A participant in the recent Annapolis workshop wrote to me today:

>Jeff,
>Had a great experience in your workshop. The pace of this environment has
>presented some challenges for incorporating the techniques. Any
>ideas? Specifically we are on an extreme schedule to develop a new
>application to support our legal operations, design has started,
>requirements are not yet done. Can I use the dialog mapping to get them
>to "stop, take a deep breath, think about what we are about to do"? Of
>course any ideas you provide will have to be assimilated into this
>culture. Write back if you can help. I will continue to incorporate the
>techniques into my regular requirements sessions.

Sue,

My experience is that there are two components to this idea of "going slow
to go fast". The first is a commitment to good process ... a mindset in
which the members on your team accept that it's more efficient to have a
single more thoughtful and rigorous conversation on a given topic (like a
set of requirements for the new system) than it is to have several hurried,
chaotic conversations about it over several meetings, or not have the
conversation at all ... until it's part of fixing a failed implementation
much further downstream. This commitment to process is then naturally
supported by using a tool like Compendium to slow down a bit and get clear
about the issues and options. Tool follows process.

The other component is the tool, and in some cases you can lead with the
tool. Especially in an engineering environment, I've seen it happen that
people will accept the use of the tool during meetings (because it's a sexy
interface? because it's hypertext? because it exports to HTML? who
knows?) without consciously changing their mindset. This is a more
subversive approach ... the mindset does change, but not because we
discussed it and agreed to "think differently", but simply because the tool
engages a different way of thinking, one that just happens to be more
thoughtful and rigorous. Dialog Mapping can thus be a "viral" approach to
changing an organization's culture. Process follows tool.

Then there are the situations where (a) the team is under extreme pressure,
(b) they have no time or patience for changing mindsets, and (c) they have
no willingness to try a new capture tool during meetings. In this case,
there's not much you can do. You might try mapping the meeting without
using a computer projector (and thus without validating the map as you go),
then showing it to people after the meeting to see if it adds value. This
is a tough way to practice, though -- when things go too fast to capture
you just miss chunks of material, period.


Fun story that's a bit off the point: I just did a 1/2 day tutorial at the
national Organizational Development Network (ODN) conference in Portland,
Oregon, with Rosa Zubizarreta. Rosa facilitated the group (about 24
people) using Dynamic Facilitation (similar to Dialog Mapping) in a
"meeting" on a tough topic: what we should do about Iraq. It was an
animated discussion which Rosa captured on flip charts. Meanwhile, I was
shadowing her capture using IBIS in Compendium, but with the projector
turned off. After about 45 minutes we paused to reflect on the
process. One of the questions finally came, "Gee, is there any software to
capture all this information??", at which point I turned the projector on
... and there was an audible gasp and murmur in the room as people saw
their comments laid out with colorful icons and arrows. It was great fun!

Lesson: Sometimes it works to capture with dark screen and then, just when
things are getting really complex and scattered, light up the map.

Hope that helps!
Jeff

------------------------
Dr. Jeff Conklin <mailto:jeff@...>
CogNexus Institute ... Collaborative Display, Collective Intelligence
http://cognexus.org Phone: 410-798-4495 Fax: 410-798-0806
304 Arbutus Dr., Edgewater, MD 21037 USA