For one night only USA…

Ah, Erica Toelle – what a legend! Thanks to Erica and Fpweb, I’m thrilled to confirm that the Seattle SharePoint Governance and Information Architecture class is all systems go. Save the date as its very likely indeed to be the only SPIA class in the USA in 2011.  If it wasn’t enough that Erica will be joining me, but Ruven Gotz will be there too.

Thursday and Friday, May 05-06, 2011. (http://spiaseattle.eventbrite.com/)

The location is the Silvercloud Inn, 14632 SE Eastgate Way Bellevue, WA 98004

In this multimedia extravaganza of a blog post, lets take a closer look at this class and what you can expect. Below is a snippet of a talk I did in New Zealand called “SharePoint Governance  Home Truths”. This clip shows a little diagnostic test that I do on my audience, to see whether they have experienced the visible signs of wicked problems. If you want to know why you should go to SPGov+IA, then take my 2 minute test yourself.

If the two minute test has taken your fancy, then you might want to see what is in store on the course itself. Below is the first half-hour of module 1 (in the form of a conference session), as well as the accompanying slide deck.

Course Information:

Download Course Outline (PDF)

Download Class Flyer (PDF)

Most people understand that deploying SharePoint is much more than getting it installed.  Despite this, current SharePoint governance documentation abounds in service delivery aspects. However, just because your system is rock-solid, stable, well-documented and governed through good process, there is absolutely no guarantee of success.  Similarly, if Information Architecture for SharePoint was as easy as putting together lists, libraries and metadata the right way, then why doesn’t Microsoft publish the obvious best practices?

In fact, the secret to a successful SharePoint project is an area that the governance documentation barely touches.

This Master Class pinpoints the critical success factors for SharePoint Governance and Information Architecture and rectifies this blind spot.  Paul Culmsee’s style takes an ironic and subversive view on how SharePoint Governance really works within organizations while presenting a model and the tools necessary to get it right.

Drawing on inspiration from many diverse sources, disciplines and case studies, Paul Culmsee has distilled the "what" and "how" of governance down to a simple and accessible, yet rigorous and comprehensive set of tools and methods that organizations, large and small, can utilize to achieve the level of commitment required to see SharePoint become a successful part of your enterprise.

Some workshop sessions are hands on, we provide all of the tools and samples needed but please bring your own laptop.

Course Structure:

The course is split into 7 modules, run across two days.

Module 1: SharePoint Governance f-Laws 1-17:

Module 1 is all about setting context in the form of clearing some misconceptions about the often muddy topic of SharePoint governance. This module sheds some light onto these less visible SharePoint governance factors in the form of Governance f-Laws, which will also help to provide the context for the rest of this course

• Why users don’t know what they want
• The danger of platitudes
• Why IT doesn’t get it
• The adaptive challenge – how to govern SharePoint for the hidden organisation
• The true forces of organisational chaos
• Wicked problems and how to spot them
• The myth of best practices and how to determine when a “practice” is really best

Module 2: The Shared Understanding Toolkit – part 1:

Module 2 pinpoints the SharePoint governance blind spot and introduces the Seven Sigma Shared Understanding Toolkit to counter it. The toolkit is a suite of tools, patterns and practices that can be used to improve SharePoint outcomes. This module builds upon the f-laws of module 1 and specifically examines the “what” and “why” questions of SharePoint Governance. Areas covered include how to identify particular types of problems, how to align the diverse goals of stakeholders, leverage problem structuring methods and constructing a solid business case.

Module 3: The Shared Understanding Toolkit – part 2:

Module 3 continues the Seven Sigma Shared Understanding Toolkit, and focuses on the foundation of “what” and “why” by examining the “who” and “how”. Areas covered include aligning stakeholder expectations, priorities and focus areas and building this alignment into a governance structure and written governance plan that actually make sense and that people will read. We round off by examining user engagement/stakeholder communication and training strategy.

Module 4: Information Architecture trends, lessons learned and key SharePoint challenges

Module 4 examines the hidden costs of poor information management practices, as well as some of the trends that are impacting on Information Architecture and the strategic direction of Microsoft as it develops the SharePoint road map. We will also examine the results from what other organisations have attempted and their lessons learned. We then distil those lessons learned into some the fundamental tenants of modern information architecture and finish off by examining the key SharePoint challenges from a technical, strategic and organisational viewpoint.

Module 5: Information organisation and facets of collaboration

Module 5 dives deeper into the core Information Architecture topics of information structure and organisation. We explore the various facets of enterprise collaboration and identify common Information Architecture mistakes and the strategies to avoid making them.

Module 6: Information Seeking, Search and metadata

Module 6 examines the factors that affect how users seek information and how they manifest in terms of patterns of use. Building upon the facets of collaboration of module 5, we examine several strategies to improving SharePoint search and navigation. We then turn our attention to taxonomy and metadata, and what SharePoint 2010 has to offer in terms of managed metadata

Module 7: Shared understanding and visual representation – documenting your Information Architecture

Module 7 returns to the theme of governance in the sense of communicating your information architecture through visual or written form. To achieve shared understanding among participants, we need to document our designs in various forms for various audiences.

Putting it all together: From vision to execution

Attendees will be taking home a manual ~480 pages, containing the Seven Sigma Shared Understanding Toolkit CD with a sample performance framework, governance plan, SharePoint ROI calculator (Spreadsheet), sample mind maps of Information Architecture. These tools are the result of years of continual development and refinement "out in the field" by Paul Culmsee and have only been recently released to the public through this Master Class.

More Information:

• Praise for SharePoint Governance and IA Masterclass

Refund Policy:

No refunds will be issued for attendee cancellations once payment is recieved.  Class cancellation by the organizer will result in a refund less transaction fees.

http://spiaseattle.eventbrite.com/

• The facets of collaboration Part 1–Meet robot barbie
• The facets of collaboration Part 2–Enter the matrix!
• The facets of collaboration Part 3-The feature jigsaw
• The facets of collaboration Part 4 – BPM vs. HPM

Hi all

Welcome to another exploration of the collaborative world through a lens called the facets of collaboration. If you are joining us for the first time, I am writing a series of posts that looks at how our perception of collaboration influences our penchant for certain collaborative tools and approaches. SharePoint, given that it is touted as a collaboration platform, inevitably results in consultants never being able to give a straight answer. This is because SharePoint is so feature-rich (and as a result caveat-rich), that there are always fifty different ways a situation can be approached. Add the fact that many clients do not necessarily know what they want and learn about their problem by examining potential solutions, we have all the hallmarks of a wicked problem in the making.

These wicked problems, underpinning SharePoint, often results in Robot Barbie situations (cue the image to the left), which is the metaphor that I started this series with. Robot Barbie represents everything wrong about SharePoint deployments, as it is symptomatic of throwing features at a platitude, pretending to be solving a real problem and then wondering why the result doesn’t gel at all. It is a pattern of behaviour that is similar to an observation made by the very wise (and profane) Ted Dziuba who once spoke these words of wisdom.

If there’s one thing all engineers love to do, it’s create APIs. It’s so awesome because you can draw on a white board and feel like you put in a good day’s work, despite having solved no real, actual problems. Web 2.0 engineers, in addition to their intrinsic love of APIs, have a real hard-on for anything having to do with a social network. For example, developing a Facebook application lets them call their shitty little PHP program an "application" running on a "platform," like a real, live computer programmer does. Make-believe time is so much fun, even for adults.

Apart from making me giggle, Dziuba may have a point. Elsewhere on this blog I have spent time explaining that there are different types of problems that require different approaches to solving them (wicked vs. tame). My conjecture is that collaboration itself is exactly the same in this regard. People who espouse a particular type of tool or approach as the utopian solution to collaboration are taking a one size fits all approach to a multifaceted area and even worse, treating that area as a platitude. Anyone who calls themselves an Information Architect and doesn’t at least give cursory examination to the dimensions or facets of collaboration is likely to be doing their stakeholders a disservice.

All of us have certain biases, and I am no exception. For a start, I am generation X – the so-called cynical generation. Apparently we whinge and whine about everything and then blame it all on generation-Y. Thus, if cynicism is the gen-X stereotype, then I will happily accept being the poster child. I mean seriously, all of you vanity obsessed, self interested generation y’ers, if you spend a little less time preening and more time thinking, we might get some wisdom out of you (see – I am such a cynical gen-X right now).

So let’s recap the facets of collaboration. The model I came up with identifies four major facets for collaborative work: Task, Trait, Social and Transactional.

• Task: Because the outcome drives the members’ attention and participation
• Trait: Because the interest drives the members’ attention and participation
• Transactional: Because the process drives the members’ attention and participation
• Social: Because the shared insight drives the members’ attention and participation

In the last post, I used the model to examine the notion of Business Process Management versus Human Process Management and looked at some of the claims and counter claims made by proponents of each. This time let’s up the ante and talk about something curlier. We will examine the notion that social networking in the enterprise is the answer to improving collaboration within the enterprise. On first thought, it makes perfect sense, given the incredible success of Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Nevertheless, there is ongoing debate about the use and value of social tools in the enterprise driven by their rise outside of organisational contexts. One particularly strongly worded quote is from Aaron Fulkerson, co-founder and CEO of MindTouch who doesn’t mince his words:

This class of software forces business users to adopt the myopic social visions imagined by the developers, which are nearly identical to their corresponding consumer web implementations. In short, social software is not solving business problems. In fact, these applications only serve to treat symptoms of the problems businesses face. They exacerbate the real problems within businesses by creating distractions and, worse, proliferate more disconnected data and application silos.

Ouch! Even within the SharePoint community there is significant variation of opinions as to the value of social. While I better protect the innocent and not name names, I have spoken with several well known SharePointers who think social is a giant waste of time, versus those who see real value in it. Irrespective of your opinion, you cannot ignore the fact that social is a significant game changer with effects still being felt. While web 2.0 has dropped off the Gartner hype cycle, its effect on particular sectors has been far reaching. Now it seems that all sectors have a 2.0 on the end of their name. For example:

• Enterprise 2.0
• Education 2.0
• Legal 2.0
• Government 2.0

Clearly, if things were just a flash in the pan, why are governments around the world trying to revitalise their public sector by utilising these tools?

Look at Microsoft as another example. They have, I think smartly, recognised industry trends and reacted to them via the introduction of a number of new SharePoint features, such as tagging/folksonomy via managed metadata, ratings columns, enhanced wiki capabilities and a significant investment in the capabilities of my-sites. Their clients now have the option to leverage these features should they choose to do so.

