D as Diagramming: The iART Framework
Self, Other, Present, and Future
This article is part of the D as Diagramming project which aims to explore the power of diagrams and diagramming in various settings such as personal thinking, interpersonal communication, and team collaboration.
This article introduces a new framework called iART framework. The name iART stands for i +Activity + Relationship + Themes. I recently joined an adult development program as an advisor. The program was initiated by a young girl who is a friend of mine.
The program was designed with three components: 1) Life Purpose Awareness, 2) Personal OKR Practice, 3) Peer Review and Feedback. My friend also adopted the Building In Public approach to share her goals, challenges, progresses, and discussions with others on social media platforms.
I have been discussing various themes about the program with her for three weeks. This week I realized it is possible to develop a framework for reflecting her project and our conversation.
Contents
The iART Framework
Step 1: Intrapersonal Analysis
Step 2: Interpersonal Analysis
Step 3: Transactional Analysis
Other Ways of Using the iART Framework
Predictive Model and Feedforward Bias
The Meta-diagram behind iART
Present, Futurem, and Spatial Difference
Coming soon
The iART Framework
On Aug 18, I adopted a meta-diagram (Oliver Ding’s diagram #005 — Thing and People) and designed a new framework: iART framework.
The iART framework can be applied to two things:
- The adult development program
- The conversation between I and my friend
Both two things share the same structure:
- i (actor): an actor who wants to make progress toward her goals of ideal life.
- A (activity): the actor should take real actions which are curated into projects as life activity.
- R (relationship): the actor needs others’ support such as feedback, suggestions, recommendations, etc. Thus, this is also about relationship building and development.
- T (themes): the activity and conversation can be perceived with a set of themes such as Future, Present, Goals, Decisions, Challenges, Solutions, etc.
Thus, the iART framework offers an ecological perspective on personal adult development. The term “ecological perspective” means the following three contexts of personal development:
- Practice context: the “Know — Act” ecology (Activity).
- Spatial context: the “Self — Other” ecology (Relationship)
- Temporal context: the “Present — Future” ecology (Time).
The diagram is very simple. However, the framework presents the complexity of life growth. As a framework, it can be used for various situations such as different types of relationships of “Self — Other”.
One simple point is that our conversation with others could lead to the change of our decisions and actions for towarding the expected future from the unsatisfied present. Let’s use three steps to reach this insight.
- Intrapersonal analysis
- Interpersonal analysis
- Transactional analysis
Step 1: Intrapersonal Analysis
Let’s start from the simple version of the iART Framework. At step 1, we only need to consider an actor’s own perspective and behavior. The diagram below presents a simple model of intrapersonal analysis.
The actor has an expectation of her ideal life in the future. Let’s call it Anticipation. For example, my friend made a vision for her ideal life in general and a life plan for the coming three years.
This anticipation inspires her to make some decisions which lead to some actions. This is called Feedforward. Her life vision and short life plan guide her to design the adult development program.
Her actions lead to several activities which are perceivable by herself and others. Let’s call it Performance. She launched the program several months ago and updated the monthly program each month. She often reviews her activities and shares her reflections on such activities through social media platforms.
If others perceive the actor’s performance, they could discover some relevant themes from the performance, and they could start a conversation with the actor and expand the performance into a shared activity. For example, she didn’t tell me about her program. We started the conversation about her life change and the program until I found it from her social media updates.
Now we have to move to step 2: Interpersonal analysis.
Step 2: Interpersonal Analysis
The diagram below presents the basic model for sept 2. After perceiving the performance and talking about it with the actor, Others could evaluate the Actor’s ideal future from their perspectives, let’s call it Evaluation. Others could also watch the actor’s daily performances and review these performances from their perspectives, let’s call it Reflection. Others could offer such evaluations and reflections to the actor, let’s call it Feedback.
Let’s apply this model to the conversation between my friend and me. First, I gave my feedback about her ideal life to her. Second, I often comment on her social media updates and chat with her through private messages. Then, she shared more private information with me in order to clarify some misunderstandings.
We should notice that real life practice is not a one-man show. So, let’s move to step 3: transactional analysis.
Step 3: Transactional Analysis
The diagram below uses “He — She” to replace “Self — Other” in order to highlight the transactional perspective.
