Tag Archives: cognition

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.

Policy and Practice: A reading of Michael Pollan

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If you are like me and educating yourself on the systems underlying our un-sustainable behavior, reading Michael Pollan is an exercise in making the complex more approachable. In particular I am thinking about Pollan’s most recent piece in the New York Times Magazine, An Open Letter to the Next Farmer in Chief.

First of all I admire Pollan’s ability as a writer. But his most important skill, I think, is in expertly crafting a narrative that helps us get at two important things:

1) A model — a way of thinking about a complex issue that is profoundly simple, and powerful in the way it helps guide us in a productive direction. “We need to wean the American food system off itsheavy 20th-century diet of fossil fuel and put it back on a diet of contemporary sunshine.” Think about the power of the idea behind that model of thinking. What if we evaluated all of our food policy decisions on the basis of “does it increase or greatly accelerate our use of sunshine as a primary energy source?”

2) The link between policy and practice (and by “practice” I mean things that people actually do to get something done). A lot of what Pollan writes about in the “Open Letter” piece is a compelling story linking the establishment of policy and the resulting behaviors and practices.

On the latter point — the link between policy and practice — what I like most about the way he writes about it is that he appears to have a healthy respect for the ability to understand the power behind crafting policy. As with anything that is a powerful tool, it can be good, bad or confusing. Good policy moves us forward (ok…there is judgment behind what “move us forward” means…it requires a point of view…) — but in the end, good policy takes current context into consideration and good policy crafters have an understanding that context changes and therefore policies may run their course.

Read Pollan’s piece to understand the importance of look at our entire food production chain as a key issue in sustainability. But also read it as an example of deeply understanding the power of good models and good policy.

The Reflective Practitioner

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I am reading Donald Schon’s The Reflective Practitioner, which I highly recommend to anyone interested in understanding some of the important “soft stuff” of individual and organizational performance. Schon’s work is part of the line of thinking behind my approach to understanding how social responsibility evolves within organizations.

In his book, Schon looks deeply at several examples of expert practitioners helping more junior counterparts work through a problem. He does this to gain insight into how the experts think about fuzzy problems (i.e., an expert architect working with a student on a building design problem).

What he ends up with is “reflection-in-action,” which he defines as a structured process of “reflective conversation with a unique and uncertain situation.” Experts use their repertoire of experience and knowledge to reframe the problem into one which they believe they can solve, then test the consequences and implications of this reframing. This yields new problems, discoveries and opportunities — leading to additional reflection-in-action. Schon pictures experts literally conversing with the problem in this interative fashion.

In summary, experts are really good at reframing problems into something they can solve. But the process with fuzzy problems is not a reframing that yields “this is x, therefore y” but “this looks like x; let’s compare the two and see what happens.” The result is experimentation and new insights which lead to a solution through many interations.

How do experts get that way? Actual experience is critical (an expert’s “repertoire” only evolves from actually doing). But Schon’s examples of expert practitioners working with their junior counterparts also sheds light on the importance of an apprentice-like social interaction. By jointly working on fuzzy problems with experts, the junior practitiioners get in-the-moment insight into the expert’s reframing process and begin to construct their own unique version of this critical cognitive activity.