So just as there are naysayers, there are the pundits. Many people cite the reasoning that these features are necessary to attract and retain the next generation of workers, who have grown up with these tools in their personal lives. Whether this claim is valid is debatable, but I have to say, I really like the Enterprise 2.0 slide deck below by Scott Gavin for a number of reasons. I think it encapsulates the 2.0 vision, underpinned by social/cloud technologies very nicely. I sometimes ask people to discuss this slide deck in my IA classes and discussion is equally polarising as social networking in the enterprise itself. Some people think it represents the vision for the future, and others think it is hopelessly idealistic and doesn’t reflect cold, hard reality. Take a look for yourself below…

And the survey says…

Using the facets quadrants, we can start to see patterns for success of these tools for the enterprise and whether Aaron Fulkerson’s argument has merit or whether Scott Gavin is on the right track. An interesting use of the facet diagram is to plot where various tools and technologies are located. in my classes, I ask people to plot where Facebook belongs on facets diagram. Guess where it is usually drawn? 

While some people will draw Facebook at various levels on the vertical axis, everyone pretty much describes Facebook (and LinkedIn)  as trait based, while being highly dominant on the social quadrant. As discussed in the last article, if I ask people to plot a crowdsourced tool like Wikipedia, the dominant characteristic is always trait/social. In other words, people maintain and update Wikipedia articles because of their interest in the topic area, not because it helps them get something done.

Clearly, big social networking technologies are successful in the "trait based social” quadrant. In other words, we tend to use Facebook more for common interest collaboration than to solve a task based collaborative issue (such as deliver a project). Another interesting thing about a lot of social networking technologies is that for many, our work-based collaborative life tends to be more task based, compared to our non-work which is more trait based. In other words, for a lot of us, our work life revolves around working with a group of people for a common outcome and if it was not for that common outcome, we wouldn’t necessarily have much in common (I risk falling victim to my own generalisation here – so I will come back to this later in the section titled “Why User Buy-In Is Hard”).

When you look at where Facebook sits in the quadrant, it begs the question of how well this type of tool (or the building blocks it is based on) would work in an organisation that is project (task) based and highly transactional. To that end, consider a project management information system, such as the basic one that Dux espouses in his book or the more complex one that Microsoft sell to organisations. Where do you think it belongs on the quadrant?

When I ask people to plot their project management information system, I typically get this response:

I speculate that the further away two tools lie on the spectrum, the more likely we are to have a robot-barbie solution if you blindly mix features that work well in each individual quadrant. The wiki argument I made in part 3 seems to support this contention. If you recall, in part 3 of this series, I mentioned that I ask every attendee of my classes if they had ever seen a successful project management wiki.  Irrespective of the location of the class, the answer was pretty much “no”. I noted that where I had seen successful wikis tended to be where the users of the wiki were linked by strong traits.

Looking Deeper

While that is interesting, I think the facets diagram tells you more than it intends. Obviously, it is clear that these project management systems such as MS Project Server are oriented toward task/transactional (“getting things done”) aspect of project delivery (ie, time, cost, scope, budget and the like). While some people might point to this and say “there you go – I told you all that social crap was a waste of time – bloody gen-Y and their social networking hubris”, I feel this is naive. If task based transactional tools are sufficient, then why do so many projects fail?

I have stated many times on this blog that shared commitment to a course of action requires shared understanding of the problem at hand. The act of aligning a team to project goals and developing this shared understanding is the realm of the task/social quadrant (the top left), where insights and outcomes come together. When I ask people to name tools that live in this space, few can name anything. Obviously, most project management systems are devoid here. Worst still, we subsequently delude ourselves to thinking that shared understanding can come from a few platitudinal paragraphs labelled as a “problem statement”.

Social networking pundits implicitly recognise this issue (and frequently butt heads against command and control type project managers as a result). But i feel they make the mistake in applying a one size fits all approach to collaboration and apply trait based tools as a panacea when they are not wholly appropriate. The social tools seem to fit exceptionally well into the top right quadrant, but not in the top left.

In fact the only tools that spring to mind that belong in the top left category are the sensemaking tools that my company practice, such as Dialogue Mapping.

Where’s the proof, Paul?

So I guess I am arguing that using social tools because they are the “choice of the new generation” ignores a few home truths about the nature of these tools versus the nature of organisational life. Just because Microsoft provide the tools for you, tells you that they are hedging their bets rather than having any more insight than you or me. So to test all of this, let’s use the facets model in a different way to back up some of my observations and suggestions in this post. Guess what happens when I ask people to plot SharePoint itself on the facets map?

When I asked SharePoint practitioners to do this, they initially drew SharePoint 2007 as a circle over the entire model. Once they did so, they would very often adjust the drawing to emphasise transactional over social collaboration as shown below.

When practitioners were asked to draw SharePoint 2010, they usually indicated a higher representation in in the two social quadrants, but favoured the trait based social over task based social as shown below.

What was interesting about this experiment is that very few people drew SharePoint over the entire facets of collaboration. Social collaboration with SharePoint it seems, only stretches so far. This leads me onto more conjecture, and now we get to the bit in the post where we name a giant SharePoint elephant in the room.

Structured tools for social collaboration?

Many collaborative tools purport themselves as operating in the social space. SharePoint 2010 clearly does so, principally due to the Managed Metadata service, pimped MySites with tagging/rating capabilities. But SharePoint’s core heritage is database/metadata driven, document based collaboration. If we go back to our definition of social collaboration as dynamic, unstructured, with sharing of perspectives and insight through pattern sensing, then social collaboration is clearly not a predefined interaction.

Yet, database driven tools like SharePoint, and its building blocks like site columns and content types require considerable up-front planning to install and govern. Many, many inputs need to be well defined and furthermore, unless you have learnt through living the pain of things like content type definitions in declarative CAML, SharePoint buildings blocks are difficult to maintain/change over time. SharePoint suffers from a problem of reduced resiliency over time in that the more you customise it to suit your ends, the less flexible it gets. In the case of social collaboration the problem is worse because we are trying design for outputs where the inputs are not controlled. Trying to turn something that is inherently organic and emergent to something that has an X and Y on it may be misfocused and destined to fail in many circumstances. The realm of well-defined inputs is the realm of transactional collaboration, where workflow and business process management thrive and change is much more controlled before SharePoint ever gets a look in.

SharePoint excels at transactional scenarios as this is its heritage – after all, the majority of its feature set is oriented to transactional collaboration. The fact that people are prepared to draw SharePoint as dominating across across the transactional half of the facets diagram illustrates this.

But this raises interesting, if not slightly heretical question. If we need to use information architects to get a collaborative tool deployed for social collaboration (to get those inputs defined), then are we pushing the solution into the transactional side of the fence? Recall that in part 3 of this series, I looked at document collaboration and noted that when asked to draw team based document collaboration, people typically drew it operating in the social half of the matrix (pasted below for reference). I also noted in part 3 that for team based collaboration, rules and process are much less rigid or formalised with regards to document use and structure. I then referred to a recent NothingbutSharePoint article where a large organisation’s attempts to introduce the usage of content types largely failed. Like the seeming lack of success of wiki’s for task based collaboration, maybe content types simply are not the ideal construct as you move up the Y axis from transactional to social?

Now do not assume that I am anti metadata/content types here as this is not the case at all. Content types rock when it comes to search and surfacing of related information across a site collection (and beyond if you use search web parts). What I am calling out is the fact that if the SharePoint constructs that we have at our disposal were the panacea for social collaboration, where are the best practices that tell us how to leverage them for success? Perhaps the nature of the collaboration taking place plays a part in the lack of take-up reported in the aforementioned article? Those who advocate highly structured metadata as the only true solution may in fact be pushing a transactional paradigm onto a collaborative model that is ill-suited to it?

The knowledge worker paradox – one of the reasons why user buy-in is hard

Finally for now I’d like to cover one more aspect to this issue. Last year, one of my students looked at the facets and said “Now I know why my users aren’t seeing the value that I see in SharePoint”. When I asked him why, he explained:

“Many of my users are transactional and governed by process – that’s their KPI. Here I am as a knowledge worker, seeing all of these great collaborative features, but I am not judged by a process or transaction. I don’t live in that world. I forget that someone whose performance is judged by process consistency is not going to get all excited by a wiki or tagging or a blog.”

I call this the knowledge worker paradox and it is reminiscent of what I said in part 4 where we looked at BPM vs. HPM. Each role on an organisation is multifaceted. For many roles, there is varying degrees of transactional work taking place. Accordingly some people are very much process driven just as much as they are social driven. Gross generalisations that make statements that “80% of people are knowledge workers or perform knowledge work” do not help matters. In fact they serve to feed the one size fits all mentality that has proven to be detrimental to projects when people fail to recognise that some projects have wicked aspects.

SharePoint people are almost always knowledge workers. Thus if you, as a knowledge worker who is rarely governed by transactional process, think that you have the vision to prescribe a SharePoint driven meta-utopia to meet transactional needs without having lived that world, then if your results are not what you hoped for then to me its hardly surprising.  My student in this case realised that he had been approaching his user base the wrong way. Like Jane in part 1, he did not take into account the dominant facets of collaboration for the roles that he was trying to sell SharePoint into.

When you think about it, the whole argument around records management versus collaborative document management is in effect, an argument between a transactional oriented approach, versus a social oriented one. It is the same pattern as BPM vs. HPM. In records management, the paradigm is that management of the record is more important than the content of the record. Furthermore, that record shouldn’t change. Yet with team based document collaboration, without content there is no document as such and furthermore, the document will change frequently and require less strict controls to grease the gears of collaboration.

Both records oriented people and social pundits commonly make the same mistake of my student, where they force their dominant paradigm on everyone else.

Conclusion

Food for thought, eh?

This is probably my last facets of collaboration post for a while. It is one of these series of articles that I feel has value, but I know it won’t be read by too many 🙂 Nevertheless, I do hope that anyone who has gotten this far through has gotten some value from this examination and sees value in the model to help users make more informed Information Architecture decisions for SharePoint and beyond. I certainly use it now in most engagements and hope that it can be improved upon as a tool, or somehow incorporated into some of the SharePoint standards or maturity model stuff that is out there.

Remember the most important thing of all though. Despite all I have said, it is still definitely all generation y’s fault!

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

www.sevensigma.com.au

Hiya

I recently participated in the Australian and New Zealand community SharePoint conferences and had a blast. First up, I was given the opportunity to keynote the Australian conference on day 2, where I spoke about SharePoint Governance home truths. It received very positive feedback and I was told by a lot of people that it really made them rethink their governance approach. In fact, in the New Zealand session, as I was going through some of the common mistakes people make, I could see people cringing as they knew they were guilty as charged. One attendee buried her head in her hands when I started talking about the “buffet of platitudes” (what is the “buffet of platitudes” you ask? Come to my class to find out! 🙂

The community challenge in Australia was a real highlight. This was a new addition to the conference where a group of conference attendees delivered a SharePoint solution for a not for profit organisation. WorkVentures was the organisation selected and the challenge progressed over three sessions, facilitated by SharePoint community leaders. Session one (Define and Design), was a business session which aimed to work through the high level requirements that WorkVentures had for an intranet, their aims for what they hope it would achieve and what they wanted included.  

This post was written on the assumption that you are familiar with some of Seven Sigma’s methods. If not, then we suggest you stop and read a couple of foundational posts first – especially if these maps do not mean much to you.

