Tools for Dialogue and Deliberation on Wicked Problems
tone and civility in sensemaking
Jack Park wrote on his blog about how the organization of a book on "Seasteading: Ocean Colonies" could be used as the basis for a mapping exercise. You find a little back and forth in the comments about civility and what is and is not appropriate/useful in a sensemaking discussion.
For me the issue of tone and civility is both an interesting and vital aspect any group, especially the explicit and implicit ways in which groups establish local norms. Understanding this topic is, I think, crucial to building a sensemaking community and seeding others — as well as an important input to tool design.
Jack wrote, "sensemaking requires civil, thoughtful and scholarly commentary.... [T]erms like lunatic or critical comments about individuals or groups are [not] appropriate even if I happen to agree (or disagree) with such comments."
I, and I expect most of us, agree with Jack's sentiments, but my agreement comes with a qualifier: I want that kind of civility only up to the point beyond which it begins to suck the humanity out of our interactions. The opposite of having a discussion that is too emotionally loaded, too insensitive to the diverse backgrounds of its participants, is having one that is too sterile and devoid of natural human feeling. Feelings are data points too.
We've all seen the on-line forums/blogs/websites that relish — sometimes encourage — sharp, partisan rhetoric, the ironic put-down, and visceral hate-speech. I take it as a given that the members of Global Sensemaking want nothing to do with that. I also take it as a given that a remark innocently offered as a colorful evaluation of an idea (the use of the adjective "lunatic" in the case at hand) can be heard by some as a painful criticism that crosses the line of civil discourse while not triggering any special response in others.
[I'm still learning about the members of our group. So far I haven't found anyone with an expertise in psychology, group dynamics, learning theory, or team/community building. If that's actually the case, we should consider finding people with those skills, and I can offer some candidates.]
I have an idea for another sub-group focused on community building which I'll pursue elsewhere. For this thread, however, I'm soliciting your thoughts on what constitutes useful sensemaking discourse; how we handle the subjective question of what's civil, useful, scholarly; and whether or not you think any of this is an appropriate topic for this group.
For me the issue of tone and civility is both an interesting and vital aspect any group, especially the explicit and implicit ways in which groups establish local norms. Understanding this topic is, I think, crucial to building a sensemaking community and seeding others — as well as an important input to tool design.
Jack wrote, "sensemaking requires civil, thoughtful and scholarly commentary.... [T]erms like lunatic or critical comments about individuals or groups are [not] appropriate even if I happen to agree (or disagree) with such comments."
I, and I expect most of us, agree with Jack's sentiments, but my agreement comes with a qualifier: I want that kind of civility only up to the point beyond which it begins to suck the humanity out of our interactions. The opposite of having a discussion that is too emotionally loaded, too insensitive to the diverse backgrounds of its participants, is having one that is too sterile and devoid of natural human feeling. Feelings are data points too.
We've all seen the on-line forums/blogs/websites that relish — sometimes encourage — sharp, partisan rhetoric, the ironic put-down, and visceral hate-speech. I take it as a given that the members of Global Sensemaking want nothing to do with that. I also take it as a given that a remark innocently offered as a colorful evaluation of an idea (the use of the adjective "lunatic" in the case at hand) can be heard by some as a painful criticism that crosses the line of civil discourse while not triggering any special response in others.
[I'm still learning about the members of our group. So far I haven't found anyone with an expertise in psychology, group dynamics, learning theory, or team/community building. If that's actually the case, we should consider finding people with those skills, and I can offer some candidates.]
I have an idea for another sub-group focused on community building which I'll pursue elsewhere. For this thread, however, I'm soliciting your thoughts on what constitutes useful sensemaking discourse; how we handle the subjective question of what's civil, useful, scholarly; and whether or not you think any of this is an appropriate topic for this group.
Views: 66
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Jack Park on
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Thanks Andy.
I am most happy if we can just learn to not call names, and use simple arguments like "I disagree because..." instead of "You're wrong" or "That's stupid", etc. If you think someone is off in "lala land" with an idea, rather than pounce on it, just ask a question about how the idea would be implemented, what are its downsides, etc, or just ignore it and let it die.
