Category Archives for "Purpose"

0 Taxonomy of Conversation: Debating

Debating is the second of four types of conversation. How do we  experience each type online?

Here is what I wrote two Wednesdays ago:

Debating is where we listen from outside, dispassionately weighing evidence.  It is a marked improvement on downloading.  It requires debaters to think about what they are saying and what the other person is saying.  It is a gateway to types three and four because it requires listening to others and marshaling our arguments to meet theirs.  The problem is that like downloading it admits of nothing new.  This is why so many debates go on for years because neither side can ultimately hear what the other is saying.

I am a part-time theologian and enjoy debating with other theologians.

I find debates about God increasingly frustrating. This started some years ago, when Richard Dawkins and others stirred up the debate with books such as “The God Delusion” and of course the atheist bus campaign.

What tends to happen is the new atheists pick debates with fundamentalist Christians. I’ve found they share a concept of God I do not share. I don’t believe in the God of the fundamentalists and so agree with the atheists about that.

But the god they don’t believe in is the same god I don’t believe in. I find both fundamentalists and atheists tell me I am a liberal and not a proper Christian!

Well, thanks for that it’s as well to know where you stand!

What is Going on Here?

It is a good example of debate, where neither side need back down because they depend on the other for the integrity of their own view. Neither side can see the immense amount of common ground between them. The only thing they disagree about is whether they believe in this false god.

The God delusion is on both sides. This is common where debates reinforce both sides. It is very seductive. I’m sure friendships develop, sometimes people change sides but the debate never moves on. Debates reinforce both sides of the argument.

Instead of downloading material that supports my worldview, debating is about listening to your opponents to respond to their points in support of your own worldview. The opposing view therefore reinforces your view. Both sides become entrenched.

Debating online can be exciting and educational. But is it possible to go deeper? Have you been involved in an online conversation that has gone beyond debate?

0 Taxonomy of Conversation: Downloading

Last time I outlined four types of conversation. Today and the next three Wednesdays I shall look at each type in turn. My question is: how does each type of conversation find expression online (if it does)?  Today’s is about downloading.

I wrote:

The first kind of conversation is downloading.  This is where we listen from within our own story and consequently hear only what supports it.  I suppose this can be a bad habit of highly creative and motivated people where I listen for anything that supports my view. This can be healthy but where the listener listens in this mode only, they cease to hear other points of view as valid.

The word ‘download’ is presumably fairly recent and usually refers to transferring data from a server to a local computer. Whilst this type of conversation is named after this online practice, it has always been around.

The analogy with downloading from a server is helpful. Think about why you choose to download a file. You do it because you have an interest in the file. You are very unlikely to randomly download stuff. What would be the point?

You have a purpose and select what you download to meet that purpose. Your download might challenge your purpose but broadly your intention is to support your purpose.

This is perfectly legitimate; you do it when undertaking online learning, for example. You might download a video, watch it and perhaps act on its content. There is no obligation to act and that is the point.

Downloading does not have to be a conversation. You can show approval by liking something. You may be able to comment and a simple note of approval may be all you offer.

The owner of the information may value your approval but it doesn’t move their thinking along; many consumers of information never say a word.

And that is what downloading is: conversation as consumption of information. The recipient does not contribute anything other than approval or disapproval. There’s no community of learning, just individual consumers.

Clearly there is value in downloading for online learning but ultimately it’s limited. In your experience, what else do you need besides the download to take conversation to a higher level?

4 A Taxonomy of Conversations

Today, I introduce a ‘taxonomy of listening’.  Perhaps it is more accurate to think of it as a taxonomy of conversations.   I’ve adapted it from two books: Adam Kahane’s Solving Tough Problems pages 91 -92 and beyond.  Peter M Senge et al in Presence, describe the same taxonomy on pages 74f.

Outline Taxonomy of Conversations

Here is a brief review of their four types of conversation; different ways of paying attention.