The Importance of Goal Alignment…

Nick Hadlee was supposed to chair this define and design session, but was unable to get to the Australian conference due to the earthquake events in Christchurch. As a result, I ended up inheriting this role, so I roped in Andrew Jolly to help me on this, because we have a lot in common and work in a similar way. User surveys had been conducted with WorkVentures staff and management, which gave some insights into potential focus areas for SharePoint. Even so, I had no way of knowing whether those potential focus areas made strategic sense. To resolve this issue, we examined WorkVentures 2009 Annual Report to understand their core purpose and strategic focus areas and various business units. After all, it is all well and good to develop some SharePoint functionality, but if you can’t see how that component helps achieve strategic objectives, how do you know it is the right thing to do?

The annual report proved to be a goldmine. It stated that WorkVentures had embarked on an enterprise improvement strategy prior to SharePoint and the community challenge being on the radar. This enterprise improvement plan, incorporating quality management, IT, HR and business strategy development, provided us the context to focus SharePoint as an enabler that fitted within the plan.

Andrew wasn’t due to fly into Sydney until the evening before the conference. So the day before the conference, Debbie Ireland and I visited WorkVentures on-site, meeting with the CEO, CFO and Marketing Director. The purpose of this visit was to ensure a shared understanding among us all of the alignment of the SharePoint community challenge outputs to the WorkVentures vision, purpose and strategic focus areas. From this conversation, which I mapped, some really interesting stories enabled them to pinpoint one of the key success factors for any SharePoint implementation at WorkVentures – “Bridging Silos”.

Ultimately, we identified four key areas of strategic focus for SharePoint that aligned to WorkVentures strategic goals. Below is a screenshot of the end-to-end alignment in map format . This map was used during the “define and design” conference session to help focus attendees on the purpose of SharePoint for this organisation, as well as noting the key areas that we would have to do well, to consider SharePoint a success.

Stories that led to the goal

Lawrence Luk – the CFO of WorkVentures told Debbie and I several captivating stories that surfaced the bridging silos area of focus. One interesting facet of WorkVentures was that staff from the whole organisation came together once per year – at the Christmas party. This is because each WorkVentures “division” or “business unit” is in effect a separate mini-company, with different goals, customers, vertical markets and regulatory requirements. Thus the problem of silos isn’t a negative one in the sense where dysfunctional “culture” is blamed as such. More that it was the simple fact that each business unit didn’t have a lot in common with other business units. The silo effect was a by-product and it was not driven by negative behaviours.

A great example of this was one particular business unit, Connect IT. It solicits organisations to donate old PC’s, which provides opportunities for skills development for disadvantaged people by teaching them how to refurbish these PC’s. These refurbished PC’s are then sold at low cost. A KPI for this program is the number of organisations donating old PC’s to WorkVentures to sustain ConnectIT. Lawrence had the experience where WorkVentures financial auditors, who had been doing the books for two years prior, asked him why they hadn’t been approached to donate PC’s as they had some. Lawrence realised that he almost missed a great opportunity to help the ConnectIT division achieve one of their key KPI’s. Furthermore, the auditor should never have had to ask themselves. Instead all WorkVentures staff should have this core KPI instilled and internalised so that they could proactively seek out these opportunities to help the other business units.

Another couple of interesting contextual facets illustrated that there were other forms of silo that went beyond a purely divisional basis:

• Most backoffice staff had never been to the Campbelltown office, where all of the “coal face” work took place with the community.
• English was a second language to many staff.
• Not all staff had their own PC’s.

These stories catalysed the conversation to many other examples of missed opportunities, where one business unit has the means to make a massive difference to the results of another. On reflection, it was realised that the nature of WorkVentures business units, being so independent of each-other, inevitably had a silo effect. There was a lack of awareness organisation-wide of the core KPI’s of each unit, hence bridging (not breaking) these silos became a key theme. If SharePoint was to have a long lasting, successful legacy, then it had to play a part in addressing this issue.

The define and design session live…

From there, with invaluable help from Andrew Jolly, we planned and then executed the requirements session with a conference audience of around one hundred people. We split the session up into several areas and the map below shows how we structured it.

After Microsoft did their intro, Debbie explained the context of the community challenge via a short PowerPoint presentation. I then took the chair and explained the vision and areas of focus map (the image above) and stressed to the audience that they were going to be participating in this session as well. I also stressed that no matter what solutions or ideas they came up with, they had to justify them against the four key focus areas, which I went through.

Then we got down to business where I dialogue mapped, with Andrew and I co-facilitating. We decided to focus people’s attention to the core goal of bridging silos as a topic area itself, and ask the audience how SharePoint could indeed bridge silos. We utilised three of the examples that Lawrence gave us  and then leveraged the wisdom of the (large) crowd to solicit ideas. Below is the dialogue map that shows the richness of this discussion (click to enlarge). You will see in this map that for each story told to us by Lawrence, we asked the question “How could we mitigate this with SharePoint?”. The purpose of asking the question this way helped the audience to focus on SharePoint as an enabler to a greater end – and not to be a tool looking for a problem to solve.

Given that we only had around 45 minutes to work with, Andrew and I could only spend around 15 minutes on the bridging silos area. But the map above shows that a lot of very valuable rationale from the audience was captured. The real benefit though was focusing the audience onto the broader goals and how SharePoint could enable them. This was critical to do, because now we had to switch focus from the lofty world of goal alignment to focusing on how SharePoint building blocks could be used to achieve specific ends.

We examined how SharePoint could augment the existing newsletter based method for dissemination of information within WorkVentures. We showed the audience what sample WorkVentures newsletter looked like and reviewed some of the key contextual aspects to newsletters within WorkVentures in terms of their creation, management, reach and format.  We reminded the audience about the importance of bridging silos and then called for ideas from the audience as to how SharePoint could improve the dissemination of news. What was particularly great about this session was that audience members began to relate SharePoint ideas against the key focus areas and identify some of the governance aspects that would be required to make it work.

For example, if you look at the map below (click to enlarge), one of the ideas for the newsletter was a fairly technical one: leveraging “word automation services to extract list or story items and create a PDF”. On first glance one might think “wow that’s fairly heavy” (and not to mention quite nerdy), but the justification for this idea was that it would still account for those WorkVentures users who do not have a PC and therefore access to the portal. Another idea was “Have backoffice staff create the content” on the basis that in doing so, they would get a better feel for coal-face issues that they typically do not see normally. When you think about it, this idea is not SharePoint at all, but more of a strategy for how SharePoint should be adopted and accountabilities for doing so (i.e. a governance approach!)

The key point here is that In both of these examples, audience members were clearly relating their ideas back to the previously established goals, which in turn were aligned to the WorkVentures vision, purpose and key strategic focus areas. Not bad for a couple hours work eh?

With the little time that we had left, we also looked at site navigation and structure, where the audience resolved that WorkVentures would be best served by a hybrid navigation model that was functionally driven primarily (i.e. task based navigation), but then divided into divisional areas. (As opposed to a purely organisational structure driven navigation model).

As you can see below, we made a point of always showing the four areas of focus for SharePoint overall, to ensure that decisions made were informed by them.

Conclusion

I have to say that given the timeframe and constraints, I think we did a great job of developing a shared vision for SharePoint, how it fitted into WorkVentures organisational and strategic context, and then focusing a diverse audience into looking at SharePoint building blocks through that lens. The dialogue maps were very rich, with some terrific ideas, and WorkVentures staff were thrilled to see the alignment of SharePoint to their strategic goals.

I use similar methods to this for non IT projects too, and I think that if we had a week to work on WorkVentures, we would have created something really special. Nevertheless, from my point of view, I think that the community challenge is an terrific idea, I enjoyed being a part of it, and I have to offer special thanks to Debbie and Andrew in particular for helping to make this into a really great mini-engagement. Hopefully we can do it all again next year.

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

www.sevensigma.com.au

Hi all

I just thought I would check-in with some updates on happenings and some upcoming travels. In less then 2 weeks now, I will be in London with Andrew Woodward and Ant Clay of 21apps for the second SharePoint Governance and Information Architecture Master Class. There are still places available on this class so if you have been thinking about attending, now is the time to act.

Also in Europe, a class is being run in Utrecht, Netherlands in May by Ant Clay.

I am proud to be chosen to be a keynote speaker at the Australian SharePoint conference in Sydney in March. I am still wondering if I should dialogue map 600 people! I will also be running a two-day class after this conference – the only one in Sydney for this year. The week after I am in NZ at the SharePoint conference there, also running a 2 day class and hopefully the first ever Issue Mapping class in New Zealand.

After a small break (begging forgiveness of clients who have to put up with my “international man of mystery” gallivanting), I’ll be heading to North American shores to run classes over there. Confirmed cities at this stage are Boston and Toronto, but DC and Chicago are in the works and I am hopeful to run one on the west coast, perhaps in San Francisco or Seattle.

If you are a SharePoint consultancy in these areas and would like to partner with us on this, please contact me on twitter @paulculmsee or email me via the address at the about page of this blog.

Below is the current itinerary for Governance and Information Architecture classes. Things are still being solidified, and will obviously change a little between now and then. Keep an eye on twitter @paulculmsee for more detail.

if you live in any of the regions that are either “tentative” or “in the works”, please contact me and register your interest so I can work with local partners on the ground in these locations.

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

Hi all

A big chunk of last year had me off under a metaphorical mushroom, putting together several days of courseware on the topic of SharePoint Governance and Information Architecture. My take on these topics are influenced from some odd places, and the course drew on a lot of the non IT work that I do, that involves collaboration on some very complex problems indeed.

In November and December of 2010, we took this “on the road”, so to speak, firstly in Dublin, then London and Sydney. The courses were sold out and feedback was terrific. Here are a few choice quotes (check out the hyperlinks for full reviews)

“Did it meet my expectations? Well I’d have to say that it far exceeded them. There had obviously been a large amount of effort in preparing the courseware and modules. They covered the important missing links currently absent from the Microsoft and traditional training courses” – Wes Hackett.

“I’ve just finished the second day of the SharePoint 2010 Governance and Information Architecture Master Class presented by Paul Culmsee with the support of Andrew Woodward . I can wholeheartedly say it was one of the best courses I’ve attended both in content and presentation style and they deserve a lot of credit for putting together a fantastic course. Paul in particular has put a huge amount of effort into the slidedeck, sample documents and enormous manual (almost 500 pages worth!) let alone all the great additional insight he could provide in person over both days” – Brendan Newell

“Finally …. after 12 years in the IT industry a course which covers some of the fundamental issues governing project success.   This course is a real eye opener and a must for any IT professional involved in project planning and delivery” -  Stephen McWilliams

“I just came back from the best technology training I have had in years: a world-first Microsoft SharePoint Elite Information Architecture course designed and delivered by Paul Culmsee. It has taught me a great deal across ALL facets of the day-to-day work that I do as a SharePoint architect” – Jess Kim

Based on this and similar feedback, we are going to do it again. Locations confirmed so far are London (#SPIAUK), Sydney (#SPIAAU) and Wellington (#SPIANZ) in February and March 2011 and in the pipeline is The Netherlands (#SPIANL) and at least a couple of US cities!