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Permalink Reply by Andy Streich on
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I agree with you, Jack, in a very heartfelt manner and appreciate the way you forthrightly made your position known in the comments on your blog post. That's leading by example. So too was the statement, I think from David Horton, that you were pushing back on, that seasteading was a lunatic idea. In my view, David was stating a truism: that, in a world of too many people using too many resources, the idea of seasteading was indeed and without any exaggeration completely lunatic. I took it as a sign of David's insight that he so quickly labeled it as such and a shorthand for a whole set of arguments. (And it's interesting that seasteading wasn't the point of your post which was about finding a example for topic mapping if I recall correctly. Yet another data point for the tool builders.)
What I'd like to do here is delve into this issue a little deeper, because I think it is quite relevant to what Global Sensemaking is all about.
First and foremost, Global Sensemaking is a group activity, and the subject chosen as an exemplar, climate change, elicits strong reactions from people on both sides of the issue. Deniers take it as a sort of misguided socialist plot, and some of its champions strongly condemn anyone who isn't willing to give up driving, flying, and eating meat. I think every member of this group is familiar with the extreme views. (Note: my use of the term "deniers" is potentially offensive as well.)
A useful, practical sensemaking tool needs to take a position on how to handle strong emotional reactions and quick labeling. At a minimum, in my view, a tool needs a way to flag certain statements as "needing rational support."
A group tackling important global issues also needs a way of handling, accommodating, acknowledging, or perhaps (although I hope not) eliminating visceral speech acts. Who gets to decide what sort of statement is "over the top" or "beyond the pale"? What sort of processes are available to the group to deal with hard-edged conflict? Where does authority and decision making lie?
It's exactly at these points of strong tension that we need help from tools, social norms, and group processes to push the dialog forward in a constructive way.
For me, this leads to a discussion of requirements: Who are our users? How do we characterize them? What sorts of use-cases are we going to entertain?
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Andy, it is so tempting to follow my own advice and just walk away from this thread, but I'll be stupid and ignore it just this one time (though I am just as liable to screw up, myself). That you insist on following another lead, repeating the statement that a particular concept is "lunatic", is telling. A Bohmian Dialogue would insist that we not jump to such conclusions at least until we know why. Enough said.
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Jack, I'm glad you made the effort to stay engaged in this discussion in spite of being put off my use of the term "lunatic" with respect to seasteading. If seasteading itself were the topic of discussion I'd defend my use of that label, but in this thread and the one on your blog, it's not. If in either place someone said in passing "seasteading is brilliant" I wouldn't expect them to explain why they believe that until the topic or the person's position on it became relevant to the converstation.
What I'm trying to get at is how we as a group determine what sort of behavior is acceptable and not. One part of that is coming to some kind of agreement about what presumptions we make about each other in this early "get to know you" phase of the group.
Elsewhere (this discussion) I asked "how does one enter this group?" precisely because expected there to be some established norms. If we're explicitly engaging in a Bohmian Dialog (I don't think we are) then that needs to be stated.
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Thank you very much, Andy, for correctly pointing out that my blog entry was not about seasteading, that it was instead about a document that happened to be created within that rubric. The blog was to introduce the idea of issue mapping, perhaps as a group exercise, the many issues raised in that document precisely because they are representative of many of the issues we must eventually map into global sensemaking events.
As George pointed out, now is not the time to propose solutions and I believe you are correctly pointing out that I did not propose seasteading as a solution. Were we to introduce a forum, think issue map, on solutions, then "seasteading" is an appropriate idea node in such a map. In that case, I am comfortable in guessing that people like Jeff Conklin would never put a "con" node in the map that says "lunatic". Rather, he would listen for hints in the dialogue that suggest reasons why the concept is or is not suitable.
