Moya’s “Trickle Learning” post has had me reflecting for a few weeks now, and the Story Exchange website she mentions is obviously working in an amazing way.
I have wanted to share another “slow” story project I’ve been working on with Matt Moore for the past 18 months or so. Matt and I were discussing what you would actually do in an expertise management programme, and we realised that while there is a lot of literature about expertise as a characteristic of individual people, there’s actually very little about how expertise works in social/corporate settings. And we didn’t really have a good sense of the different ways that expertise was being leveraged (or not) across different organisation types.
So we started our “Using and Leveraging Expertise” project by starting a story-collecting blog at first sight very similar to Moya’s. The main difference is that ours is not the product of a community of practitioners, but an open space for anyone anywhere to contribute – which probably accounts for the very low levels of conversation on that blog compared to Moya’s.
But we also wanted some structured help in figuring out the larger patterns of behaviour around expertise, and so about 3 months after we started the project, we started running sensemaking workshops with knowledge management practitioners around the world – we put up a gallery of the stories collected on the blog, we ask them to share their own stories, then they tag the stories for values, attitudes and behaviours, from which they abstract archetypal characters that represent typical behaviours around expertise, and finally they come up with issue statements that capture the essence of what they see going on in the stories.
It’s a sensemaking technique developed by Dave Snowden in the belief that a body of stories is best interpreted by the community from which they come.
So far we’ve run seven workshops on different continents (and I think Matt is running one in the UK even as I write this post) – and as an open research project, we are posting the workshop outputs as we run them.
After a number of workshops we had enough new insights to open up a more structured survey to explore some of the themes that were emerging in a little more depth. This has been running for almost a year now, and I reported on the first emerging insights from this survey at KM World in November of 2009.
Later this year, we’ll start consolidating the outputs from the sensemaking workshops and the survey, and put some sort of shape to them. The next plan is to take them on the road for another round of workshops looking at the “so what?” from the project – what have we learned, and what can we do about this?
What this has illustrated for me is how rich stories can be, especially when gathered widely and then turned over again and again by different groups of people. They are not a one-time resource, but a source of focus and reflection in lots of different and multiple ways. We’ve learned a lot, and I think the people who have worked with us have also gotten value out of being involved – and yes, you can too! Add a story to the blog, contribute to the survey, or offer to host a workshop!