Practical Attractors

2022-04-21 by cense

Attractor mapping is a method we’ve written about before. It’s a visual means of tracking where we pay attention and where energy is created, sustained and organized.

Energy is represented through attention, action, activity, and interactions. Energy is dissipative and it’s dynamic. This means that we can’t ‘set and forget’ our exploration of attractors. What we learn about where energy is today is likely to change in the near future.

How do we practically use attractors?

Mapping is the key starting point. Mapping, as we’ve described elsewhere, involves paying attention to where patterns of activity are generated. These patterns may be beneficial, problematic, or neutral relative to our goals and needs.

Once the patterns have been identified, it’s important to engage in a sensemaking process to determine what we see and what we imagine might be happening. Sensemaking is a social process that involves looking at data, interrogating it (asking questions about its function, fit, completeness, and patterns), and then devising meaning from it. Ask: what is the significance of what it is that we see? How does what we see fit with what we know and what does it challenge?

Sensemaking is about learning-in-action and making sense of complexity.

Sensemaking, Evaluation and Attractors

With attractors, we are looking at new emergent patterns so it may not be obvious. Consider the example of the early days of the global Pokemon Go game that involved people taking their phones to parks and public squares to play with augmented reality actors. To the untrained eye, this looked bizarre (see the picture above). Yet, when we watch the patterns we see they are shaped by the game, but more importantly, it brings people literally together in the real world. Some of the emergent patterns that came from this were friendships, collaborations (around the game), and a burgeoning community of Pokemon Go players.

The next step is to take the insights we generate from our sensemaking process to align what we learn with what we seek to do. This is connecting strategy and data together. This means clarifying your intent and the desired impactthat your organization seeks.

This is where evaluation comes in. Evaluation can serve as a means to help clarify the strategic intent and take advantage of attractors. Evaluation links intent and action together. This is what the heart of a strategy is all about: aligning the resources, intentions, and actions together to produce an outcome.

Evaluation looks at what is happening through the lenses of strategy and data. It connects the two together.

Putting it into Practice

The lessons for attractors are:

Start with a system. A system is a set of boundaries that contain interactions. These boundaries might be geography, time, markets, populations, contexts or something that helps define the situation you’re looking at. If you look at a system and feel lost, you probably have boundaries that are too broad (try narrowing them, including more constraints). If you constantly are looking outside the system for explanations, you might want to broaden your constraints.
Pay attention. Build observation skills to start looking within a system. What’s happening? Use everything from observation to quantitative data points (e.g., customer numbers, counts, requests, etc..) to stories and more.
Sense make Come together with those who might have different perspectives on your team or beyond to help make meaning from what you see. What patterns did you expect? What surprises you? What’s unknown? What do you need more data on?
Strategize Develop a plan that fits the context. In highly dynamic situations this might mean developing a shorter-term plan. Consider what forces are influencing the attractors and amplifying their effects or whether or not you wish to avoid or dampen those effects if they are not beneficial.
Design Take the steps to design an approach, service, product, policy or overall organization plan to meet these needs. Using the steps in the Design Helix you can gather information and bring all of what you’re seeing together to shape things and create impact.

Repeat these often.

That’s bringing attractors to life in practice.

Do you want or need help in putting this into practice? Would some coaching or strategic advice help you out? If so, reach out and let’s chat over a coffee or tea about how we can help you.

Creating Glue: Viewing Change as an Index

2022-04-01 by cense

Change-making is not a singular thing, rather it is viewed more as an index. That means that the more of these different factors that are present, the greater the likelihood of change.

We recently concluded the first season of Censemaking: The Innovation Podcast looking at this idea of the index and introducing the last of the ten factors: glue. Glue brings together our strategies, processes, techniques and tools (one of the other factors).

Ten Factors for Change

The previous factors that have each been profiled in episodes in that first season are:

Knowledge
Skills
Confidence
Outcome Expectations
Conditions
Environment
Social Support
Time and Space
Tools
Glue

This first season has focused on the building blocks of change. These ten factors that if applied in earnest can help us to grow and transform organizations, communities, and ourselves. We can think of these in two groups: individual-focused change and shared-focused areas of change.

