetics. This is the intangible dimension, where we are in touch with ourselves at the most true level and in a position to let that truth meet the truth in the room THROUGH what we draw.

It is an honorable and breathtaking thing to sense, the flow, the presence of many. To work in that place, to help shape it, to give form to the unexpressed – THAT is the magic. It is a magic of the reciprocal zone that our presence merely meets.