In addition to the unique content on these classes, I am honoured to announce that I am now authorised to teach the official Cognexus Issue Mapping courseware – the only non Cognexus Dialogue Mapping practitioner authorised to do so. As such, we will be running the inaugural Issue Mapping class in London in late February as well (wohoo!)

So, here are the details for each location:

Wondering what to expect in these classes? Read on!

 SharePoint Governance and Information Architecture Master Class. 2 full days of real world, examples knowledge and techniques

Most people understand that deploying SharePoint is much more than getting it installed. Despite this, current SharePoint governance documentation abounds in service delivery aspects. However, just because your system is rock solid, stable, well documented and governed through good process, there is absolutely no guarantee of success. Similarly, if Information Architecture for SharePoint was as easy as putting together lists, libraries and metadata the right way, then why doesn’t Microsoft publish the obvious best practices?

In fact, the secret to a successful SharePoint project is an area that the governance documentation barely touches.

This master class pinpoints the critical success factors for SharePoint governance and Information Architecture and rectifies this blind spot. Paul‘s style takes an ironic and subversive take on how SharePoint governance really works within organisations, while presenting a model and the tools necessary get it right.

Drawing on inspiration from many diverse sources, disciplines and case studies, Paul has distilled the “what” and “how” of governance down a simple and accessible, yet rigorous and comprehensive set of tools and methods that organisations large and small can utilise to achieve the level of commitment required to see SharePoint become successful.

Master class aims:

• Present SharePoint governance and Information Architecture in a new light – focus on the “blind spots” where the current published material is inadequate
• Cover lessons learned from Paul’s non IT work as a facilitator and sensemaker in complex large scale projects
• Examine the latest trends in the information landscape for industry and government and review studies that inform governance and Information Architecture efforts
• Present an alternative approach to business-as-usual SharePoint governance planning that focuses on real collaboration
• Provide quality information that is rigorous yet accessible, entertaining and interesting

Master class outcomes:

• Understand the SharePoint governance lens beyond an IT service delivery focus
• Develop your ‘wicked problem’ radar and apply appropriate governance practices, tools and techniques accordingly
• Learn how to align SharePoint projects to broad organisational goals, avoid chasing platitudes and ensure that the problem being solved is the right problem
• Learn how to account for cognitive bias and utilise tools and techniques that help stakeholders align to a common vision
• Understand the relationship between governance and assurance, why both are needed and how they affect innovation and user engagement
• Understand the underlying, often hidden forces of organisational chaos that underpins projects like SharePoint
• Understand the key challenges and opportunities that SharePoint presents for Information Architecture
• Learn how to document your information architecture
• Practical knowledge: Add lots more tools to your governance and IA toolkit!

Course Structure: The course is split into 7 modules, run across the two days.

Module 1: SharePoint Governance f-Laws 1-17:

Module 1 is all about setting context in the form of clearing some misconceptions about the often muddy topic of SharePoint governance. This module sheds some light onto these less visible SharePoint governance factors in the form of Governance f-Laws, which will also help to provide the context for the rest of this course

• Why users don’t know what they want
• The danger of platitudes
• Why IT doesn’t get it
• The adaptive challenge – how to govern SharePoint for the hidden organisation
• The true forces of organisational chaos
• Wicked problems and how to spot them
• The myth of best practices and how to determine when a “practice” is really best

Module 2: The Shared Understanding Toolkit – part 1:

Module 2 pinpoints the SharePoint governance blind spot and introduces the Seven Sigma Shared Understanding Toolkit to counter it. The toolkit is a suite of tools, patterns and practices that can be used to improve SharePoint outcomes. This module builds upon the f-laws of module 1 and specifically examines the “what” and “why” questions of SharePoint Governance. Areas covered include how to identify particular types of problems, how to align the diverse goals of stakeholders, leverage problem structuring methods and constructing a solid business case.

Module 3: The Shared Understanding Toolkit – part 2:

Module 3 continues the Seven Sigma Shared Understanding Toolkit, and focuses on the foundation of “what” and “why” by examining the “who” and “how”. Areas covered include aligning stakeholder expectations, priorities and focus areas and building this alignment into a governance structure and written governance plan that actually make sense and that people will read. We round off by examining user engagement/stakeholder communication and training strategy.

Module 4: Information Architecture trends, lessons learned and key SharePoint challenges

Module 4 examines the hidden costs of poor information management practices, as well as some of the trends that are impacting on Information Architecture and the strategic direction of Microsoft as it develops the SharePoint road map. We will also examine the results from what other organisations have attempted and their lessons learned. We then distil those lessons learned into some the fundamental tenants of modern information architecture and finish off by examining the key SharePoint challenges from a technical, strategic and organisational viewpoint.

Module 5: Information organisation and facets of collaboration

Module 5 dives deeper into the core Information Architecture topics of information structure and organisation. We explore the various facets of enterprise collaboration and identify common Information Architecture mistakes and the strategies to avoid making them.

Module 6: Information Seeking, Search and metadata.

Module 6 examines the factors that affect how users seek information and how they manifest in terms of patterns of use. Building upon the facets of collaboration of module 5, we examine several strategies to improving SharePoint search and navigation. We then turn our attention to taxonomy and metadata, and what SharePoint 2010 has to offer in terms of managed metadata

Module 7: Shared understanding and visual representation – documenting your Information Architecture

Module 7 returns to the theme of governance in the sense of communicating your information architecture through visual or written form. To achieve shared understanding among participants, we need to document our designs in various forms for various audiences.

Putting it all together: From vision to execution

As a take home, we will also supply a USB stick for attendees with a sample performance framework, governance plan, SharePoint ROI calculator (Spreadsheet), sample mind maps of Information Architecture. These tools are the result of years of continual development and refinement “out in the field” and until now have never been released to the public.

Note: The workshop sessions will be hands on, we provide all of the tools and samples needed but please bring your own laptop.

Issue Mapping Master Class. Your path towards shared understanding and shared commitment

“Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them.” Laurence J. Peter

Presented by: Paul Culmsee

Courseware by: Cognexus Institute and Seven Sigma

“Not another $#%@*$ meeting!”

All of us have felt the frustration of walking from yet another unproductive meeting, wondering where the agenda went. Yet, as problems become more complex, meetings are still the place where critical strategic decisions are made.

What is Issue Mapping?

Issue-Based Information Systems (IBIS) is a sense-making framework used to support group discussions to assist all involved to come to a shared understanding. It visually maps participants’ points of views, problems voiced, the rationale and reasons leading up to decision(s). The maps can be easily read and understood by everyone, even by those not part of the discussion group.

Why Issue Mapping?

• Maps detailed rationale behind decision-making as well as the decision; maps the thinking process of the group
• Concentrates on pros and cons to an idea, encourages and explores all views, taking the sting out of differences
• Represents and clarifies diverse points of views, conflicting interpretations and goals, inconsistent information and other forms of complexity
• Everyone gets a chance to speak, if they want. People are heard and contributions are acknowledged. Interruptions, repetition and dominance of the loudest decreases
• Keeps participants on topic because they can visually see the progress of the discussion
• Keeps everyone’s attention
• Meeting progress/result can be seen
• Map helps participants come up with ideas/arguments
• Visual display of progress to review summary if need so the brain can absorb the bigger picture and appreciate the validity and value of a larger perspective
• Avoids jumping to easy answers or superficial conclusions
• Promotes deeper reasoning, rigor and even wisdom
• Everyone can visually see everything discussed- leaves no room for misunderstandings
• Documents can easily be attached to map to back up ideas
• Participants can see effectiveness of mapping and genuine will try to make it more productive

About Seven Sigma

Issue Mapping is a life skill that can be applied to many different problem domains and scenarios. Participants will gain proficiency in a craft that can be applied long into the future, to help them and others bring clarity and convergence to the management of complex problems. At Seven Sigma, we practice Issue and Dialogue Mapping routinely and this has brought us many satisfied clients. The Mapping in itself is part of the ‘secret sauce’ that makes Seven Sigma’s reputation renowned.

Seven Sigma Business Solutions is the only recognised designated partner of Cognexus Institute, founder of the art of Issue Mapping, in the world. We recognise that without reaching shared understanding, you will find yourself at yet another meeting, rehashing the same unresolved problems, listening to the same arguments month after month. Or, if a decision has been made, it has not been followed up to fruition due to lack of commitment/buy-in.

We are proud to be part of your journey towards shared understanding and shared commitment.

Master Class aims and outcomes:

• Be able to create great maps – issue maps that are clear, coherent, and inviting
• Immediately start using Issue Mapping effectively in your work and life; the class will focus on practical experience and map building
• Command a rich range of options for publishing and sharing maps
• Lead with maps: create direction, momentum, and energy with issue maps
• Quickly and effectively do critical analysis in dynamic situations
• Organize unstructured information and discover patterns and connections within it
• Make critical thinking visible for inspection and analysis
• Recognise early, the symptoms of wicked problems and the forces behind group divergence
• Recognise the importance of capturing the rationale behind decisions, as well as the decisions themselves
• Rethink the traditional approach to meetings and decision making
• Start capturing the rationale leading up to the decisions by using IBIS and Compendium software

It will also give you a deeper understanding of:

• The fundamentals of IBIS and Compendium
• The structural patterns that give clarity and power to issue maps
• How decision rationale is represented in a map

This master class will be hands on – please bring your own laptop with Compendium software (freeware) installed.

Duration: 2 days, with homework after the first day

Audience: For both IT and non-IT audience; those involved in highly complex projects including leaders, consultants, facilitators, organisational development professionals, change agents, managers and engineers.

Prerequisite: An open mind geared for shared understanding and shared commitment

I don’t know about you, but as a SharePoint practitioner, I love the fact that I do not do SharePoint full-time anymore. I’d like to take some time to explain why this is the case, and how my non IT work helps me be a better SharePoint practitioner. To do so, I will talk about a recent non IT project I worked on. Who knows? This may give you some insights into how you view and approach collaborative work.

Western Australia is BIG

In case you don’t know already, I live in Perth, Western Australia. You can see Perth if you squint at the map on your left and look to the south west area.

Western Australia is a bloody big land area and extremely isolated. One claim to fame about living in Perth is its distinction for being one of the most isolated cities in the world. In fact we has a population density is on par with Mongolia (this is dead-set true – I researched this fact). Of the 2.2 million people that live in the state, 1.8 million live in the Perth metropolitan area and the rest are scattered far and wide. In terms of distribution, there are no other major cities in Western Australia. The next most populated town outside of Perth is Mandurah with some 83,000 people. 

In the north of Western Australia, these towns are often separated by anywhere from a couple hundred to more than a thousand kilometres. The weather is very hot, the landscape is breathtakingly beautiful and the isolation here is hard to comprehend without visiting. The wealth of Western Australia (“GFC? What GFC?”) comes from the north of this vast state, via huge mineral deposits that China seems happy to buy from us, which in turn keep me and my colleagues busy putting in SharePoint around the place.