1. The first type is downloading.  This is where we listen from within our own story and so hear only what supports it.  This can be a bad habit of highly creative and motivated people where they listen for anything that supports their view.  It can be healthy but where the listener listens in this mode only, they can fail to hear other points of view as valid.
2. Debating is where we listen from outside, dispassionately weighing evidence.  It is a marked improvement on downloading, requiring debaters to think about what they are saying and what the other person is saying.  It is a gateway to types three and four because it requires listening to others and marshaling our arguments to meet theirs.  The problem is that like downloading it admits of nothing new.  This is why so many debates go on for years because neither side can hear what the other is saying.
3. Reflection is where we listen from inside and hear ourselves reflexively and others with empathy.  It invites the listener to try on the insights of the other person to see if they might work for them.  It invites a more subjective understanding of unfamiliar points of view.
4. Generative dialogue is where we hear not just ourselves and others but the whole system.  We see ourselves within the whole; the role we play for good or ill.  This can be highly motivating when people experience it together.  This type of conversation can generate something new; an insight that no one person brought with them to the conversation.  Everyone leaves with insights that are completely new.

In the next four posts I shall look at these four types of conversation in more detail and their practice online.

What is your experience of these modes of conversation in real life or online?

1 Generosity of Spirit

Generosity is essential if you want to be successful online.

If you are promoting a cause, you are a teacher.  This applies as much online as it does in real life; whether you make a living from teaching or not.  It applies even if you are not qualified.

These days in the UK, we are told, schools are really businesses.  Most of my life they’ve been a part of the statutory sector.  I’m not sure I’m happy with this change but a lot depends on the teachers.  If a teacher is a business person, it is probably OK.  The prospect of business people running schools is far worse than the prospect of teachers becoming business people.

I was listening to a headteacher this week.  She was discussing how to attract and retain high quality staff.  This is a headache in most places; in my neck of woods, a disadvantaged area, schools have real problems.

Look, she said, (I paraphrase) the thing is you help teachers develop.  When teachers from your school become better qualified and move onto become deputies and head teachers, this attracts new teachers to your school.  Of course, if someone does well, they may move on but that’s OK.  Many will stay on if the school looks after them and the ones who leave enhance the school’s reputation and that will attract more high quality teachers.

Not only does this show good business sense but it is also good for the school.

And it’s also good for your online presence.  If you:

• care about people by offering good content, in time you will find people follow you.
• have something to sell, they are more likely to buy it.
• run a campaign, they’re more likely to join in.

The headteacher spoke a lot about values but never once mentioned generosity.  That’s the value I saw in her talk.

Do you have favourite websites that show similar generosity of spirit?

1 Science as Conversation

Two Wednesdays ago I wrote about three different types of conversation.  Of these, I’ve written about conversations between people and conversations as prayer.  Today it is the turn of science.

Conversation is about paying attention and this is the heart of scientific method.  You study data and formulate a hypothesis.  (The data might be the results of an experiment, scientific papers or textbooks, or a real life problem.)  You design experiments to test the hypothesis and then pay attention to the results.  Bad science is failure to attend to the results;  a bad experiment does not necessarily lead to bad science.

This scientific method leads to theories; theory implies there is no such thing as absolute certainty in science.  This is sometimes hard to understand; after all it is not difficult to point to the many successes of science.  But all theories are to some degree tentative.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Newtonian physics answered all the questions about mechanics and gravity.  Einstein noticed anomalies in the available data and came up with his theories of relativity.  In doing so, he did not prove Newton wrong, Newtonian physics is still useful but is now a part of a wider theory, which itself someday may prove to be part of something even wider.

The Challenge to Fundamentalism

Fundamentalists deal in certainties.  For them theory proves science wrong because it is by definition tentative.  They believe their book (the book varies, depending on the type of fundamentalist), deals in eternal truths.   They do not dialogue with their book but impose their views upon it.

Fundamentalists and tyrants the world over close down conversations.  They live in fear of discovering something new.  For them truth has to be nailed down to be true.

The challenge, if you are marketing a message online, is to encourage conversation, not to impose views.  Conversation is a learning experience and if you commit to genuine sharing, your website and your real life business or project will become learning experiences.

In my next post, I shall show how conversation can become a learning experience and more!