In fact, the transactional analysis means we need to consider step 1 and step 2 from two sides. For example, let’s talk about the above case study from my perspective. Though our conversations are mostly about the program and her ideal future, I do learn some things new from this conversation.
She has over three years of experience on implementing OKR (objectives and key results, a goal-setting management method) in a tech mid-sized startup. The new program adopts the OKR method for personal adult development. Thus, it is an interesting example of what I called “Attachance” which means the opportunity of detaching and attaching. She detaches the OKR method from the organizational context and attaches it to the personal development context. Is this “Attachance” true or false? Why doesn’t she adopt some ideas such as WOOP from individual psychology?
My primary interest is connecting theory and practice, while her primary interest is developing practical projects. Thus, we can learn something from each other’s perspectives. The present article and the iART Framework are good examples. While we talk about the program at the practical level, the case still inspires me to think at the theoretical level.
Other Ways of Using the iART Framework
As a basic model, the iART Framework can be used in various ways. It could go beyond the above three steps for discussing other topics and discovering other insights. For example, we can talk about “information behavior + anticipation + interpersonal interaction”. The diagram below shows a new element about “Information” on our basic model.
For example, my friend often lists a series of questions around a theme which is related to her goal. She shares her questions publicly and asks others to join discussions about these questions in the community of the program. She also encourages her members to do the same thing because it is considered as a technique of the program.
Last week I visited her personal website and looked at a list of questions about the theme of “Community” which is one of my favorite topics. After reviewing the list of questions, I didn’t figure out her real needs behind the questions. So, I asked her about this issue. In fact, she just roughly thought that “community, network, and similar things” are critically important for her enterprise. I told her the difference between Brand Community, Communities of Practice, Virtual Community, Community-led growth, Open Brand and Community, and etc.
This experience inspired me to return to the theme of sense-making and information behavior. I searched and found some articles about the theme. For example, Peter Hayward Jones’ 2015 article Sensemaking Methodology: A Liberation Theory of Communicative Agency.
According to Peter Hayward Jones, there are several methodologies of sensemaking, “Each of the major contributors to sensemaking theories — Brenda Dervin, Gary Klein, Karl Weick, David Snowden, and Russell, Pirolli and Card have established different perspectives on sensemaking, each of which aligns to different human science philosophies, theoretical commitments, and normative perspectives. There seems to be no overarching sensemaking umbrella that neatly fits these together — a point Dervin has made.”
The above diagram presents five major sensemaking theories with different units of analysis.
- Weick’s focus has been organizational activity (collective), and the location of sensemaking is internalized as representation of collective meaning.
- Dervin has a clear individual and hermeneutic approach, on the individual’s situation and their internalized subjective experience of it.
- Klein’s focus is the individual mental model (frame) applied to an external context or activity (how external data is represented).
- Russell’s information theoretic view establishes sensemaking as a collective location (an information world) largely in the service of interpreting external data.
- Snowden’s more evolutionary model considers sensemaking a knowledge production activity, using data toward a shared understanding of problem areas (which I call “understanding about” as a unit of analysis).
I have read articles and papers about theories developed by Weick, Dervin, and Snowden five years ago. This time I returned to this topic and found more theories. It’s a great discovery!
We can apply Dervin’s Sense-making theory to present discussion. My friend doesn’t want to do academic research or write articles. She just wants to understand some themes in order to make good decisions and put the program forward. She wants to search for “Best Practices of X”, “highest ROI approaches for doing X”, etc. This is a typical ordinary mindset of a rational actor.
Dervin’s model uses a bridge as a metaphor to describe the sense-making situation. My friend wants to acquire practical knowledge and information (bridges) in order to make good decisions and take effective actions (outcomes) for doing X (context).
Predictive Model and Feedforward Bias
A framework is a tool for guiding research and reflection from the practical situation and past experiences. The iART framework can be seen as a new framework for understanding sense-making. I am not going to challenge the above major theories about sense-making, I just want to use the iART framework to turn my tacit knowledge into explicit insights.
For example, by using the iART framework, I developed a new concept called “Feedforward Bias” to summarize my discovery from watching my friend’s performance about the adult development program.
