Sensemaking techniques in support of leadership development

Large companies looking to explore and solve complex business challenges are adopting proven techniques to get the most out of their efforts. Charles Palus and Albert Selvin outline the results of a leadership-development workshop that used Compendium, a methodology offering a way to visually map and connect ideas, and examine the implications for knowledge management.

Recently Verizon Communications and the Center for Creative Leadership have been collaborating on R&D to help leaders face and resolve complex challenges. A principle part of that effort has involved experimenting with tools and processes for better ‘sensemaking’, that is, for paying attention to diverse and often chaotic information about critical challenges, and creating shared understanding in support of mindful action.

In this brief case report we focus on illustrating a set of techniques, called Compendium, that make sense of complexity, as applied during a two-day leadership development workshop. We look at the outcomes achieved via Compendium, and the implications for the fields of knowledge management and leadership development.

Compendium was originally developed for internal use at Verizon. It is available for use by others under a no-cost license. Verizon is currently evaluating the release of the code for open-source management in the public domain.

The workshop had two sets of goals. The first was to mutually explore, and then begin to solve selected urgent – but frustratingly complex – challenges facing a business unit. The second was to develop leadership capacity within this group, including enhanced sensemaking competencies, and an enhanced leader-to-leader network of relationships.[1] Participants were executives from different geographic regions and functional groups within a business unit of a large corporation. Many of the participants had never met face to face before the session. By the end of the workshop, two action-learning teams were formed to address targeted aspects of the challenges explored.

Faculty members from the Center for Creative Leadership facilitated the workshop. Albert Selvin served as the Compendium practitioner, he operated the software and assisted in various facilitation functions.

Compendium offers a way to visually map and connect ideas. Ideas are shown as text-filled icons on a screen. Conversations are mapped as they unfold, producing a richer record than normal minutes. Because it is done on a computer, ideas can be connected in many ways, for example, by clustering ideas together, joining ideas with graphical lines and sharing keywords. Compendium enables groups of people to build knowledge on the fly. It allows teams to combine informal, exploratory discussion with formal problem-solving frameworks. Compendium makes the resulting knowledge available for re-use and expansion via a robust database (MS Access) and a variety of display and reporting formats (for example, hyperlinked HTML pages, MS Word, and a visual map of nodes and links). Originally developed at Verizon as a methodology for cross-functional business-process redesign, and for addressing ‘wicked’ problems pertaining to telephone operations (for example, Y2K planning among diverse stakeholders), Compendium has been applied to more than 70 projects in a variety of organisations.[2]

An important research question of ours begins: What if we took this set of Compendium techniques, as originally developed for making sense of wicked technical problems, and adapted it for the use of leaders facing complex business challenges?

The workshop

The following description of the workshop is not exhaustive. Rather, we show how the Compendium techniques are used to help build shared and useful knowledge within the group. In the interests of confidentiality we have withheld or disguised the details of that knowledge.

One of the initial exercises is called visual explorer (VE).[3] Participants had done preparation work to identify a key challenge they were facing. They were then instructed to walk around and look at approximately 200 pictures spread out on the floor in the hallway outside the conference room. They were asked to look for pictures that spoke to them in some way – not literal illustrations, but rather ones that triggered some metaphorical or emotional resonance. Each person was asked to select two pictures – one representing the current state of the challenge and one representing a pathway for taking action. After the individuals selected the pictures, they brought them back and discussed them in small groups according to a structured protocol. First the selector explains what they see in a picture, why they selected it and how it seems to speak of their challenge. Others in the group say what they see in the picture. The selector then gives his final comments, and the process moves on to the next person.

At this point, a few hours into the day, Compendium entered the proceedings. Each of the VE images had a serial number tied to a file name of thumbnail images stored on a laptop computer, which also had the Compendium software installed. The practitioner created a map with each participant’s name linked to two question nodes: ‘present state?’ and ‘future state?’. These were then linked to the associated VE image. The entire map was projected on a shared display.

