Notes on narrative research
Participatory narrative inquiry, mass ethnography… by any name, it’s sensing patterns in the community through the stories of the people who experience its life, and using those patterns to guide management in complexity
Marc Rettig
July 2019
Fit Associates | marc@fitassociates.com
This document was assembled as a quick response to questions on Twitter. I make no claims of completeness, but I hope it might help someone begin their own explorations. I’m happy to talk more about this by request. -Marc
I have compiled a set of publicly-available downloadable resources in a folder on Google Drive: bit.ly/Fit-PNI-Resources
The nut: what is this?
Participatory Narrative Inquiry (which goes by other names, but let’s use that one for now, or PNI for short) is an approach to sensing the patterns in a social system. It is a key technique for managing in the complexity of such a system (organization, school, food system, nation, sports team,….).
Key points:
- Gather lots of stories — short “micro-narratives” about the experience of the system — from across the diversity of the system
- Do this in a way that allows each person to control the “analysis” of their story. THEY get to say what their stories mean, not some expert analyst.
- Aggregate the results in a way that lets us recognize patterns, trends, and outliers.
- Throughout the process, treat the storytellers as the experts, and rely on local knowledge to interpret what you see and hear.
- Throughout the process, recognize that social complexity is unpredictable — you’re not using this to “decide what to do,” you’re using it to sense adjacent possibilities, guide your exploration for attractors to them, and notice how people in the system respond to your probes.
If you are trying to manage in a typical top-down, expert-centered, research-plan-design-implement-deploy kind of way, PNI might not make much sense to you. When we use PNI, we are asking questions like,
What can we learn about how to attract people to better patterns of behavior and relationship?
What’s worth trying, so we might get more stories like these desirable ones, and fewer stories like those undesirable ones?
How do we know what’s worth trying?
How do we know which probes/experiments to stop, and which ones to stabilize or amplify?
Background: discerning complexity and managing accordingly — Cynefin Framework
Participatory narrative inquiry is not just a method, it’s a way of seeing and working that embodies a particular theory of change and way of working creatively in complexity. Here is a quick introduction to that theory.
Participatory Narrative Inquiry holds hands with an emergent approach to managing in complexity. At the heart of that approach is what Dave Snowden calls “probes,” and that Jennifer Garvey Berger calls “experiments.” There is good reason to distinguish probes from experiments and prototypes. Experiments start with a hypothesis, and good probes tend to be hypothesis-free. We think of prototypes as embodying a concept of a product or service. Probes are pre-concept. They ask, “Can we learn how to attract people to a more positive pattern of behavior and relationship?”
Explanations of PNI, with examples
There are many videos of Dave Snowden giving explanations, point of view, framing, and examples of this work. Here I offer his recent TEDx talk as a good starting point, because here he managed to confine it all into one straight story.
Tony Quinlan is one of the most experienced practitioners out there. He’s full of practical stories and the wisdom of long practice.
Some firms that practice narrative inquiry and managing in complexity
Some people to follow and learn from
Dave Snowden, Cognitive Edge
Blog
Twitter
Laurie Webster, QED Insight
Twitter
Software to support story collection and sensemaking
- Sensemaker, from Cognitive Edge
- Spryng.io, launched in Spring of 2019
- Narrafirma, a free WordPress plugin from Cynthia Kurtz