I adopted Robert Rosen’s Anticipatory System theory for the iART framework. According to Robert Rosen, “An anticipatory system is a natural system that contains an internal predictive model of itself and of its environment, which allows it to change state at an instant in accord with the model’s predictions pertaining to a later instant.” In contrast, a reactive system only reacts, in the present, to changes that have already occurred in the causal chain, while an anticipatory system’s present behavior involves aspects of past, present, and future.
It seems that our life is an anticipatory system. However, it is not easy to apply this meta-theory to life, career, or personal development. Let’s ask a question, what’s the boundary of our life, career, or personal development? If we review the above discussion, there are at least three perspectives:
- Intrapersonal analysis
- Interpersonal analysis
- Transactional analysis
If we adopt the intrapersonal perspective, the anticipatory system should be the pure person and the person should do everything by himself without any input from others. Thus, his internal predictive model is a closed model because it ignores all feedback from others.
The interpersonal perspective is similar to the intrapersonal perspective, however, it considers feedback from others. We can consider its internal predictive model as an open model.
An unusual way is the transactional perspective which considers Self and Other as a whole while the above two perspectives only consider Self as a whole. Correspondingly, its internal predictive model is a reciprocal model.
After watching my friend’s information searching behavior about “Community”, I realized that her previous knowledge about the topic led her to ask “wrong” questions. Moreover, these questions may lead her to wrong answers, even wrong decisions. Finally, the feedforward may cause less effective actions than expected.
I use the term “Feedforward Bias” to name this phenomenon. How to avoid Feedforward Bias? It means we have to build and maintain a good internal predictive model. We have to choose one perspective for building our “internal” predictive model. Each model defines their own boundary of an anticipatory system.
The Meta-diagram behind iART
The Meta-diagram behind iART was developed in 2017. It was the outcome of my project “Activity as Container” which aims to discuss the Thing-People ecological structure.
The above diagram is the final model of the Thing-People ecological structure. T means Thing while P means People. 1 means Here while 2 means There. The circle means one event.
I also use another version for this diagram: This (T1), That (T2), Self (P1), Other (T2), and Activity (Event). This version is close to the iART framework.
The diagram presents six types of relations. There are four dimensions behind these six types of relations. The table below offers a full configuration. The pair of “Homogeneous — Heterogeneous” refers to Categorical Difference while the pair of “Close — Remote” refers to Spatial Difference.
If you find Categorical Difference and Spatial Difference behind a situation or a phenomena, then you can adopt this meta-diagram to visualize your thinking. You can make a new framework with it too.
Present, Future, and Spatial Difference
The iART framework uses “Present — Future” to replace “This (T1) — That (T2)”.
Should I add Temporal Difference to the meta-diagram? Actually, I don’t need to do it because it is part of Spatial Difference.
This view is inspired by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s ideas on the Cognitive Science of the Embodied Mind from their 1999 book Philosophy in The Flesh and other books. According to Lakoff and Johnson, “Very little of our understanding of time is purely temporal. Most of our understanding of time is a metaphorical version of our understanding of motion in space.” They introduces a metaphor system for time in the book, see the note below:
In a 2000 book Where Mathematics Comes From, George Lakoff and Rafael E. Nunez use the Source-Path-Goal schema as an example of the cognitive science of the embodied mind. See the picture below:
The Source-Path-Goal schema points out that there is an unrealized trajectory between the location of the trajector at a given time (present) and the goal (future). The diagram clearly shows the Temporal Difference between Present and Future is the Spatial Difference between present location and future goal.
Thus, I think we don’t need to add Temporal Difference to the meta-diagram because we can highlight Temporal Difference in its applications. For example, the iART framework is an application of the meta-diagram, I can use “Temporal Context” to describe the “Present — Future” ecology.
Coming soon
I will use the Diagram Blending approach to unpack the iART diagram into a network of diagrams.
I have introduced the concept of Diagram Blending in a previous article: D as Diagramming: Tripartness and Diagram Blending. You can find more details there. The article also introduces three meta-diagrams:
- The Dialectical Room
- The Interactive Zone
- The Hierarchical Loops
I will use these three meta-diagrams to expand the iART framework with a set of sub-diagrams. Together, they form a diagram network.
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