What do you think?  Conversations with matter?  Do you find them more or less stimulating than conversations with people?

1 Conversation as Paying Attention

The first post in this sequence introduced the topic of conversation between people.  In the second I introduced two other approaches to conversation: prayer and science.

The word ‘prayer’ may be a turn-off for some readers but bear with me. Understanding this is important to getting your message across online and in real life.  I choose a traditional word because we need to make connections into ideas people already understand.  Whatever you call it, paying attention is important.

Simplistically prayer can be understood as conversation with God, similar to conversations between people.  There’s nothing wrong with being simple so long as it doesn’t lead to misconceptions.

So, why is prayer so important?  Through prayer or meditation, you may

All these are essential in conversations with people whether online or in real life.  A lot of exchanges in social media and websites would benefit from slowing down our thinking and producing more thoughtful responses, through paying attention.  Do you agree?

2 Types of Conversation

Last Wednesday I introduced this sequence about conversation.  Today, I shall introduce three types of conversation; conversation through dialogue, prayer and science.

What Makes These Conversations?

We live in an atomised world, where the individual is the centre of attention. It is easy to lose sight of progress made through collaboration. Indeed, conversation is the only way anyone can make progress. The response, from a person or anything we encounter, pushes us to think again, to go deeper and find new insights.

These three approaches all do this.  Maybe conversation with non-human objects may seem odd but they are there and their intransigence means we have to be challenged by them.

I’ll write about prayer and science in the next two posts, so that we can see how they work as conversation.

Are there other ways in which we converse?  How do we converse online?

4 What is a conversation?

What is a conversation?  It’s essential to understand conversation if you want to be clear about the purpose of your web presence.  In this new sequence I shall explore the meaning of conversation and how you can hold conversations online and integrate them with real life conversations.

Most people know a conversation if they see one.  Two people meet and talk and listen.  Talking and listening are both essential and the depth of their conversation is the degree to which they do both.

That’s fine as far as it goes but there is more to it.

Paying attention is essential to conversation; if one or both fail to listen, the conversation fails.

Conversation goes far beyond talking.  Face to face conversations are often helpful because it means subtle cues in facial expressions or body language can add to the meaning of the exchange.  So, paying attention involves more than listening.

Possibly closest to face to face conversations is Skype, where many visual cues can be picked up.  Next of course there is telephone, where tone of voice can be heard.

Conversations with the Dead!

It is possible to have conversations with the dead!  Jane Austen is very popular; many people engage with her, paying close attention to her text.  Is this real conversation?  It is if a conversation between a client and a consultant or psychiatrist is a conversation.  Professional listeners say very little during a conversation, so why not include reading books or listening to recordings as conversations?

If someone takes a recording of Duke Ellington and jams along with it, they are in conversation.  Ask what difference does it make if both musicians can respond to each other.  Perhaps live musicians jamming demonstrates the power of a two-way conversation.

Music performed in a jam session might be banal but from time to time, and more often as musicians gain experience, discovering something new and unexpected.

The challenge for web designers is, how can we encourage similar generation of new ideas online?

0 Consultancy and Website Design

Over the last four weeks I introduced four approaches to non-directive consultancy and I’ve explored how they can be used by website consultants.  This post considers the relationship between consultancy and website design.

Good Website Design

Many people don’t appreciate design is not about artwork, a site that looks good is not necessarily well-designed.  Design is ultimately problem solving.  What is the best solution for this client?

We can abandon the idea that design is a creative art because it is so easy, using content management systems, to create sites with massive functionality.  The problem is choosing the functionality that best meets the purpose of your organisation and not implementing that functionality.  Implementing finctionality is not really all that challenging!

However, many clients are not consultors.  A good consultor understands consultancy and that their organisation’s needs are not necessarily immediately obvious.  They need help to work out the best fit between their organisation and its web presence.

Many clients cannot do this and their wants get in the way of discovering their organisation’s needs.  To implement wants and not needs, can be an expensive mistake, in terms of both up-front costs, ie paying for things you don’t need, and lost productive life of your web presence.