The practitioner made this map to serve as a reference for later use, both in the two-day session and in subsequent individual work, documents and future sessions. It was only shown briefly during the workshop, at several points, but served as a starting point for subsequent work by the participants. As with all Compendium maps, it also served as a database record of sorts –other appearances of any of the image nodes, or any of the nodes referencing the individual participants, can be queried to find out, for example, which images were selected by which person. The software is designed so that all information resides in a relational database.

The facilitators then led the participants in a dialogue about their collective challenges.[4] Compendium was displayed on a screen at the front of the room and the participants’ initial response was captured in real time. At this point of the proceedings, the practitioners and facilitators only intermittently directed the participants to look at the screen. This was only done when it seemed as though the group would benefit from clarifying a particular point (“does this capture what you said?”) or to refocus the discussion by tying it to an already voiced question or idea. Most of the time the Compendium practitioner typed continuously, forming participants’ statements into question or idea nodes, and deciding what to link them to, as well as what to capture and how. This went on for quite a while, surfacing many issues and assumptions that were facing the organisation as a whole.

The dialogue was started by posing a set of organisational challenge statements that the company’s president had outlined earlier in the year. One of the exercise’s goals was to bring those abstract statements (‘top down’) into relation with the immediate, tangible and tactical challenges that the participants were facing (‘bottom up’).

At this point in the initial Compendium-supported dialogue, the practitioner made minimal attempts to guide or shape the conversation, emphasising the verbatim ‘capturing’ of the participants’ statements more than shaping or active construction. There are several reasons for this. One is to simply get a record of the discussion. Another is to capture the discussion as it happens in a form that allows its elements to be available for later use. The display is also used as one aspect of the facilitation for this particular session. This approach also gives each participant a sense of validation by having his or her comments added to the display. The mapping process involves aesthetic and technical choices appropriate to the situation. At other times and for other reasons, practitioners can employ more deliberate shaping, using pre-established structural templates for example.

The workshop participants then divided their visual attention between the screen and each other. They watched as the practitioner entered their words (or close paraphrases) in nodes, sometimes calling out corrections either to the current node or to a previous node as the meanings became refined or changed in the discussion. Corrections were sometimes made in a ‘review’ mode as either the practitioner, one of the facilitators, or one of the participants read through some portion of the discussion out loud. Most of the time, though, they looked at each other.

At one stage, one of the CCL facilitators asked if any of the chosen VE images illustrated any of the points raised in the general discussion. The participants identified such images and they were added to the map in context, as were the copious points made in the ensuing lively discussion. Note that this is a matter of re-using a node already created in the individually chosen map of images – an example of re-using knowledge elements on the fly.

During live sessions, it is often useful to show participants that an idea they have created or referenced in one context has been used in another. In the example above, the image selected had already been discussed by a small group of participants in the earlier VE exercise. Compendium has a special interface for displaying in which views a particular node appears.

In the afternoon of the first day, the facilitators asked the participants to review the Compendium discussion map as a prelude to reframing their challenge statements. The practitioner read through the map while the participants listened and watched the screen. The facilitators checked to make sure that the review seemed to match what the participants remembered, and had captured the sense of the morning’s discussion, correcting the map where necessary.

The facilitators then conducted the ‘reframing’ session, in which the participants would come up with alternative ways of talking about their major challenges, incorporating the dialogues they had had during the VE exercise and the subsequent Compendium discussion session. The purpose of reframing was to identify better ways of stating the essential challenges, thus leading to more robust solutions.

To introduce this, the facilitators presented some material about how to reframe challenges in order to achieve more robust results. They then conducted a brainstorming-style Compendium session where participants were asked to call out new challenge statements in the form of questions, starting with “How to …” (abbreviated as H2), “How do we …” (HDW), “In what way …” (IWW), etc. Participants were asked to pay attention to the screen and directly engage with how their questions were being captured and displayed. The practitioner captured each question in real time. He employed only minimal arranging, to keep more or less regular columns of questions on the screen. The exercise was not conducted as an open discussion; if new ideas were suggested by another participant’s question, the facilitators encouraged the participant to state the idea as another question.