A big myth that we’ve covered this season of the podcast is that we are the masters of our own change and destiny. While we do contribute a big deal to our own change efforts, we can’t separate ourselves from the communities, organizations, families, and teams around us who enable, constraint and support change.

The more of these things, we do the better, the quality of our performance, the amount of persistence and endurance of our efforts. The more likely we are to change specifically glue are the techniques, the methods and the strategies for change. They are something that connects all of these other factors together in the implementation of some type of plan to make changes.

Lessons from Season One

The first is that change Isn’t a single thing. It’s more of a combination of things that we think of less than the list and much more as an index. Second, tools, techniques, strategies, and practice are the glue that ties all of these individual factors. Third, we can design change if we know what to do, and we can draw these 10 factors together to help us innovate and create a difference in the world we’re looking to make.

This is a design challenge. Glue is the systemic design of our organizations or our own personal practices that build up strategies to leverage all ten of these. We’re rarely successful with all of these, but by viewing them as an index it gives us something to focus on for improvement. We also can optimize those things working well to compensate for those areas that are not. Success comes because we have many avenues to change, not just one or two.

This is a different way to view change, but one that we’ve seen show the truth in our many years of working as change-makers and strategic designers.

If you want to learn more about this, please contact us and we can help. Censemaking: The Innovation Podcast is available wherever you get your podcasts.

Photo by olia danilevich

Futures and Optimism Bias

2022-02-25 by cense

Futures (thinking) and strategic foresight can be powerful tools to help us to plan and see opportunities and threats ahead of us. When we can imagine what might happen it’s easier for us to plan for it. Futures work allows us to anticipate what could be so we can adapt better to what is now.

Good strategic foresight involves drawing on trends and patterns to create scenarios, envision possible futures, and assess risks and benefits. It is, however, a product of our present. When we use futures and foresight we begin with stating our assumptions. As we wrote recently on Censemaking, it is the willingness of futurists to see preferred, positive, and optimistic futures that they often neglect things we dislike. Just listen to the assessment on the Globalist of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and you’ll hear how badly the West got its futures thinking wrong.

Assumption Building

The first step in any futures or strategic foresight project is assumption finding, building, and assessment. We begin by asking ourselves: what do we believe to be true about the situation?

We continue asking: what do we believe about the past, the present, and the future?

Another key tool we use is the Third Position Strategy where we begin asking questions about our beliefs from a ‘third’ position that is not us. Another is the What Went Wrong approach which is a post-hoc review of what we’ve already done. After-action Reviews are other ways to help assess what kind of beliefs we had about something and the effect of that thinking on action.

These two approaches combined with some exploratory design research help us surface assumptions.

Assumption Testing

We also advocate asking these questions and using these techniques ahead of engaging in futures work. There is no ‘correct’ answer to these questions and there may be multiple answers.

Do we see the situation through a lens of optimism or pessimism?
What would someone who is not like me to see in this situation?
What are the fundamental beliefs about human nature that guide our thinking?
How is the situation we are looking at (past, present, future) similar to what’s happened before?
How might we see the situation differently?

By asking these questions and building narratives that can challenge and confirm the answers we can better ensure that our futures thinking is less prone to unhelpful bias.

Futures building is all about beliefs and assumptions. What’s important is that we recognize, acknowledge, and remember the ones we bring.

Futures and strategic foresight work is a means of seeing what might come before it does. It’s a big part of what we do at Cense. For help in bringing this perspective to your organization, contact us and let’s grab a coffee.

Photo by Alex wong on Unsplash

Clarifying Your Intent and Impact

2022-01-07 by cense

There are a handful of universal practices that transcend technique, tools, and strategy. Paying attention is one of these. Choosing what to pay attention to is more tricky.

Intentional practice is just as it sounds: do something with purpose. This sounds simple — it is simple– but it’s among the most powerful practices for discovery, innovation, and performance. Being intentional requires that we know what we value, what value we seek to create, and how well we are doing.

