Simon.BuckinghamShum.net

One of the most exciting things about releasing Compendium into the wild is that people go off and do amazing things with it that I have no idea about.

Here is a detailed case study from Groupaya, documenting the use of Dialogue Mapping to achieve a breakthrough in collective sensemaking, clearly a hugely collective effort, aided by the expert Dialogue Mapping of two friends and colleagues I’ve known for years, but haven’t seen for a while as I moved into other fields: Jeff Conklin and Eugene Eric Kim.

This report is a very honest account of the sensemaking journey undertaken by a group of people as they wrestled with a classic wicked problem in environmental planning, which had defied previous attempts at bringing people round the table productively.

Check out their public meeting maps and the beautifully produced Phase 1 Report.

It feels like we are at some kind of a turning point, with reports such as this, and the work of Paul Culmsee and Kailash Awati, appearing in the last year or so (SevenSigma case study PDF; Heretics Guide to Best Practices book – search the sample chapters for Compendium to see how they use it).

I am so grateful to these colleagues who are very busy, but deeply reflective practitioners, taking the trouble to document their work in such detail, and so accessibly. Something for us academics to learn there!

Categories: Projects, Software
Tags: compendium, dialogue-mapping, issue-mapping, sensemaking