Sometimes It's Not Time To Make Sense

From a tweeted response by Brigid Russell the other day on a thread about well-being and culture-change, this quote:?

"I think what's more helpful just now are open questions, provocations, & space for us to listen to each other's real experiences, without editing & tidying up. It's raw, let it be raw. Models have a place to help make some sense, but not to stifle, gloss, & tidy stuff up."

This message struck me, as someone who is in the habit of trying to "make sense" of messy information: Through my writing, sharing my experiences and observations, trying to derive clear lessons or rules from it, through my work as a facilitator/workshop-designer, where the goal is to get others to generate and swim in the messy soup of experiences and perceptions, to see what useful abstractions might be derived... this message struck me as hugely important.

There are times when the rush to interpretations and patterns is not helpful. It might make us feel more comfortable, since we like to live in clean and tidy intellectual spaces where there are more answers than questions, since we like to consider ourselves "action-oriented" and hate to simply dwell on what's happening; but it's often not what would be most helpful...

I think often of this image from a tweet by John Cutler in which he describes three approaches to sense-making:

A - Exposing the mess

B - Clustering but leaving a path back to the mess (the preferred but most difficult approach)

C - Hiding the mess

When I initially encountered this image, I thought about how many people see the world only through abstractions, living purely in that third space where the mess appears to not exist. The mess is hidden to them. These abstractions often feel useful to us because they are coherent with our own lived experience (or we interpret our lived experience through the lens of the abstractions we've dogmatically adopted, resulting in a sense of coherence). This makes life feel less messy than it actually is.

But the mess is reality. The abstractions are simply useful fictions.

The clusters provide useful patterns in experience that can be exploited or employed in the design of solutions, but the majority of experience falls outside of those clusters rather than within them. They are simply points of overlap in otherwise turbulent information.

Cutler's image brought to mind how we apply rigid frameworks to everything, seemingly incapable of interacting with the mess at all, needing to immediately jump into the steps, the dogmas and abstractions of our particular approach, discipline, worldview, or favorite theory... and how often this results in conflict--the attempted silencing of others' lived experience in defense of our abstractions.

When you silence others' lived experience in your attempts to introduce solutions, you're introducing new problems. Solutions that are incoherent with the lived experience of others represent barriers rather than pathways, and so there are times and contexts in which abstractions have to be left behind, and perhaps rebuilt for a particular context or population.

We're highly averse to "rebuilding the wheel", but perhaps we think of these abstractions as too transient--too useful beyond the context for which they were concocted. These days, I am much more prone to think we need to generate a new framework for each effort--like scaffolding that can be adaptively constructed for a time and then taken down once the intended structure is completed, it's component parts then being brought to the next context to be reconfigured for that specific context... this flies in the face of common and particularly the straw-man conceptualizations of approaches like Design Thinking, which present the sense-making/problem-solving approach as a fixed toolkit that can be applied through rote steps on any problem-set.

(For the record I don't see Design Thinking this way and in my experience those who do are either trying to sell you a flawed version for profit or are using a straw-man to sell some other dogma.)

At times, as Brigid Russell states, the most important thing we can do is to fight the pull of those abstractions, to lead with "open questions, provocations, & space for us to listen to each other's real experiences, without editing & tidying up", to allow that messy lived experience to speak for itself, to overlap paradoxically with itself and the lived experience and perceptions of others... and to be ok with that.

As facilitators, we're charged with "holding space" and yet it can be enormously difficult to do so in a way that actually leaves room for the entirety of others' lived experience to be present without rushing into the task of whittling away at it to try and shape it into something "actionable" or coherent with the patterns of our own or others' values and experiences.

To do this effectively requires significantly more discipline, time, space, and safety than we traditionally create. But this work is important. We have to hold back the encroachment of the constraints imposed on and by us. We really ought to free ourselves from the tyranny of too many contextually inappropriate abstractions so that we can first make room for the messy reality again, and then from there figure out or create the abstractions that might be useful going forward.