In another forum, George is now asking a very important question, and that is how we can be effective in the sensemaking process. I will toss in here my thought, which pertains precisely to this thread. I believe that the global climate change issue really is related to energy uses by humans, among many other causally related concepts. Human energy uses are similarly related to human behaviors, and human behaviors are similarly (some might suggest: fractally) related to human attitudes. Attitudes are reflected in human discourse. Those are my beliefs. Your mileage might vary. In any case, I also believe this: if we, as sensemakers, are to be effective (successful), we must engage all stakeholders. If, in the course of any of our deliberations, we manage to brand any stakeholder or stakeholder tribe as "lunatic", how does one expect that tribe to become engaged?
There really is a big picture going on here. Tug on one and you are tugging on all, to borrow from something George said (I think). I do not feel that such a self-selected, passionate, articulate, and otherwise well-educated tribe of sensemakers such as this should be in the habit of trash-talking about other tribes and their beliefs. We are supposed to be perceived as above that if we are to engage all tribes in the necessary dialogues and other sensemaking activities.
Thanks again, Andy, for really paying attention to what I said. The punch line of my initial rant on civil discourse could be summarize thus: were we each, in the course of textual discourse such as this, thinking in terms of contributing nodes to an issue/dialogue map, we would not need or perhaps even think to use such terms as "lunatic" or "get real". Rather, we would craft our phrases and sentences as if they were titles of nodes, each intended to explicitly state some concept that contributes to the meanings entailed in the graph.
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Permalink Reply by David Horton on
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Look, I really wasn't going to comment again, or indeed bother coming back. Since registering with this group I have been trying to work out what it was for, what you were all trying to achieve. I could see there were flow charts, project management type tools, decision making software, and I could see that many of you were experts on this. But I couldn't see the purpose, couldn't see what it was that these tools were going to be applied to, by this group of bright and highly qualified people, so I stayed out.
Then I saw Jack Park's note on the "seasteading" concept, and what I assumed was a plan to examine such a proposal to determine its practicalities and implications, as a kind of test for how you would go about systematically looking at proposals which have arisen from the kind of ideological/political/populist media soup that seems to drive planning for the future these days. Ah, I thought, so that's what we (at last thinking myself potentially part of the group) are about. Given a world under the dire threat of global warming we need to carefully examine the kind of threats we are faced with, and also to look at the kind of technological fix/geo-engineering proposals that keep emerging.
So I thought I would add another possible topic - seeding the atmosphere with Sulphur to produce global dimming/cooling. Not a new idea, but recently resurrected along with such ideas as dumping iron into the oceans, or breeding gm plankton. It seems to me that proposals like this, along with already active ideas like "clean coal", burying CO2, biofuels, shale oil, nuclear power, war in Iraq, come from an ideology that, among other things, wants to continue business as usual by whatever methods can be sold to the public. To do anything in fact except reduce energy consumption and increase renewable energy use. The seasteading proposal though, looks to me more like the ultimate in gated communities for the rich. This strand of thinking understands, secretly, the coming ecological disaster, but thinks that the rich can buy themselves out of it. And perhaps they can. But all such proposals could lend themselves to careful analysis, as could the exact nature of the effects of global warming (is ocean acidification a serious problem for example, what are the real threats from tropical diseases spreading north and south, can ecosystems and their component species adapt to the changes in their habitats, and so on).
So I dipped my toe in, agreeing that the seasteading idea could do with examination, and suggesting turning the sky yellow as another fit topic for analysis. I thought others might join in, suggesting the kinds of topics I've hinted at above, and then looking at ways to go about considering implications of such plans. To my great surprise the response was to instead tell me off for hinting in passing that the Friedmans, grandfather, father and now son, have not been a family you could look to for great ideas, and that the idea of seeding the air with sulphur might not be the smartest suggestion for dealing with global warming ever made. I had assumed that all members of this group would probably agree with those propositions, otherwise why would you be planning to look critically at such schemes? Critical analysis has not been a feature of political decision making by the Right over many years, particularly the last decade.
I don't know Jack Park, and he doesn't know me, but I should say that I am far too old to be taken to task like an errant schoolboy and told to mind my manners or stand in the corner. If this isn't a group for frank discussion (and no, I don't mean personal abuse and character assassination, if you read my blog you will see that while I don't suffer fools gladly I am not personally nasty to individuals, just their ideas at times) then what is its point? If the topic of Iraq comes up, for example, am I supposed to pretend that there are two sides to the story, and that Cheney et al were full of good intentions? Do I seriously argue for and against drilling for oil in the Arctic, and pretend that Senator Inhofe is a credit to his state?