Now if you think Western Australia is big, get this: The Kimberley region of Western Australia (the top section marked in red) is almost as big as the entire country of Germany. For American readers, it alone is three fifths the size of Texas. For all that space, only around 45000-50000 people live there.

These wide distances create all sorts of challenges. At a most basic level, think about the cost of basic services to such a remote location with such a small population density. Cost of living is high and services like health care are always stretched and people living here have to accept that they will never be able to enjoy the same level of service enjoyed by their city slicker cousins.

Now that I have painted that picture in your mind, let me intersect that with one of Australia’s biggest wicked problems. The indigenous people’s of Australia have many social and health issues that have had a massive human cost to them. We are talking chronic alcoholism, physical and sexual abuse, depression, suicide and the whole range of mental illnesses. Families and communities tear themselves apart in a seemingly an endless negatively reinforcing cycle. Like many indigenous groups around the world, intervention approaches from earlier periods have had catastrophic long term consequences that were never considered at the time (a classic wicked problem characteristic). When you read the stories about the stolen generations, you cannot help but be deeply moved by the long term effects, the damage done and the sad legacy left behind.

Continue reading “Dialogue Mapping: The Ying to SharePoint Yang”

The background

Over the last three years, my career trajectory had altered somewhat where I spent half my time as a SharePoint practitioner, doing all of the things that us SharePoint practitioners do, and the other half was spent in a role that I would call sensemaking. Essentially group facilitation work, on some highly complex, non IT problems. These ranged from areas such as city planning, (envisioning and community engagement) to infrastructure delivery (think freeways, schools and hospitals), to mental health, team and relationship building, performance management, board meetings and various other scenarios.

Imagine how much of a different world this is, where a group is coming together from often very different backgrounds and base positions, to come to grips with a complex set of interlocking problems and somehow try and align enough to move forward. We cannot simply throw a “SharePoint” at these problems and think it will all be better. By their very nature, we have to collaborate on them to move forward – true collaboration in all its messy, sometimes frustrating glory.

As a result of this experience, I’ve also learned many highly effective collaborative techniques and approaches that I have never seen used in my 20+ years of being an IT practitioner. Additionally, I’ve had the opportunity to work with (and still do), some highly skilled people who I learned a huge amount from. This is “standing on the shoulders of giants” stuff. As you can imagine, this new learning has had a significant effect on how Seven Sigma now diagnoses and approaches SharePoint projects and has altered the lens through which I view problem solving with SharePoint.

It also provided me the means to pinpoint a giant blind spot in the SharePoint governance material that’s out there, and what to do about it.

The first catalyst – back injury

In January this year, my family and I went on a short holiday, down to the wine country of Western Australia called the Margaret River region. On the very first day of that trip, I was at the beach, watching my kids run amok, when I totally put my back out (*sigh* such an old man). Needless to say, I could barely move for the next week or two after. My family, ever concerned for my welfare, promptly left me behind at the chalet and took off each day to sample wines, food and generally do the things that tourists do.

Left to my own devices, and not overly mobile I had little to do but ponder – and ponder I did (even more than my usual pondering – so this was an Olympic class ponder). Reflecting on all of my learning and experiences from sensemaking work, my use of it within SharePoint projects, as well as the subsequent voracious reading in a variety of topics, I came to realise that SharePoint governance is looked through a lens that clouds some of the most critical success factors. I knew exactly how to lift that fog, and had a vision for a holistic view of SharePoint governance that at the same time, simplifies it and makes it easy for people to collectively understand.

So I set to work, distilling all of this learning and experience and put it into something coherent, rigorous and accessible. After all, SharePoint is a tool that is an enabler for “improved collaboration”, and I had spent half of my time on deeply collaborative non IT scenarios where to my knowledge, no other SharePoint practitioner has done so. Since sensemaking lies in all that ‘softer’ stuff that traditionally IT is a bit weaker on, I thought I could add some dimensions to SharePoint governance in a way that could be made accessible, practical and useful.

By the end of that week I still had a sore back, but I had the core of what I wanted to do worked out, and I knew that it would be a rather large undertaking to finish it (if it ever could be finished).

The second catalyst – Beyond Best Practices

I also commenced writing a non SharePoint book on this topic area with Kailash Awati from the Eight to Late blog, called Beyond Best Practices. This book examines why most best practices don’t work and what can be done about them. The plethora of tools, systems and best practices that are generally used to tackle organisational problems rarely help and when people apply these methods, they often end up solving the wrong problem. After all, if best practices were best, then we would all follow them and projects would be delivered on time, on budget and with deliriously happy stakeholders right?

The work and research that has gone into this book has been significant. We studied the work of many people who have recognised and written about this, as well as many case studies. The problem these authors had is that these works challenged many widely accepted views, patterns and practices of various managerial disciplines. As a result these ideas have been rejected, ignored or considered outright heretical, and thus languish (largely unread) in journals. The recent emergence of anything x2.0 and a renewed focus on collaboration might seem radical or new for some, but these early authors were espousing very similar things many years ago.

The third catalyst – 3grow

Some time later in the year, 3grow asked me to develop a 4 day SharePoint 2010 Governance and Information Architecture course for Microsoft NZ’s Elite program. I agreed and used my “core” material, as well as some Beyond Best Practice ideas to develop the course. Information Architecture is a bloody tough course to write. It would be easy to cheat and just do a feature dump of every building block that SharePoint has to offer and call that Information Architecture. But that’s the science and not the art – and the science is easy to write about. From my experience, IA is not that much different to the sensemaking work that I do, so I had a very different foundation to base the entire course from.

The IA course took 450 man hours to write and produced an 800 page manual (and just about killed me in the process), but the feedback from attendees surpassed all expectations.  This motivated me to complete the vision I originally had for a better approach to SharePoint governance and this has now been completed as well (with another 200 pages and a CD full of samples and other goodies).

The result

I have distilled all of this work into a master class format, which ranges from 1 to 5 days, suited to Business Analysts, Project and Program Managers, Enterprise and Information Architects, IT Managers and those in strategic roles who have to bridge the gap between organisational aspirations and the effective delivery of SharePoint solutions. I speak the way I write, so if the cleverworkarounds writing style works for you, then you will probably enjoy the manner in which the material is presented. I like rigour, but I also like to keep people awake! 🙂

One of my pet hates is when the course manual is just a printout of the slide deck with space for notes. In this master class, the manual is a book in itself and covers additional topic areas in a deeper level of detail from the class. So you will have some nice bedtime reading after attending.

Andrew Woodward has been a long time collaborator on this work, before we formalised this collaboration with the SamePage Alliance, we had discussed running a master class session in the UK on this material. At the same time, thanks to Michael Sampson, an opportunity arose to conduct a workshop in Ireland. As a result, you have an opportunity to be a part of these events.

Dublin

The first event is terrific as it is a free event in Dublin on November 17, hosted by Storm Technology a Microsoft Gold Partner in Dublin. As a result of the event being free, it is by invitation only and numbers are limited. This is a one day event, focussing on the SharePoint Governance blind spots and what to do about them, but also wicked problems and Dialogue Mapping, as well as learning to look at SharePoint from outside the IT lens, and translate its benefits to a wider audience (ie “Learn to speak to your CFO”).

So if you are interested in learning how to view SharePoint governance in a new light, and are tired of the governance material that rehashes the same tired old approaches that give you a mountain of work to do that still doesn’t change results, then register your interest with Rosemary at the email address in the image above ASAP and she can reserve a spot for you. We will supply a 200 page manual, as well as a CD of sample material for attendees, including a detailed governance plan.

London

In London on November 22 and 23, I will be running a two day master class along side Andrew Woodward on SharePoint Governance and Information Architecture. The first day is similar to the Ireland event, where we focus on governance holistically, shattering a few misconceptions and seeing things in a different light, before switching focus to various facets of Information Architecture for SharePoint. In essence, I have taken the detail of the 4 days of the New Zealand Elite course and created a single day version (no mean feat by the way).

Participants on this course will receive a 400 page manual, chock full of SharePoint Governance and Information Architecture goodness, as well as a CD/USB of sample material such as a SharePoint governance plan, as well as IA maps of various types. Unlike Ireland, this is an open event, available to anyone, and you can find more detail and register at the eventbrite site http://spiamasterclass.eventbrite.com/. In case you are wondering, this event is non technical. Whether you have little hands on experience with SharePoint or a deep knowledge, you will find a lot of value in this event for the very reason that the blind spots I focus on are kind of universally applicable irrespective of your role.

Much of what you will learn is applicable for many projects, beyond SharePoint and you will come away with a slew of new approaches to handle complex projects in general.

So if you are in the UK or somewhere in Europe, look us up. It will be a unique event, and Andrew and I are very much looking forward to seeing you there!

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

www.sevensigma.com.au

As you may have noticed, this blog has been a bit of a dead zone lately. There are several very good reasons for this – one being that a lot of my creative energy has been going into co-writing a book – and I thought it was time to come clean on it.

So first up, just because I get asked this all the time, the book is definitely *not* “A humble tribute to the leave form – The Book”! In fact, it’s not about SharePoint per se, but rather the deeper dark arts of team collaboration in the face of really complex or novel problems.

It was late 2006 when my own career journey took an interesting trajectory, as I started getting into sensemaking and acquiring the skills necessary to help groups deal with really complex, wicked problems. My original intent was to reduce the chances of SharePoint project failure but in learning these skills, now find myself performing facilitation, goal alignment and sensemaking in areas miles away from IT. In the process I have been involved with projects of considerable complexity and uniqueness that make IT look pretty easy by comparison. The other fringe benefit is being able to sit in a room and listen to the wisdom of some top experts in their chosen disciplines as they work together.

Through this work and the professional and personal learning that came with it, I now have some really good case studies that use unique (and I mean, unique) approaches to tackling complex problems. I have a keen desire to showcase these and explain why our approaches worked.

My leanings towards sensemaking and strategic issues would be apparent to regular readers of CleverWorkarounds. It is therefore no secret that this blog is not really much of a technical SharePoint blog these days. The articles on branding, ROI, and capacity planning were written in 2007, just before the mega explosion of interest in SharePoint. This time around, there are legions of excellent bloggers who are doing a tremendous job on giving readers a leg-up onto this new beast known as SharePoint 2010.

So back to the book. Our tentative title is “Beyond Best Practices” and it’s an ambitious project, co-authored with Kailash Awati – the man behind the brilliant eight to late blog. I had been a fan of Kailash’s work for a long time now, and was always impressed at the depth of research and effort that he put into his writing. Kailash is a scarily smart guy with two PHD’s under his belt and to this day, I do not think I have ever mentioned a paper or author to him that he hasn’t read already. In fact, usually he has read it, checked out the citations and tells me to go and read three more books!