This allows us to apply methods like the Copy Cat Method to learn from others. Our intentional practice also leverages something called attractors — energy directed toward an activity.

Noise Reduction

Noise — unhelpful information in its relevance, salience, or quantity – is everywhere. We find noise almost everywhere. Noise increases as data is generated and shared. Our ability to attend to it all is compromised by the volume available to us. What intentional practice does is it forces us to consider what is most important and when.

When we are intentional about what we are doing we create a noise filtering system that allows us to better judge data.

Getting intentional means being clear on what you want. It’s about working as an organization to ask explicitly about values and the kind of impact desired.

A useful tool to help this along is a variation of the Personal Moral Inventory Checklist developed by Dom Price. This checklist basically requires us to assess our performance across four different areas of impact outlined in the image below.

This tool designed for individuals can be modified for organizations in helping to generate a connection between the choice of activities and the perceived impact of those activities. This can only be done by creating a tighter, simple coupling of activity, intent, and perceived impact.

Using Simple Inventories

What the above inventory does is make things simple, reduce noise, and focus us on the core principles and values of our work. We recommend using something like this — there are many options — as part of a values and value clarification exercise. Bring together your team and give some time to ask yourselves three questions:

What do we stand for?
What kind of impact do we want to express through that stance
How well are we doing?

These simple questions can help you to clarify your core beliefs and values, determine what kind of value you wish to create through your work, and assess progress on those values. It’s simple, powerful and something that ought to be done every 6-12 months to best capture variation, changing circumstances, and provide a means to calibrate your strategy and operations.

If you want help facilitating this process in your organization. Contact us and let’s talk.

Habit Design: A Starting Place

2021-12-30 by cense

Among the greatest means to promoting sustained behaviour change is to create healthy (beneficial) habits. The science of behaviour change provides many recommendations for how to form, break, and maintain good habits.

While we often believe that beliefs change habits, we often find that behaviours themselves can just as profoundly affect our beliefs.

There are many ways to shape the design of habits with good research and we’re going to introduce you to a few of them.

Pay attention. The first step toward understanding habits is recognizing which ones we have — as individuals and organizations. Doing sufficient research to observe and record the degree to which we perform an activity repeatedly is essential. A habit is something that requires little or no conscious decision-making. It’s not that we don’t know it doesn’t exist, we just do it with the most minimum amount of ‘friction‘. Observation, recording, and reflection all contribute to this part of the process.
Model the benefits. All of our habits benefit us in some ways. The key is to determine what those benefits are and if those habits are harmful or detrimental to our goals. By knowing what we are doing we can begin to change what we do. By understanding the benefits of harmful or unproductive habits we can also start to determine how we might be able to replace them down the road with our designs.
Understand history. How salient is a habit? Once we know what we do, it’s important to see how strong habits are. For example, someone who started using cigarettes two weeks ago will have a different habit structure than someone who’s smoked for 25 years. Whether its consumer habits, health, productivity, or otherwise, the salience and strength of a habit is tied partly to a person’s history with that behaviour. The same applies to organizational practices as well.
Model the context. It’s not enough to know what we do, it’s important to understand what context we do it in. The environment is a powerful force in shaping what habits we engage in and to what degree. By understanding our context, including how and what triggers our habit, we can start to begin to re-design this context. This can be done by tracking what behaviour is performed, where, and what other variables were present at the time.
Identify leverage points. A leverage point is something that can be adjusted — amplified or reduced — that can yield large benefits indirectly within a system of activities. Most of what we seek to change is one behaviour among many that are, as we’ve seen, often connected to one another. For example, to use the cigarette example, many smokers cite drinking alcohol as a co-habit (the two are done together). In this case, reducing or changing the way one behaviour is done can also affect the other. This is called habit stacking. It’s having one behaviour affect another.

By engaging in systematic inquiry — observation, interviews, surveys, or reflective practice — we can start to illuminate some of these powerful hidden forces that shape and direct our choices and behaviour.

Try these methods out. The application does not need to be complicated, just systematic.

Need help or want more detailed design research to help your organization change and design for something different? We can help you – contact us.

Photo by Drew Beamer on Unsplash