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A new approach to those thorny, intractable problems

I’ve been in many situations where I just knew - both as a line and executive manager, and later as a consultant - what the underlying issues were of particular corporate dysfunction. I just knew it; but I could neither collect the survey data to back up my intuition, nor could I get the organization to blindly accept my intuitive analysis. And rightly so; I have no special super-powers that give me 20/20 foresight. Besides, I was trained in the idealistic/analytical way of thinking: describe and analyse current situation --> design desired situation --> close gap. Yet the nagging feeling remained that there had to be a way, a better way, to peel away the layers of denial and corporate group-speak, and uncover the truth. And to do that in such a manner that the executive could not simply dismiss the outcome as ‘consultant bias and opinion’.

Encouraged by a colleague, and after doing some research and reading on the topic, I made the decision to become accredited as a Cognitive Edge practitioner. Whoop-dee-doo, you might say. But let me explain as best I can what I’ve learned during the 3-day course in a bitterly cold and snowy Calgary in February of 2007:

Pioneered by Dave Snowden, then head of IBM’s Knowledge Management research and consulting group, the concept of using narrative to make sense of complexity resulted in the establishment of the Cynefin Center for Organizational Complexity. In 2006, Cognitive Edge, Inc. was founded to continue and build on Dave’s work. From the Cognitive Edge website, three of the key concepts of this methodology:

Sense-making
Sense-making is defined as how we make sense of the world so that we can act in it. Our approach draws primarily on insights from the cognitive sciences and the science of complex adaptive systems along with anthropology and philosophy; not as an academic theory but as a co-evolution of sound theory with practice.

A naturalistic approach
Naturalistic approaches focus on a sufficient and shared description of the current state to allow the creation of interventions the impact of which can be monitored to allow the emergence of an beneficial future state. Naturalism is contrasted with normative or idealistic approaches which start with a desired future state, perform a gap analysis and then seek to close that gap.

Descriptive self awareness
Our research and consultancy methods aim to minimise the need for expert interpretation and recipe style approaches to intervention design. Instead we focus on facilitating the emergence of meaning through and by the members of the organsiation or the subjects of the research.

I would like to share two of my key learning points with you:
1. Prompting people to tell stories about their experiences, and having them ‘tag’ their stories for meaning, intent and significance themselves, completely eliminates ‘observer bias’ and leads to incredibly rich and accurate information
2. Mapping the information gathered from employees on the one hand, against the stories gathered from the executive on the other, produces a matrix that clearly and unambiguously identifies the issues that need to be dealt with.

And here’s the best part: the information-gathering and sense-making part can be accomplished in just a few days - as opposed to weeks, sometimes months, using more traditional (survey, focus groups, and interviews) methods.

In a follow-up post, I will talk about some of the tools themselves, and what types of applications I see for them in the field of human performance improvement. In the meantime, read some of the articles published on the Cognitive Edge site, as well as Dave Snowden’s blog.

Last updated on Sep 13, 2007 at 03:14 PM
Category: Cognitive Edge Knowledge Management Managing Change Human Performance Improvement
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