Category: Slim Volume

2015/05/15

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.

2015/05/13

Discern

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.

2015/04/03

The Iceberg

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

2015/02/09

A Model of Practice

The Practice Model for Scribing results from 20 years of collaborative efforts and framework integration, with many dear colleagues along the way. Here is a breakdown. And for a walkthrough of the theory in practice, visit: Decoding a Wall

The Iceberg

The iceberg model, used in systems thinking, is the base note. We are familiar with seeing events, actions, and behaviors – like the exposed tip of an iceberg. But the domain we access internally as facilitators and aim to touch with our graphics is at the level of structure – that less seen, in the domain of patterns and mental models and vision. We seek to find relation between pockets of words and concepts and aspirations to intentionally reveal where there is open loop (linear, sequential, start-to-end) and closed loop (systems, integrated, interrelated) thinking.

In graphic facilitation, this requires venturing beyond the known – the tip of the iceberg – and moving into a realm of trust and sensing, listening internally and within the room to what is wanting to surface. With this in mind, the facilitator has an opportunity to recontextualize what is being said to shift levels of perception and comprehension.

More: Iceberg model
References: Peter Senge, John Sterman, Leanne Grillo, indirectly Daniel Kim

The Diamond

As a scribe, the practices of joining (including listening), knowing, perceiving, and our stance of being ALL function together to ground and orient us in a decision-making process before and while we draw. This framework has tiers of related thinking, including: dialogic principles, Jungian archetypes, ShadowWork, family systems therapy, and The Symbols Way. All speak to the nature of a whole systems approach to change, where the art of the facilitator is to dance between the domains – in ourselves and the way they outwardly manifest – to help an individual or group shift into a possibility.

References: William Isaacs, Peter Garrett, The Ashland Institute, Cliff Barry, David Kantor, indirectly David Bohm

This area at center speaks to the inner stance we hold when showing up: with a person, in a room, at the board or wall. (Referring to Scharmer’s work) We seek to suspend judgment, quiet cynicism, move through fear, so that one can approach the work with an open mind, heart, and will – insuring space to receive what wants to come through into the room. This is the place where Presencing most intersects our practice, at the center of the scribe, at core, and thus as a centering device in the room and system. This relates to the container, and overall holding capacity of a scribe.

More: Attending – Containers – A practice for Identifying Presence – Trust

Reference: Otto Scharmer, Barbara Cecil

Join

For me, joining – including deep listening – is a tap root of this entire visual practice. Without joining, we are isolated in our own ideas and limited in our potential to see. Forget about being able to draw anything! We listen to connect, experience the entire context in which we exist, feel, and activate the heart. It is our intake, all our sensory valves on “open”. We receive. This maps to 4 Levels of Scribing – where at Level 1 (tip of the iceberg) someone says bird and we draw a bird, and at Levels 2, 3 & 4 we process internally to sense into the essence of what is wanting to be seen and draw from that other-informed place (bottom of the iceberg.)

More: Levels of Scribing (Listening)

References: Beth Jandernoa, Peri Chickering, Otto Scharmer

Perceive

It’s been challenging to articulate this part of the model, and I keep coming back to art, the making or art, the viewing and interpreting of art, the required multi-faceted approach to any refined process of seeing. It’s got something to do with the ability to turn in all directions and use a range of lenses for our filtering and framing capacity. It’s seeing with a suspended eye and open mind.

More: Ladder of Inference – Fear and Seeing

References: Eleanore Mikus, Matthew Bird, Rob Licht, Norman Daly, and indirectly Josef Albers, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee

Know

The domain of choice-making, clarity, and essence, where Open Will enters. I access a model from Dialogos here: Bypass-Name-Engage-Transform. 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. 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. Engage: Enter the dynamic to further surface patterns, to deepen the inquiry, and to expand the container. Transform: Make facilitative container-building moves to shift the dynamic, even if you are on the side of the room, silent.

More: Bypass-Name-Engage-Transform

References: Glennifer Gillespie, Robert Hanig, Dorian Baroni

Draw

Well, this is what it looks like. This is the visible, tip of the iceberg. This is the tangible result of everything we take in, process, interpret coming out through the hand.

Lettering: The basic way of explaining or annotating an idea. Check out masters Alicia Bramlett and Sita Magnuson
Illustration: Incredibly powerful to bring a metaphor or story or anecdote to life. Here is where simple bean people can go a long way. And here is where there is some serious talent out there. See Peter Durand, Christopher Fuller, and Mike Fleisch
Storytelling: Realized the power of this through Anthony Weeks and Liisa Sorsa, at 2015 IFVP conference. Never thought of our work with this language – but it sure is! More Here
Mind-mapping: Perhaps the most familiar part of the practice, depending on a strong ability to recognize patterns and organize threads.
Modeling: Conveying spatial dynamics of parts of a whole through shapes and lines. Bryan Coffman was my mentor here. An old reference point, but a timelessly valuable one: MG Taylor Modeling Language where we can see examples of drawn and conceptual models, both – useful for ALL parts of the Practice Model.
System mapping: Showing the interconnectedness of things – including system dynamics – visually, while attuning with this filter to reveal the system of the content coming into a room. It’s about drawing out the systems, literally and figuratively. See Decoding a Wall for insights on this concept.

Additional References: The Value Web, MG Taylor, and indirectly David Sibbet

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