When the screen was filled with brainstormed questions (38 in total), the participants stood in a circle near the screen. The facilitators asked the participants to point to the screen and move the brainstormed questions into groups that seemed to hang together (similar to affinity-group exercises traditionally conducted with sticky notes or index cards). During this, the participants were encouraged to touch the nodes, going up to the screen and physically moving them, instructing the practitioner exactly which nodes to move and where. When the participants were satisfied that they had created a set of more or less stable and coherent groups, the facilitators asked them to name the groups and then select images from the VE exercise that seemed to characterise the themes of each group.

Once completed, the group held a lengthy discussion on how to present the newly created information at a session with the group’s president the following morning. It was decided to present a ‘cleaned-up’ version of this last map, with individual participants taking the president through each of the themed groups. The practitioner agreed to create the cleaned-up views, while assuring the participants that the ‘messy’ views they had worked on would remain unaltered for future reference.

While the participants were working on other exercises led by the facilitators, the practitioner created the cleaned-up maps, HTML exports of the maps (an automated function of Compendium), and Word documents with the complete notes of the discussion and reframing exercises to be given out to the participants.

The next morning, all the participants were given the Word document with the complete notes from the previous day (13 pages), as well as the graphical HTML output with the cleaned up versions of the reframed challenge questions. The group’s president was given the graphical HTML printout to refer to during the subsequent two-hour dialogue session among all the participants, facilitators and himself. During the session, individual participants presented the grouped reframed questions by referring to the cleaned-up maps on the screen. The president then responded to the questions and the resulting discussion was captured on the screen in a new map linked to the challenge question.

After a productive discussion, the president left for another appointment. The participants held a debriefing discussion, and then moved on to the formation of action-learning teams that would tackle specific reframed challenges, later reporting back to the president and his senior leadership team. The workshop ended in the early afternoon. As the participants left they were given Word documents with all of the discussion notes from the morning’s meeting.

Discussion

We observed that the participants in this workshop had a generally favourable opinion of Compendium. A common observation was that it provided structure for the potentially diverse exploration and dialogue aspects of the workshop. Compendium offered several clear advantages compared to the more usual method of note taking.

First, participants now have a robust database in support of their action-learning projects. This database can be easily searched, built upon and formatted in a number of ways for their own use as well as presentation to others. This advantage first became apparent when the president held a dialogue on the second day. Participants were able to use the features of Compendium to prepare for this somewhat tricky encounter, in which they would be surfacing issues that were difficult to discuss with top management. At the same time, they were able to invite the president into the dialogue, by displaying the texture of their deliberations from the previous day. Likewise, the database, when combined with similar ones from other workshops, had much to contribute to a broader understanding of this organisation’s complex challenges.

Second, Compendium allowed us to combine the images from the VE session in the same map with text from the group dialogues. This proved to be very fruitful, helping participants more readily connect ‘business facts’ to the more metaphorical and emotional associations provoked by the images, and to then preserve and build on these often intriguing connections.

Finally, Compendium allowed us to re-use and restructure the knowledge maps during the session. Unlike a paper-based capture system, we were able to preserve the original maps, while at the same time copying them into new maps where the initial dialogue was sorted into themes and modified by deeper reflection. Also, unlike form-based or static graphical visualisations common in many knowledge-management systems, we were able to manipulate, and add to the graphic knowledge representation directly and in real time.

It is important to keep in mind that the entire session was conducted in a mostly improvisational manner. The structures used by the Compendium practitioner were not set up in advance or programmed in to the software (with the exception of the VE images already present on the hard drive). Compendium was not imposed on the workshop; rather, it reflected and responded to what was happening, including unanticipated twists and turns.