Some Examples

Whilst a web consultant may assemble a website using old-style creativity, they can do their job without going anywhere near a computer!  I know one consultant paid $20 000 a month to support a company that had a team of in-house designers!

I’m working on an assessment for a client who is planning a campaign for the next general election.  I shall write about this work in due course.  I’m helping them map out their online campaign over the next fifteen or so months and integrate their online and real life work.  It is unlikely I’ll do much website design for this client, because they have that covered.  But when you’re campaigning, especially with limited resources, you need someone to look after the long-term strategy, to work out the frameworks in which the campaign will operate.

The Consultant’s Role

Remember there are no clear boundaries between the four consultancy models.  A consultant asked to work on a project may find they have a situation which evolves into a project.  Projects and situations are likely to generate problems and cases.  Resolution of a case may mean there is a need to review the situation and so on.

Consultants do whatever is necessary to help clients meet their objectives, occasionally in the teeth of opposition from their clients.  How to do this with humility and not arrogance (I know better!) is a real challenge.

What do you think?  What is the role for old school designers in a world full of content management systems?

2 Four Models of Consultancy: Cases

What is the difference between a problem and a case?  A case is a problem handled in a different way.  A problem is shared with other organisations; it emerges from practice and resists ready solutions.  Cases are problems with a history; stories about someone’s failure.  For this reason, there is usually a worker at the core of a case.  Usually the story is about broken relationships.

Whilst there may be a technical fix, with a case it’s likely the problem is about personalities and relationships.  This is why I’ve put cases as fourth in this sequence.  If an organisation is having serious relationship problems, it is unlikely they would call on a web consultant to help resolve them!

However, the four models are not static.  A consultant called in to help with a situation, project or problem may realise they have a case.  They must find out what the case is and respond accordingly.

If there is a case, the web consultant may need to deal with it.  It may not initially be clear there is a case that prevents a website from being successful, but once it becomes clear someone has to deal with it.  Even if the web consultant can’t cope, they should at least be able to recognise a case and suggest how the consultor might deal with it (presumably by seeking help elsewhere).  If the web consultant is able to discuss the case, so much the better.

How to Approach Cases

There are three purposes to tackling a case:

1. The main purpose is to discover the action the consultor needs to take to discuss the specific situation.
2. It helps to clarify what needs to be considered.  This is sometimes called “the authority of the situation”.  Whatever the text books say, some situations need to be addressed before you can get on with the work.  They demand a response and progress is not possible until there is a response.
3. Discover how the consultor can do things better and become a better worker.

Note how none of this is necessarily anything to do with the organisation’s web presence.  A web consultant must understand  sometimes the issues that need to be addressed are offline.

So, how do you tackle a case?  There are 6 stages in any consultation about a case.  These conversations can get out of hand because there is often a lot of emotion sloshing around.  So, you both, consultant and consultor, need to return to these steps and work out which ones you’ve done and which you still need to discuss.

How to Resolve and Learn from a Case

1. Get a clear statement of the case story.  The consultor needs to tell the story about what happened in a disciplined and structured way.
2. Define the overall change for the worst and for the better.  Compare things as they were at the start and end of the consultor’s story.  This defines what went wrong.
3. Diagnose where the consultor went wrong and the steps the consultor could have taken for the better.   Now you need to define how the consultor contributed to what went wrong.  This should be specific and explore the things the consultor might have done.
4. Assess the strengths and weaknesses of the current working situation and the implications for the consultor.  This lays the groundwork for the next step.  The strengths are important for the consultor’s morale as well as possible foundations for the action steps.
5. Work out the action the consultor can take.  You need to analyse the pros and cons of possible actions for this consultor in this situation.  Each action is not simply doing something; when, where and how the consultor does it is important.  You need to consider all the likely outcomes of any action.  Don’t assume the proposed action will work – what happens if it doesn’t?
6. Learn as much as possible about the case so that the consultor can improve their performance in the future.  This can help the consultor in future situations.

I haven’t gone into a lot of detail here but hopefully this overview will help you know when you have a case.

Can you think of instances online where you or someone else would benefit from this type of help?