Kailash writes with the sort of rigour that I aspire to and will never achieve, thus when the opportunity of working with him on a book came up, I knew that I absolutely had to do it and that it would be a significant undertaking indeed.

To the left is a mock-up picture to try and convey where we are going with this book. See the guy on the right? Is he scratching his head in confusion, saluting or both? (note, this is our mockup and the real thing may look nothing like this)

This book dives into the seedy underbelly of organisational problem solving, and does so in a way that no other book has thus far attempted. We examine why the very notion of “best practices” often makes no sense and have such a high propensity to go wrong. We challenge some mainstream ideas by shining light on some obscure, but highly topical and interesting research that some may consider radical or heretical. To counter the somewhat dry nature of some of this research (the topics are really interesting but the style in which academics write can put insomniacs to sleep), we give it a bit of the cleverworkarounds style treatment and are writing in a conversational style that loses none of the rigour, but won’t have you nodding off on page 2. If you liked my posts where I use odd metaphors like boy bands to explain SharePoint site collections, the Simpsons to explain InfoPath or death metal to explain records versus collaborative document management, then you should enjoy our journey through the world of cognitive science, memetics, scientific management and Willy Wonka (yup – Willy Wonka!).

Rather than just bleat about what the problems with best-practices are, we will also tell you what you can do to address these issues. We back up this advice by presenting a series of practical case studies, each of which illustrates the techniques used to address the inadequacies of best practices in dealing with wicked problems. In the end, we hope to arm our readers with a bunch of tools and approaches that actually work when dealing with complex issues. Some of these case studies are world unique and I am very proud of them.

Now at this point in the writing, this is not just an idea with an outline and a catchy title. We have been at this for about six months, and the results thus far (some 60-70,000 words) have been very, very exciting. Initially, we really had no idea whether the combination of our writing styles would work – whether we could take the degree of depth and skill of Kailash with my low-brow humour and my quest for cheap laughs (I am just as likely to use a fart joke if it helps me get a key point across)…

… But signs so far are good so stay tuned 🙂

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

www.sevensigma.com.au

Three weeks ago my plasma TV broke, freeing the family from the magic spell of hi-def television. My family took the loss in different ways. My four year old was devastated at the lack of Nintendo Wii, and constantly whined about being bored. My ten year old is a bookworm anyway, and continued to be one. I suddenly found mountains of time to write, churning out three Dialogue Mapping articles that I had been meaning to write for ages.

Today the repair man came and fixed the TV. I expect that the glow of the plasma screen will once again induce that zombie-like state, where my work-rate is dependant on what show happens to be on at the time (NCIS as I write this). Luckily, this is the last article of this particular series on Dialogue Mapping for now and I might have enough active brain cells to hang on long enough to squeeze this article out.

This article builds on the last section of part three that was entitled “Nurture the holding environment”. In that section, I introduced the concept of the “holding environment” and I offered a basic example (the bus trip that was conducted prior to the Dialogue Mapping session). This concept is so fundamental and important to the success of Dialogue Mapping and projects more broadly that I want to do it proper justice here in part four.

The paradox of individuality

Put a bunch of right-brained geeks in a room to solve a problem and you will probably find that they get on relatively well. Put a bunch of creative left-brained marketing people in a room to solve a problem and you might expect the same thing. The solutions offered, when compared to each other, are likely to be quite different and will also likely be sub-optimal. For a truly good solution, we need diversity in perspectives and, although this pains me to say, marketing people are therefore actually needed. This creates a bit of a problem though with the paradox of individuality because, as geeks, we all know the notion of marketing people being needed goes against everything we stand for.

I first read about the paradox of individuality in a book called Team Talk: The Power of Language in Team Dynamics and it was described as follows:

The only way for a group to become a group is for individuals to express their individuality, yet the only way for individuals is to become fully individuated is to accept and develop more fully, their connections to the group.

What? Geeks and marketing people accepting each other as equals? Unifying the laws of physics will come sooner and this is a classic example of what Conklin calls “social complexity”. Of course, social complexity goes much deeper than geeks vs. marketing people, but one of the effects of social complexity is a distinct lack of direct communication between parties. This is because conflict is not fun and avoidance is a natural reaction to situations that are not fun.

The idea of the “holding environment” is best summed up with the image below. Here, you can see that we have an area set aside for kids to play in a safe, controlled environment.

A holding environment for an organisation or a team is actually not that dissimilar to the example above. You are attempting to create a state where participants can step out of their comfort zones, but at the same time, are shielded from counter productive tensions that cause paralysis, chaos and pullback.

For this reason I maintain that beer is one of the best holding environments available and it forms a key part of my professional skill set 😉

As I stated in part 1 of this series, Dialogue Mapping is a very useful holding environment on its own, but it can be augmented with other things as well and you should always be on the lookout for complimentary tools and techniques. In the following sections, I will outline where Dialogue Mapping has augmented another method, or where we have augmented Dialogue Mapping itself with another method.

Information gathering for 40+ people

There are practical limits to how many people should be involved in a standard Dialogue Mapping session. Mind you, there are practical limits for how many people should attend a meeting too and that limit seems to be any more than one person :-).

By “standard”, I mean the sort of session illustrated below. The exact number that test the limits of Dialogue Mapping varies because it really depends on the wickedness of the problem being discussed and the past history of the group. For example, one of the teams I map for consists of around fifteen to eighteen members. They are working on a particularly wicked problem, yet I can work with this group alone quite easily. This is because over time, the group has worked out their decorum for the Dialogue Mapping sessions that work for all concerned. I also know everybody on a first name basis and some of the group have become personal friends of mine outside of work. In short, people are comfortable with each other and the process, and despite things getting heated people know that it is not personal. This is a simple, yet effective, example of a working holding environment.

A while back, my client invited representatives from academia, charities as well as various public sector government departments, to a half day workshop on the topic of social sustainability as part of a significant redevelopment project. There were approximately 40-45 attendees who were there for the first time. There was no way we would be able to cover off the required topics using a standard Dialogue Mapping set-up. With so many people, it would be hard for all attendees to have a say in the allotted time, let alone set up the room to handle that number of people for the process.

The way we got around this issue was to run a pre-workshop session among a much smaller group, to create a series of “seed maps” for each of the sub-areas of social sustainability. By the end of this process, we had around a dozen maps on various subtopics with a few questions, ideas, pros and cons. These maps were not complete at all, but that was not the aim. Instead they were well formed IBIS argumentations.

We then printed each of these maps out at large size. Initially each map was pinned to display boards, and when the attendees arrived they spent time wandering from map to map, examining the argumentation while mingling with other attendees. Below is a photo showing some of the seed maps prior to the attendees arriving.

Below is a diagram representing the table arrangement for the workshop. We started with a half hour overview and introduction as to the purpose of the workshop and why they had been invited. At this point, we removed four of the maps from the display boards above, and put a map on each table. We explained to the group that each table had a unique map on it and each map was on a particular topic. At this point attendees had the opportunity to move to a table where the topic was of most relevance or interest to them.

Each table contained copious amounts of marker pens. I then took the stage and explained the basics of IBIS grammar to the attendees and explained to them that we wanted them to start adding ideas to the existing maps. I did not belabour the grammar, nor did I expect them to suddenly know how to do IBIS properly, but what I made clear, was that I was going to walk from table to table and interrupt if I felt the additions to the map made no sense or were ambiguous in some way.

The group had just under an hour to work on each map and at the end of the hour, we removed the updated paper maps and replaced them with the next four from the display boards. The process was then repeated and I walked from table to table, asking for clarification or calling out implied questions on parts of the maps that made no sense to me. Interestingly, IBIS novices seemed to have little problems with the usage of ideas, pros and cons, but they would forget to make the underlying question explicit. I would ask them what was the question being answered by a particular idea and would write the question into the map and redraw the lines.

After the third iteration of this process we were done. The last half an hour was a “Where to from here?” session and an opportunity for the group to provide feedback to the organisers of the workshop.

After the workshop was completed, I took all of the updated paper maps and added the additional rationales into the seed maps in Compendium. The process was surprisingly quick because the majority of the additional argumentations that were added were actually pretty good IBIS form. I think that having existing argumentations on the seed maps made it easier for attendees to add rationales that looked similar to what was there already. It wasn’t perfect IBIS by any means, but it was not a difficult task for me to refactor the additional information without losing any of the intent behind the rationales.

For the record, additional workshops were conducted, but these reverted to standard Dialogue Mapping workshops with a subset of the attendees who had specialised skills and knowledge in the topic area. But what this particular process demonstrated was that with a little planning a single Dialogue Mapper could still manage to capture quality rationales from a very large group in a short space of time.

Dialogue Mapping with a facilitator

Dialogue mapping for a large group can be augmented with a facilitator and I have done this a few times. For a large group, this can be very helpful because the mapper can concentrate on capturing the dialogue and less on directing the meeting. Equally though, a facilitator can actually make the process more difficult. The key to a facilitator situation working is when the facilitator either knows IBIS or has been present in a number of Dialogue Mapping workshops and understands how the process works. This is because the facilitator is usually facing the group like the mapper, asking probing questions, directing the course of conversation and therefore is not looking at the map or listening in terms of IBIS translation of the dialogue. As a Dialogue Mapper, it is important for participants to verify what you have captured is correct, and if the facilitators are not following the map, they can easily get in the way of this verification process.

Facilitators can also get you into trouble at times because they can sometimes be conditioned to traditional meeting decorum where topics are allocated at particular times with an agenda that can preclude deeper exploration of a topic. Dialogue Mapping is a rich enough container to allow a group that deeper exploration, but this is not something that some facilitators are used to. One prime example that sticks out in my mind to this day was a workshop where we had a lot of options to explore. Conscious of the agenda, in an attempt to make the process more efficient, the facilitator asked the group whether any of the options had any “fatal flaws” that enabled that option to be quickly discounted. It soon became apparent (in a negative way) that one person’s “fatal flaw” was diametrically opposed to another person’s “fatal flaw”. This attempt to shortcut deliberations backfired badly and resulted in this line of question being completely abandoned.

This is a great example of the importance of nurturing the holding environment (lesson nine from part 3). After this “fatal flaws” episode, I deliberately stopped mapping while the group resolved the fatal flaw issue and resolved to try a different approach. This subsequent approach proved to be much more successful and we never deviated from it after that. “No fatal flaws” became a bit of a mantra among this group.

A key to working with a facilitator is to remember the lesson on confidence and assertiveness from part 3. Just because a facilitator is directing the meeting and influencing the direction of the conversation, it doesn’t mean that the mapper is purely a scribe. Work out a system with the facilitator where, if you raise your hand or signal in some way, you are not ready to move on straight away. Another technique that I have used in a large group situation was to assign someone else the traffic warden role, where if I am having trouble keeping up with the various conversations, and my eyes are on the map, they can call the group to order.