The ‘complexification’ of business issues requires networks of leaders working together. The associated processes of leadership need considerable support in handling often dispersed information, making shared sense of it, and creating and using the resultant shared knowledge. Compendium is therefore an example of what Weick and Meader call a ‘sensemaking-support system’ for leadership in the face of complexity.[5]

Our experience with this and similar cases has led us to an aspect of sensemaking-support systems that we believe to be of critical importance. When networks of leaders come together to work on complex challenges, it has been helpful to think in terms of what we call ‘knowledge art’. It is a mistake to think of Compendium as simply a software device or a set of facilitation techniques. Knowledge art is the application of artistic competencies and sensibilities to the processes of making sense and meaning out of complexity. The artistic aspect transforms a process that could otherwise be formulaic, reductive or hyper-rational into a creative, synthetic process resembling art making.

In this case, knowledge art is apparent in several ways. The content of Compendium’s shared display and database become something like clay that participants shape into larger structures. The best of these structures get re-used, eventually being crafted into formal ideas or statements of purpose. The visual-explorer images lend themselves to knowledge art by providing a stock of metaphors. These too are part of this clay, and tend to become crafted into shared narratives, in which the metaphors play out in various extensions and implications. The idea of ‘play’ is important to knowledge art. Participants test various combinations of their ideas, tell stories, improvise and explore metaphors with levity and humour. This humour is often a welcome foil for disarming anxiety around contentious issues. More subtly, Compendium provides a means of positively affecting the rhythm and timbre of the group conversation.[6] Typically the pace of conversation is fast, staccato and dominated by the most assertive participants. Compendium provides a way of occasionally and deliberately shifting this dynamic by reflecting back on what was said, seeking clarification, looking for patterns, or drawing attention to another part of the map. Finally, we suggest that the aesthetics of sensemaking are of great practical importance. It pays to use robust tools and inviting media that ‘handle’ well. The practice of a shared discipline will result in coherent works of ‘everyday art’ that are both emotionally and logically satisfying.

The appropriate methodology can add a great deal to the efficacy of groups gathered for the purpose of making sense of complex challenges. Those working with similar methodologies and similar groups would do well to consider the nature of knowledge art as adapted to their own environment.

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Yolan Williams, David M. Horth, Mary Lynn Pulley, Wilfred H. Drath and Simon Buckingham Shum for their contributions to this body of work.

Albert M. Selvin senior manager in the information technology group at Verizon Communications. He can be contacted at albert.m.selvin@verizon.com

Charles J. Palus, Ph.D. is research scientist at the Center for Creative Leadership. He can be contacted at palusc@leaders.ccl.org

References

1 For our understanding of the leadership sensemaking competencies useful for complex challenges, see Palus, C.J. & Horth, D.M., The Leader’s Edge: Six Creative Competencies for Navigating Complex Challenges (Jossey-Bass, 2002)

2 Selvin, A., Buckingham Shum, S., Sierhuis, M., Conklin, J., Zimmermann, B., Palus, C., Drath, W., Horth, D., Domingue, J., Motta, E. & Li, G., Compendium: Making Meetings into Knowledge Events. Knowledge Technologies conference (Austin TX, March 4-7, 2001) See www.compendiuminstitute.org/library/papers.htm.

3 The visual explorer is a product of the Center for Creative Leadership (www.ccl.org). See Palus, C.J. & Drath, W.H., ‘Putting something in the middle: an approach to dialogue’ in Reflections (3(2), 28-39, 2001)

4 Isaacs, W. Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together, (Random House, 1999)
Palus, C.J. & Drath, W.H., ‘Putting Something In The Middle: An Approach To Dialogue’ in Reflections (Society for Organisational Learning, 3(2), 2001)

5 Weick, K.E. & D.K. Meader, ‘Sensemaking and group support systems’ in L.M. Jessup & J.S. Valacich (Eds) Group Support Systems: New Perspectives (Macmillan 1993)

6 Conklin, J., Selvin, A.M., Shum, S.J.B., & Sierhuis, M., ‘Facilitated hypertext for collective sensemaking: 15 years on from gIBIS’, Tech Report 112, Knowledge Media Institute (The Open University, 2001) http://kmi.open.ac.uk/tr/papers/kmi-tr-112.pdf