So, did I find myself in the wrong group by mistake?
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My feelings are similar to yours, David. I don't think either of us are in the wrong group, rather we need to be active in clarifying what the group is about. I took a shot at that in this discussion (can we get a CSS change to make links more obvious?) which led to the formation of a new subgroup but hasn't yet begun to answer my initial question about group purpose, vision, etc.
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Permalink Reply by George E. Mobus on
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We probably all need to be sensitive to a variety of norms for discourse from the standpoint of different cultures say things differently and with this narrow bandwidth (no body language, no facial expressions) it is very hard to tell, for me anyway, when some phrasing is critical or supportive. I've made many mistakes myself in conversing via e-mail with people from cultures other than my own (of course some would say I make mistakes even within my own culture!) But standards of what counts as civil are not yet universal, as far as I know. So a modicum of tolerance on everyone's part might be a good starting place.
Just as a suggestion for how to learn about one another without unleashing sentiments: If we could focus for a time on analysis of the problems and avoid talking about solutions we might get to understanding of each others' styles and language habits better. Focusing on the problem statements and analysis thereof tends to be more fact-based and less opinion-prone. I don't mean to suggest we shut down interesting conversations. But we might need to establish boundaries around specific areas, like blogs are for open ideas, but the group discussions are for analysis until there is consensus that the problem(s) has been reasonably described and the group acknowledges it is time to start building solutions.
It's just a suggestion, meant to generate some discussion. I only make it because I have seen it work, as I have seen too often groups dissolve in disagreement over opinions.
If any of this makes sense (that is what we are here for after all) good. Otherwise, ignore it. You won't hurt my feelings!
George
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Explicitly establishing norms (or boundaries) as part of the initial group work is useful for several reasons. Obviously, the output is an agreement that anyone can refer to when the inevitable conflicts arise. "Remember we agreed to handle that this way." It's also establishes a baseline which can change as the group evolves, and new members have something help orient themselves in the group. Perhaps as importantly, it gets the new group's members interacting with each other in an initial, short-term exercise to get something useful done, something in which everyone participates. The output can be as succinct as a few sentences.
If we were face-to-face I'd offer to lead that exercise (something like this is in all the management training schemes, and I have my favorite approach), but I'm never done it in a purely on-line setting. I'll have to give it some thought. One friend who does this for a living calls them group charters. Maybe I can find a sample output to share or get one from him.
Usually it's just a one pager: What's the purpose of the group? How do we interact to achieve it? How are new members added? How do we modify this charter?
It's a sensemaking exercise. If one output of this group is sensemaking tools, seems like knocking out a charter for a sensemaking group would be quite easy to do.
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If you want to take the lead on making suggestions I will certainly participate. I agree it needs to be done. David, any thoughts?
George
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Permalink Reply by Mark Szpakowski on
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I would hoist up this topic a level higher, and suggest that beyond even the practice of civility and tone in discussions, and paying explicit attention to that as part of group process, there is the question of including ourselves, as the human participants, explicitly in the whole systems picture of effecting change through analysis and care, individually and as a group.
As David mentioned in the blog comments on the Sea project, theories and practices (emphasis on the latter word) offered by World Café, Theory U, Dialoguing and others are too important to ignore: technical solutions alone do not address the self-reflexive nature of the problems we are addressing, which include us as part of the problem.
Re dialoguing and discussion, one motto I like is be a warrior without anger. For me that means don't flinch from addressing the sharp edges of the issue, don't hide in willful ignorance (often the instinctive polite and safe thing to do), but it also means to watch my own aggression. Communication without aggression is in the long run more effective. As an example, I recently saw Jimmy Carter being interviewed by Larry King, and was impressed at how well he lives up to that motto. I wish I could be as unflinching yet without aggression as he was.
On what I think is the even bigger picture (but for which this topic of civility is essential), I'll post a separate message: I think it actually fits in Global Sensemaking U.
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