Dialogue Mapping, in tandem with another Dialogue Mapper ,can work very well and I have done many times with my colleagues at Seven Sigma. In this situation, you are both thinking in the IBIS grammar and both of you are mentally unpacking the conversation, although only one of you is actually performing the mapping. We have used this technique with particularly good results in SharePoint requirement gathering workshops, where one of us asks the questions and the other performs the mapping.

Dialogue Mapping and Debategraph

Compendium is one of several tools that can be used to create and render argument grammar like IBIS. For me, Compendium is the absolute best for Dialogue Mapping. Being a desktop application, I do not need internet access and once you are proficient with it, Compendium is very fast. This is of course, the biggest factor for Dialogue Mapping live. You do not want to be hindered by the limitations of the software tool that you are using.

I noticed that some CleverworkArounds readers created IBIS maps in Visio and were also using mind mapping tools after I published the “One best practice” series. But the problem is, although you can technically make an IBIS map, those tools would never work in a live session because of how slow it would be to add rationales to the map. Seriously guys, it might be technically possibly but do not attempt to use those tools live.

One size does not fit all and this is especially true of sense making tools. There are actually two main audiences for maps like this. Those who create the maps and those who consume the maps. The key point is that the ultimate audience for any map is quite often not the group creating the map in the first place. The whole point of capturing rationale is to make visible the process that a group went through when working on a problem, which ultimately shows why a particular decision was made or why a course of action was taken. Those who want to review the rationales are a very different audience to those who made the decision and wish to demonstrate justification. Just because the tool works well for the problem solving process, does not automatically assume that the tool is then best suited to the communication of that rationale to a wider audience.

Compendium maps work brilliantly well during the Dialogue Mapping process and from a broader communication point of view, work exceptionally well when detailed maps are printed onto large sized paper. But as a communication and distribution tool, Compendium is weaker than some of the alternatives. Compendium maps do not translate overly well to the web at this point, and asking all interested parties to install compendium is out of the question. For the sake of article length, I will not go into detail why this is, but to appease the Compendium fanbois, this is direct feedback from my clients and not just my opinionated rant.

For communicating the rationale that has come from Dialogue Mapping sessions to a wider audience, Debategraph is ideal. Unlike Compendium, Debategraph is a cloud based argument visualisation tool, designed to leverage the freeform updating capabilities of a wiki, along with the rigor of an argument grammar much like IBIS. Debategraph does not use a top down or left to right visualisation method. Instead each node is at the centre of the screen and surrounding issues, ideas, pros and cons surround the node, requiring the user to click nodes to explore further argumentation.

The beauty of Debategraph is the combination of its argument navigation, along with the streaming view of related content as shown below. My clients absolutely love the stream view because it is so simple for people to explore and work with. The ability to embed a map at any point in the debate on any web site is also pretty handy and I have pasted a sample map below to illustrate this. Click a node on the left pane (the “*” means there are sub arguments) and the content in the right window will change, based on which argument node is currently being examined.

Compare this to Compendium maps, where additional rich content like images, documents and the like are treated as additional nodes in the map. As you can see in the example below, it is possible to integrate rich content into the map very easily, but that rich content is linked in the same manner as the argumentation itself. Debategraph on the other hard, separates the argumentation from the supporting content and I think that this works much better and supports a richer form of argument based content delivery.

But once again, use the best tool that fits the purpose. From a dialogue and rationales collection point of view, Debategraph is an excellent way for a bunch of geographically dispersed people to debate a particular issue because the map will refactor on the fly as people self-contribute to it. But I personally would not use Debategraph for the Dialogue Mapping process, because it is not as fast as compendium and it is not as easy to view the map in full context as shown above. The over-arching point with all of this is that if the rationale has been captured in the first place, there are many ways to make creative use of it.

Note: To be fair on the Compendium makers there are many excellent examples of Compendium being used for some pretty impressive things. I am talking here specifically about online collaboration and communication to a wider audience.

Conclusion

This series of posts has examined the practical aspects of Dialogue Mapping, explored some of the techniques that I have used to augment it. Although I do not intend to write any more articles on this topic right now, the series is by no means complete. This is an ongoing learning process for all practitioners of this craft and I am sure that other Dialogue Mappers have tried different techniques than those that I have covered. (Some interesting things are happening on the SharePoint integration front too, which should enrich this experience even further, but that is a whole separate topic 🙂 )

But one final request. If you have used techniques such as these to enrich the experience for participants, then I’d love to hear from you. Even if it is not for Dialogue Mapping, any technique that is inclusive and augments the holding environment, please drop me a line or leave a comment.

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

www.sevensigma.com.au

Hi there and welcome to part 3 of my series on the practice of Dialogue Mapping in the real-world. To recap, in part 1, I provided a brief overview of Dialogue Mapping and in part 2, I described a common real world usage scenario that we perform fairly often as SharePoint consultants.

The rest of this series will change tack a little. In this article I am going to describe a very different Dialogue Mapping scenario to you. This was a huge challenge and a large leap from what I described in part 2. There were some wonderful lessons learned from this work which I will cover off here.

The most “wicked” problems are not technical

My first Dialogue Mapping gig where I was not a subject matter expert also happened to be a real baptism of fire. Here was a problem that I had no understanding of, no discipline knowledge and no sense of background history of the project, the dynamics of the group, nor any idea of the positions of stakeholders on the problem.

By this time my IBIS fluency was pretty much down and I felt very confident with the usage of Compendium. I had not yet travelled to the USA yet to train under Jeff Conklin directly, but I carried his book around with me, and had read it many times over. I had performed Dialogue Mapping many times, however until this point all the projects or subjects that I was involved in I knew a lot about. This time I felt very vulnerable. Your domain knowledge is a form of armour, and it was unsettling to know that you’re going in stark naked. I was intimidated, yet excited at the same time.

So imagine this scenario. There was myself, a facilitator, and *fifteen* strangers sitting across from me. This was double the group numbers of the typical IT scenarios I had previously mapped. I remember emailing Jeff for advice when I heard that there would be so many and I recall him saying that 15 was a lot of people for a newbie. What was I in for! 🙂

Little did I know at the time that this group had been meeting for quite some time before that, but were really struggling on a complex urban planning issue. When I say complex, I mean complex in a social way, rather than technical. Interestingly, the issue was not a technically complicated issue at all. Anybody could have sat in the room and understood most of the dialogue (not necessarily the full context but you would not be completely blinded by science). What made this particular issue complex was the fact that the group members came from several different organisations, representing some quite diametrically opposing viewpoints. In part 2, I wrote about how it was hard enough just to get one IT department to come to the party and that was just one department of a single organisation – sheesh! If you have complained about organisational silos and think it is hard enough to get some degree of consensus within the realm of one organisation, imagine it when over a dozen representatives from different organisations are involved, organisations that straddle the full spectrum of public and private sectors, as well as the community.

There were simply so many stakeholders and interconnected issues that it was very hard to not get bogged down into tangents, repetition and frustration. Now, imagine eighteen months of this environment and the stressful social complexity impacts.

This is a long-term project that I am still involved with, so I will not be taking you through the specific details of this project just yet. Rest assured though, it has been such a great experience that I will write about it in detail in the future. For now, I will focus on lessons learnt so that others aspiring to perform this craft can learn from my own experiences.

People often tell you the best way to learn is to dive right in, and Dialogue Mapping is no exception. No sooner than I had put up a “what should we do…” type root question, it didn’t take long for debate to get … shall we say … rigorous! So I will go over some of the key lessons that I learnt from this experience thus far.

Lesson One: Confidence and assertiveness

The first thing that I had to contend with was not being in control of the conversation to the same extent as before. As previously stated, with SharePoint workshops I tend to direct the flow of the workshop as a mapper and as a subject matter expert. But this scenario was very different. I didn’t know the topic area at all and therefore some of the terms and acronyms made no sense to me. Also being new and unused to the decorum of the group, I erred on what I thought was politeness, rather than annoy the group by being direct and at times, interrupting them.

This, in my opinion, is a mistake and does a disservice to the other participants. It is also probably the most common thing a newbie mapper will experience when starting out, especially with a new group. As a result, the mapping in this first workshop ebbed and flowed. There were a few times where I was mapping the conversation really well, and the participants really engaged with the argumentation as it unfolded on the screen before them. Participants gestured to the map and asked me to add additional arguments and issues to what had already been built there. I could literally hear some of the initially sceptical, suddenly have that magic moment where they see it working. But at other times, during, say a particularly contentious issue, the conversation would fly at a rapid rate of knots. With so many people in the room, many wanted to have their say on these topics. This led to:

1. Side conversations started up
2. Some participants looked away from the map, and started debating directly to each other

As soon as one of these happened, and especially with the latter, I, as the Mapper, had no hope of following the conversation. As you might expect, I would lose focus and the quality of what was captured suffered (hence lots of idea nodes with no connections to anything). The focussing power of the map would be diminished and the wheels would start to fall off.

So remember this above all else. No matter what you do, you must be confident and assertive from the very start to keep the group focussed on the map. Don’t be afraid to interrupt someone to clarify a point, or pause them before they go too fast. If someone else starts to interject, interject back and make it clear that you will get to them as soon as you have finished capturing what someone else has said.

Here is the other critical thing: You must be consistent. It is the first ten to twenty minutes that will set the tone for the rest of the session. This is where people will implicitly learn the decorum of a Dialogue Mapping session and know what to expect. Your actions as a mapper, during this period, is critical to the overall quality of the session. Start it well and it will generally end well.

Jeff Conklin, of course, offers advice for this in his wonderful book on how to dealing with this. But of course, in the heat of dialogue, all of that advice goes straight out the window as you struggle to keep up with the rapid fire dialogue heading your way. Reading about how one should dialogue map is one thing, doing it is another. This is why I call Dialogue Mapping a craft and leads me to my second lesson learned.

Lesson Two: Remember that one guitar lesson you had? (Be realistic)

I think just about everybody at one point has had romantic notions of being a rock guitarist, banging out the blues like Clapton or blistering solos like Kirk Hammett or Brian May. A surprisingly large number of people have actually bought a guitar at some stage in their lives and have tried to live the dream. Most give it up once they find that the gap between their ability to play a G chord and their dream of playing the solo to Hotel California stretches to the moon and back. Inevitably, many guitars ends up collecting dust in the attic, along with the home gym set and many other items that were bought from late night infomercials.

You will hit this with Dialogue Mapping. Remember that wicked problems breed social complexity. Some problems may have some stakeholders with diametrically opposed views and discussion can be quite heated. The romantic notion of your group suddenly solving their wicked problem from your wonderful dialogue mapping has to be viewed with the reality that you still have to learn the G chord and audience can be fickle.

Thus, as far as audiences go, don’t go playing a stadium gig until you feel that you can handle sitting in the corner of a local bar or the school disco. In other words, start small and work your way up. A small, successful meeting will help you develop your style, confidence and then empower you to take on larger groups.

As Ali-G would say, keep it real.

