Author Archives: Jeff Merrell

My context is better than your context

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I’m confused. And that’s actually a good thing because it means I’m working through something interesting. Maybe important, maybe not. But at least interesting.

I started thinking about context a few years ago during graduate studies when I kept reading and hearing things like “context matters” and “it depends on the context.” Of course it does. My own professional experience gave me a keen appreciation of context when working on technology design and adoption problems.

So ok. But exactly what do we mean by “context?” When you ask people to describe the context of some situation, they are clearly including some things while ignoring others. But how do we decide what to include or not include in “The Context” when you are looking at some situation? Whose definition of context are we using here?

So I did some reading and research on how people who think about context actually define it (which actually had a big influence on how I thought about my final graduate thesis work, and what I do and teach today). The result: We should appreciate “context” as a set of specific cues selected by a practitioner or researcher to analyze or understand a situation. Cues tend to fall in a few big buckets — social factors, physical factors (think architecture), time, desired outcomes, etc. But “selected” is the key here. It’s a hypothesis. A way of seeing. A way of creating a coherent story to explain some behavior or outcome. Change one or more of the selected cues and the context suddenly becomes different. (Think about time as one element in setting the context. We look at some organizational practice over a period of weeks. We look at that same practice over a 3-year period and now the context is changed).

I went down this context rabbit hole after listening to David Snowden’s talk this week at #change11 Change: Education, Learning and Technology MOOC. I also shared some thoughts in commentary to Jenny Mackness’s thoughtful blog posts about some of the more interesting bits Snowden shared during the talk, which emerge from his Cynefin framework and work in adapting complexity theory to improve decision making.

Anyone who has heard Snowden knows that he is as entertaining as he is innovative and thought provoking. And during the session he challenged us to question our belief that facilitation techniques can elicit a truly broad and diverse set of ideas. If you really want diversity of ideas you need a process — specifically a process that ritualizes dissent — rather than facilitation, which dampens dissent in favor of convergence.

I know I am oversimplifying the ideas discussed, but Snowden’s point put me in mind of a dialogue I heard at a panel discussion featuring expert practitioners from the design field. Someone in the audience asked the panel how they learned to ‘check their biases at the door’ when observing an environment in the early stages of some design project (trying to understand the context before coming up with potential solution design options). One panelist said they really didn’t/couldn’t check their biases – the solution was to make sure you had different-minded people on your team, doing the observation with you.

Now – that might be more of an interesting practice than a real process, but the idea (I think) is the same. Accept cognitive bias a part of the human condition and build some process work-around to deal with it in situations where you want diversity of ideas.

That lead to the comments/discussion on Mackness’ blog about context. Does the goal of ensuring ample dissent vary by context? For example: Are we talking about decision making, idea generation or some other outcome? (Different outcome goals create different contexts) Open networks or some other structure (my small-team of designers, for example)? And within the structure, what might be important underlying principles of the way we gather together (learner autonomy in MOOC’s, common professional practice in the case of designers)? Each of these questions – my view – is an example of trying to be more explicit about defining cues we look for to define context. Snowden’s Cynefin Framework could be viewed as another aspect of this context-defining: Are we talking about a complex or complicated environment? Chaotic or simple?

In the end, I’m confused. I am continually amazed by the subtleties that thoughtful practitioners pick up as cues that are very likely important to the situation being observed or analyzed — and in many cases, clearly important to the participants involved (my bias is to give higher weight to these). This capability is a really critical skill.

Perhaps what I’m landing on this. We need to agree on the attributes that help us define the context; and there we begin to have a shared framework for understanding. That practice should not change our efforts to continually consider new cues. But let’s define how we define context first.

Seeing the sense-making dance

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“Artefacts without participation do not carry their own meaning; and participation without artefacts is fleeting, unanchored and uncoordinated.” – Etienne Wenger in “Communities of Practice and Social Learning Systems: the Career of a Concept” in Social Learning Systems and Communities of Practice, 2010. (Chris Blackmore, ed.).

It is the beginning of the third week of the academic quarter here at the Master’s Program in Learning & Organizational Change and at least two things remain consistent year after year: The winter weather in Chicago and the concepts that (re)capture my attention. The latter is generally more worthwhile dwelling on than the former.

Wenger’s phrase from his chapter in the Blackmore book jumps out as one of those elegant lines that captures something profoundly simple but ultimately complex. And as someone who is both a practicing educator and who focuses on the field of knowledge management, I find this to be one of those anchoring ideas that is worth returning to as a guiding principle in evaluating the work we do. Do we recognize (and acknowledge) the types of things we produce — documents, blog posts, tweets, pictures, videos — as part of a dance designed to creating meaning? Or are we deaf to the music?

As an educator, I am fascinated by how students in my classes create unique paths to discovering something meaningful about the topics we cover. It’s most evident to me in the things that are posted to the online community we create for each course session – the visible artifacts of our knowledge creating efforts. Some students use the micro-blogging feature to essentially take public notes (the Wenger quote above was once such micro-note). Others concentrate on building off of other students’ blog posts – they enrich the dialogue and scaffold off of ideas. Still others share and write thoughtful pieces that can stand on their own or work as starting points for new paths of dialogue. Videos appear in the community about news or people of interest.

It all looks pretty messy at times. But underneath it you can often detect a series of themes or line of thinking, or bits of micro-sense-making. (An example of what I mean by micro-sense-making can be seen in this Google+ conversation on lurking.).

This ability to detect themes and lines-of-thinking is relatively more straightforward in a course setting that allows routine interaction with a common group of people. The challenge that intrigues me, though, as a knowledge management professional, is this: How do we get better at seeing the sense-making dance at 10x, 100x or 1000x the scale of a typical class?

Additional note added 16-Jan: What Wenger’s phrase leads me to wondering is, just what specific types of digital artifacts might be cues to important points in the knowledge sharing/creation process? (And the context here being enterprise knowledge management and collaboration). When we think about trying to measure the value of these E2.0 environments we typically look at participation data (number of people, time spent in digital activity, etc.) or we do some rear-view mirror analysis based on participants telling us stories of where and how they found value.

But – what if we could define and identify specific types of artifacts as indicators of key sense-making moments? What if we could look for the presence of those artifacts as indicators of something valuable happening? Or what if we could design spaces so that these key artifacts stand out a bit more? Wikis provide some insight here; the wiki article is the current state of best-thinking/research, while the discussion and editing functions allow all the messing sense-making and dialogue to happen.

The point is: I just am somewhat unsatisfied in my own practitioner’s capability to look at a large-scale collaboration system and “see” cues of real learning and knowledge-sharing happening — at least in the same way that I can see it on smaller scales. I’m looking for the tools to develop a practice of digital archeology.

Here’s to ‘acting as if’

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It is the beginning of a new academic quarter and I am back in the classroom – an enjoyable experience for me because it’s an opportunity to continue learning (and unlearning as well).

In the time I had to do a some reading before the quarter began, I stumbled across a wonderful 2010 piece by Marlene Fiol in the Journal of Management Inquiry: “Acting as if we were new.” In brief it is a call to action for organizational theorists and researchers to act as if the field were new – and thereby expand research conversations and embrace being wrong.

In the article she quotes organizational theorist John Van Maanen, who said (tongue in cheek) during a 2006 speech: “In the long run we will all be dead. In the long run we will all be wrong. A wonderful scholarly career can be had only when the former precedes the latter.” To which Fiol adds her wish: That at the end of her life’s work, much of her research would prove to be wrong most of the time, providing the opportunity to search again.

So here’s to acting as if we were new – no matter what field in which we believe we are expert. Embrace being wrong and the new opportunities to explore.