Tag: dialogue-mapping

Al Selvin – Memories & Tributes

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Words can only say a bit of what Al’s loss means, but a version of what I said at his memorial service is on the website.

POSTED TODAY TO THE COMPENDIUM INSTITUTE COMMUNITY FORUM.

Dear Compendium Community and other colleagues,

Al Selvin, one of Compendium’s inventors and leaders, passed away suddenly due to heart failure on 10th Oct while out cycling, enjoying one of the activities he loved most. He was 56. This is a terrible shock for all who knew him, and our thoughts are very much with his wife, children and wider family. Moving tributes to him at his memorial events reflected the deep love and huge esteem in which he was held as a humble, loving, deeply reflective man.

For those of us in the Compendium community, Al was the driving force to refine Compendium as a digital medium. It was the experience of the mapper that particularly fascinated him, since nobody seemed to pay any attention to this particular mix of skills and dispositions. Why did so many people say that it looked like ‘magic’ when he produced a Dialogue/ Issue/ Conversational  Map during a meeting? What was a mapper doing when they were combining this with more formal modelling, all seamlessly integrated with navigating and linking the myriad other documents in that team’s work? This passion produced many research articles, much thinking aloud in his blog, and a PhD, recently distilled as a book. See the links at the top of the page for more.

Without Al, this community would not exist.

Please use this page as a place to share your memories: http://bit.ly/alselvin

We welcome all reflections on Al’s contribution — his writing, talks, videos, or first hand experience working with him. Feel free to include links and photos.

To contribute, please email us with your contribution and we’ll add it in.

We thought we’d let Al start the contributions in his own words, acknowledging how many of you supported him in his PhD.

With our thanks in advance to you, for helping his family and friends, as well as ourselves, to understand and celebrate how many people Al’s life touched.

Feel free to forward this to relevant colleagues.

Maarten Sierhuis & Simon Buckingham Shum

msierhuis and sbuckinghamshum at gmail dot com

 

 

 

Delta Dialogues: fantastic Dialogue Mapping case study

One of the most exciting things about releasing Compendium into the wild is that people go off and do amazing things with it that I have no idea about.

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Here is a detailed case study from Groupaya, documenting the use of Dialogue Mapping to achieve a breakthrough in collective sensemaking, clearly a hugely collective effort, aided by the expert Dialogue Mapping of two friends and colleagues I’ve known for years, but haven’t seen for a while as I moved into other fields: Jeff Conklin and Eugene Eric Kim.

This report is a very honest account of the sensemaking journey undertaken by a group of people as they wrestled with a classic wicked problem in environmental planning, which had defied previous attempts at bringing people round the table productively.

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Check out their public meeting maps and the beautifully produced Phase 1 Report.

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It feels like we are at some kind of a turning point, with reports such as this, and the work of Paul Culmsee and Kailash Awati, appearing in the last year or so (SevenSigma case study PDF; Heretics Guide to Best Practices book – search the sample chapters for Compendium to see how they use it).

I am so grateful to these colleagues who are very busy, but deeply reflective practitioners, taking the trouble to document their work in such detail, and so accessibly. Something for us academics to learn there!

Debate Mapping the Gaza Crisis: from argumentation to dialogue?

David Price and Peter Baldwin are doing a great job with their Debategraph tool to raise the profile  of visual argument mapping. Their collaboration with The Independent on “Mapping the Crisis in Gaza” has been widely covered on other channels.

Debategraph represents the current state of the art in argument mapping in the way it uses Web 2.0 techniques to draw in users and make its maps viral. Some of our ongoing discussions with David and Peter cover our joint ESSENCE initiative, the sociotechnical mix that gets tools such as this used, and interoperability with our own tools, also grounded in the IBIS discourse scheme.

One of the challenges facing the argument/debate mapping field is the relationship with dialogue. Argumentation is quite a confrontational activity, seeking to establish the truth — or plausibility — of a position. This is clearly critical in many fields of inquiry, where factual truth is at stake (was there a holocaust or not?), or the plausibility of an approach, as judged by other criteria. But we might also ask how we move from mapping an apparently intractable debate such as the issues around Gaza, to supporting dialogue that builds common ground, resolves conflict, and re-establishes trust. In a recent chapter reporting on mapping some of the Iraq debate, we concluded:

Finally, while we are certainly interested in improving information management, sharpening critical thinking and promoting sound argumentation, at the same time, these are only part of the story if knowledge mapping tools are to go beyond fostering critical analysis (albeit a worthy end in its own right), and provide support for shaping, not just analysing, the hardest kinds of policy deliberations. Those who are engaged in conflict resolution in the most strife-ridden communities and countries (not to mention the less extreme dynamics within our organisations), remind us that the key to making true progress is to establish the context for open dialogue in which stakeholders learn to listen to each other properly, and co-construct new realities (Isaacs, 1999; Kahane, 2004).

This chapter has focused somewhat on the rational, critical analysis of information and argument connections (see also Ohl’s Chapter 13). However, the approach we are developing emphasises a simple visual language that can be used effectively in real time to capture and reflect back a wide variety of deliberative moves, with its roots in facilitating dialogue that is owned by all stakeholders (Conklin, 2006; Selvin, et al., 2002;  Papadopoulos, 2004 Selvin, Chapter 11). The vision of our ongoing Hypermedia Discourse research programme  is to create knowledge cartography tools and practices that integrate heart and mind. We need both critical thinking and open listening as we strive collectively to make sense of, and act on, the complexities and controversies now facing us.

Exciting times! But serious times, as we need to get these tools into the hands of the people who are tackling the pressing issues now confronting us in our communities, nations and as a planet.

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