Lesson Three: Stick to your domain of knowledge (at first)

This is a logical extension of lesson two, and also a tricky one because it can be just as much of a worst practice as a best one. This I suspect is probably a lesson on where Jeff Conklin or other dialogue mappers may disagree with me. One of the transitions that you have to make as a mapper is to move from what I would call Issue Mapping to real Dialogue Mapping. Just because you are doing mapping in front of a group, doesn’t actually mean you are necessarily “dialogue” mapping. Dialogue Mapping is often called “Issue Mapping with facilitation”, and when you work within your domain of expertise and you are a mapper as well as participant. Therefore you are not an impartial facilitator. This is the situation I described in part 2 and discovered very quickly, that pure dialogue mapping was much harder and mentally tougher.

But in terms of developing your skills, you will have good results when you are working in an area that you know well. You don’t have to worry about the meaning of acronyms and half of the questions you have likely heard before anyway. Remember though, that in a way it is kind of cheating because you are in effect, using the craft to get people to confront questions that you want answered. But it is an important stepping stone and will help you master lesson 4.

Lesson Four: IBIS grammar in the reptile brain

IBIS is the grammar that you use to map discourse. When mapping rapid-fire contributions from a group of people, they do not want to sit and wait for you to mull over whether their statement was an idea followed by a pro or an inferred question with an idea. If you find yourself having to do this, it is like trying to play a song on guitar and having to consciously think about how to play that G chord. Just think about how much you’d enjoy a Metallica concert if James Hetfield stopped every minute or so on a hard bit of a song and said “Wait, wait.. I’ve done this before… ok, hang on…oops, sorry”. This translation needs to burn itself into your reptile brain so that the process is as automatic as possible. To do this, you need to initially not worry about getting up in front of a group. As Conklin suggests in his book, listen to interviews on the radio or take an article, pull out its main points and create an IBIS map for it. There are a zillion ways to do this.

For all of you SharePoint people, a really excellent, highly relevant way of practice that I use, is to sit in the audience of a presentation at SharePoint Saturday or a conference and issue map the presentation. Below is a sample of some of the sessions where I have done this and the image after that demonstrates how much rationale I captured in the “NZ Web Standards and SharePoint” session.

Another great way to learn is to send one of your maps to an IBIS practitioner and let them pull it to bits. Even those of us who have done this for a while need that constant reinforcement and feedback. Like any grammar, different things can be written in different ways and one person’s IBIS will not always look like someone else’s. (There is another blog post in the works that will show this in a funny way). At various times I have sent maps to Conklin for constructive feedback (and then ducked for cover! – hehe)

Finally, if you are serious about this and like what you are reading, then do what I did – the 5 week Issue Mapping webinar based workshops that Jeff Conklin runs, or if you are in Australia and want something local, then contact me for a half or full-day in-house Issue Mapping intro workshop. Both will not teach you to dialogue map, but by the end of them you will dream in IBIS 🙂

Lesson Five: IBIS translation in the reptile brain

Once the language of IBIS is familiar to you, you can take any argumentation and form a consistent IBIS map. You then have to learn how to listen very carefully because that is half the art. Now you have to take prose and pontification by participants and somehow unpack the points made, articulate them into a summary, and form an IBIS based model in your head, and then commit it to the map.

This can be hard – very hard, and it is nigh on impossible to do without applying what I told you in lesson one. A dialogue mapper is not superhuman and does not have photographic memory. The skill you are developing here is one where you pick out the IBIS elements of some dialogue quickly, as well as knowing when to interject to make sure you do not miss anything.

A great example of this working is when someone has stated something, and although I cannot remember all points, I know that there was a question and three ideas offered. I might pause the conversation before it goes too far and say something like “Ah, that was important and I need to get this right. I heard you say three things there. You questioned the idea of X, and you offered an answer with 3 pros. One was Y, and what were the other two again?”

Conklin explains meeting discourse and question types in his book and the aforementioned workshop in a lot of detail. But once again, to apply it to a real-world situation can only be done by practice (and more practice). The absolute best way to do this is to watch an experienced dialogue mapper perform this and look at how they handle the situation, which brings me onto lesson six.

Lesson Six: Observe

One of the most enjoyable training experiences of my career was to travel to the picturesque town of Annapolis and learn dialogue mapping from Jeff Conklin himself. Up until then, I had been practicing the craft, but after those two days, I returned as a much better practitioner.

The single most important part of the time spent there was when we, the students, dialogue mapped each other as we discussed a real-world issue. We each sat in the hot seat for fifteen minutes or so, trying to map the discussion. We were all being completely evil, deliberately starting side conversations, interrupting and interjecting, playing the role of the dominant type A style participant, jumping all over the place and, overall, just being as difficult as we could.

Unsurprisingly, we all sucked big time trying to dialogue map this. However, when Conklin took the floor, we then saw how exactly Dialogue Mapping was done and what twenty years of practice does. He effortlessly brushed off our attempts to trip him up by observing all of the lessons that I have thus far described, but also with some subtle tricks that we didn’t even notice until he told us afterwards.

After Conklin had wiped the floor with us, so to speak, we all got to have another crack at it, with the benefit of observation and hindsight. This time the difference was significant in our performance and the way that we each handled the “mob”.

Moral? The very best thing you can do is to be involved in a Dialogue Mapping session where it has been done well. Watch carefully what the mapper is doing and how they are conducting themselves and the process.

Lesson Seven: It will make you tired

If you think of all the various things that you have to do simultaneously (for examples listening, understanding, mapping, and managing the group) during Dialogue Mapping, it is amazing that anyone with a Y chromosome can manage it, given that men usually cannot multitask at all. (Case in point: If sport is on the radio and my wife is speaking to me, one of them has to be switched off…Sorry honey 🙂 ).

When you are first learning this craft and you are going to be up in front of a group, plan for only an hour or so. While you have to think quite consciously about things, it will exhaust you even more. Once things become more automatic, you can go for longer. From my own experience, the limit for Dialogue Mapping a big group on a really wicked topic would be about four hours at the absolute maximum. (Usually by then the participants also need to take a break and sleep on it anyway).

Some sessions can be intense, and you, as a mapper, need to be switched on for that entire time. You are listening carefully to every person speak because you are trying to form it into IBIS. So unlike everybody else who can sit there and look interested, yet be mentally switched off, you have to be interested by definition.

One thing about this is that, while you are in the zone, you don’t need coffee. When mapping, you have enough endorphins racing around your system to keep quite alert, but as soon as there is a break, you can find that you will feel quite tired at times, and a well timed coffee can be very handy (real coffee, of course – none of that instant junk!)

The one thing that compensates for what Dialogue Mapping can take out of you mentally, is that exhilarating experience when the group is really getting into the process and the positive feedback that you receive when a really well formed map has been developed.

Lesson Eight: Learn to love “transclusions” and CTRL+R

I thought that I would drop in a left-field lesson learned at this point that is still very important.

Trans-what? Don’t worry – I don’t know why they called it that either. Ted Nelson, who also coined the term “hypertext”, came up with the name but I think the day “transclusion” sprung to mind, he was having an off-day. I asked Conklin what it meant and he said “It’s technically accurate … an "inclusion" of material *across* (‘trans’) several documents”. When I whined about the geekiness of the name he added “There was a time when the word "hypertext" was a wacko term for geeks, you know”. Damn! He’s got me there.

My explanation that will suffice for now? Transclusions is a fancy way of describing the process of breaking your big map up into smaller, linked up sub-maps. I have also heard it referred to as chunking, and when maps get too big, this is a necessity. (For the hypertext nerds that is somewhat incomplete but suffices for this point).

The compendium software that I choose to use for this work also has a great feature in it. Your map is re-drawn automatically when you hold down the control key and press R. I am now in the habit that after entering a node or three, I redraw the map via this method to keep it all looking orderly. That way, if there has been a lot of dialogue captured, you do not end up with a messy, cluttered map that participants find hard to follow. Like lesson number three and four, stopping conversation while you refactor a messy map will cost you group momentum so ideally if you have gotten into the Control+R habit, all you have to do is a quick transclusion at an opportune time.

The best time to perform a map transclusion is when a thread of discussion has been exhausted and the group has moved onto a new idea or area in the map. A trick I learned from Anapolis was to sit up and say something like “Okay, let’s just pause for a minute.” (Holding up my hand), congratulate the group on the quality of what they have captured and then say something like “Let’s just put this stuff into its own pigeonhole, so we can now focus on X idea”.

Lesson Nine: Nurture the holding environment

Okay, so if there is to be one big serious lesson learned, it is this one. To make the point, I am going to quote Heifetz and Linsky from their excellent book Leadership on the Line. You can read a PDF press release here, specifically the section entitled “Control the temperature.”

Changing the status quo generates tension and produces heat by surfacing hidden conflicts and challenging organizational culture. It’s a deep and natural human impulse to seek order and calm, and organizations and communities can tolerate only so much distress before recoiling.

If you try to stimulate deep change, you have to control the temperature. There are really two tasks involved. The first is to raise the heat enough that people sit up, pay attention, and deal with the real threats and challenges facing them. Without some distress, there is no incentive for them to change anything. The second is to lower the temperature when necessary to reduce a counterproductive level of tension. Any community can only take so much pressure before it becomes either immobilized or spins out of control. The heat must stay within a tolerable range—not so high that people demand it be turned off completely, and not so low that they are lulled into inactivity.

Heifetz and Linsky talk about maintaining the “the productive range of distress” but I have heard many metaphors like this. Another I like is “creative abrasion”, coined by Leonard and Swap in their excellent book When Sparks Fly . Both are essentially talking about making the whole environment conducive to getting the best out of the participants.

The key takeaway is this: Each group is different and each situation is different. In the normal discourse of the meeting, there will be times where the group works together in almost perfect unison and times where one wrong word will destroy that balance and require the group to stop, reset things and move forward. This is not about IBIS either. The fact is that over time, a particular pattern will emerge in the decorum of the sessions, where conducting the sessions or approaching the mapping in a particular way, will work consistently well for the group.

Let me give you a classic example that was absolute genius on the part of my client who did exactly this. Before Dialogue Mapping for a group of concerned residents who were facing the prospect of significant change to the amenity of their homes, a bus was hired and the residents were taken to an area where a similar urban transformation had been made ten years before. We all walked around the area for an hour, soaking in the vibe, learning about the history of the area, how the area was redeveloped and how certain planning challenges were overcome.

This allowed the participants to get a real sense of the issues they needed to confront, and they felt it with all senses, sight, sound and tactile, rather than some cold, rather detached room with a projected map on the wall. Later, when I dialogue mapped the session after the bus tour, the group did a fantastic job and the quality of the rationale that was captured was much richer and faster, through that sensory immersion that took place before the mapping process began.

So just remember, Dialogue Mapping is a great holding environment in the sense that Heifetz and Linsky talk about. It is a wonderful “rich container”, as Conklin puts it, for fostering and maintaining creative abrasion. But as the bus ride example shows, there is a lot of things that you can combine with it to enhance the experience further.

More examples like this will be covered in part 4 of this series.

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

www.sevensigma.com.au