Navigate the Narrative Landscape Measuring Change with Stories FiveWhyz.pdf

In a world where change and organizational transformation are ever-shifting landscapes, 'Sense-making' and participative narrative inquiry emerge as fit-for-purpose methods to guide leaders at every level through the fog. This session delves into the art of detecting weak signals and understanding the dynamics and patterns of organizations through the lived experiences shared by individuals.

Sense-making is a participatory form of ethnography. Individuals share personal experiences or observations and enrich these narratives by answering targeted questions, adding depth and layers of meaning. This method uniquely marries hard data with soft, qualitative insights. It inherently reduces bias, as participants, rather than external analysts, interpret and code their own stories. This approach not only lends authenticity to the data but also ensures that real-life stories, supported by data, are at the forefront of driving culture change and measuring progress.

The power of these narratives, especially when they reveal consistent patterns supported by quantitative evidence, is undeniable. They offer a detailed, multifaceted view, aiding leaders in spotting trends and behaviors within their organizations. By analyzing a broad collection of such narratives, organizations can detect subtle changes and inform targeted actions, making sense-making an invaluable tool for understanding complex systems and guiding interventions.

In this workshop, we'll learn how to apply sense-making and narrative inquiry methods to identify patterns and measure change. Additionally, we'll share how participants can leverage this same approach within their organizations as part of a retrospective or as a way to measure progress for a transformation.

1. Daniel Walsh and Betsy Irizarry
Navigate the Narrative Landscape:
A Workshop on Measuring Change with Stories

2. Dan Walsh

❖Lean & Agile Coach and Product
Management Consultant
❖Cynefin® Basecamp Trainer
❖Sense-making consultant
❖Systems Engineer
❖Cultivate workplaces where people
can thrive and do their best work
Betsy Irizarry
❖Business Agility Coach
❖ProKanban Trainer
❖Archaeology major
❖Practical, human-centered
agility and organizational
effectiveness
Linkedin.com/in/danwalsh1115
[email protected]
@danielwalsh
FiveWhyz is a collaborative
of highly experienced
coaches with a shared
mission to empower clients
by nurturing their internal
capabilities and fostering
end-to-end business agility.
Linkedin.com/in/betsy-irizarry
[email protected]

3. First, let’s self-organize

Role-based tables:
●Scrum Masters, internal
Agile Coaches, & RTEs
●External Agile Coaches,
Trainers, & Vendors
●Product roles
●Architects, Devs, QA
●Project/Program
Management & Leaders



Room: Grapevine 3-4
(you are here!)

Wall-flower tables
(Please only sit here if you
are unable to stay for the
full 3-hour workshop!)

4. Purpose
© FiveWhyz LLC. All rights reserved. 4
Learn how to apply
sense-making and narrative
inquiry methods to identify
patterns and measure
change
Show you how to leverage
this same approach within
your own organizations as
part of a retrospective
Introduce a novel way to
measure culture change and
transformation progress

5. Today’s Agenda
Welcome and Introductions (~10)
Exchange experiences and stories (~30)
Collect Stories and Visualize Patterns (~30)

Break (~15)

Analyze and Make Sense of Patterns (~65)
How to leverage this approach for your team (~15)
Share Insights (~15)
© FiveWhyz LLC. All rights reserved. 5

6. Narrative Inquiry
Narrative inquiry is a
qualitative research method
that examines how
individuals create and
interpret their experiences
through anecdotes and
stories to understand the
meaning they construct in
their lives.

Like empathy interviews and
behavioral interviews

© nuCognitive LLC & FiveWhyz LLC. All rights reserved. 6
CC BY-SA 3.0 Storyteller doll by Rose Pecos-Sun Rhodes

7. Sense-making

“How to make sense of the
world in order to take more
effective action”
-David Snowden
Cynefin® Company
7 © nuCognitive LLC & FiveWhyz LLC. All rights reserved.

8. Sense-making
Sense-making is a a form of
distributed ethnography that
links qualitative narratives with
quantitative data



Enables everyone, everywhere
to take collective action to affect
change and shape culture

8© nuCognitive LLC & FiveWhyz LLC. All rights reserved.
Ethnography Field
Narrative
Inquiry
(difficult to scale)
Sense-making
(easier to scale)

9. © nuCognitive LLC & FiveWhyz LLC. All rights reserved. 9
Collect
Stories
Analyze
Patterns
Collective
Improvement
people share their lived experiences
and answer questions about their
stories to add layers of meaning
review the patterns, trends, weak
signals and use underlying the stories
to make sense of things
enable leaders at every level to take
effective action to generate more
positive stories & fewer negative ones
Repeat & Measure Progress
What is Sense-making?
An way to help people make better sense of their world in order to take effective action

10. © nuCognitive LLC & FiveWhyz LLC. All rights reserved. 10
Collect Stories Analyze
Patterns
Collective
Improvement

11. Story Sharing Session
Share a recent experience that gives you
hope or concern for the future of Agile.


© nuCognitive LLC & FiveWhyz LLC. All rights reserved. 11
In groups, share your responses to the following
prompt with specific stories, experiences,
events, rumors, or anecdotes.

12. Narrative Capture
Use the form provided to write up your
experience that gives you hope or concern
for the future of Agile,
then answer a few questions about it.

© nuCognitive LLC & FiveWhyz LLC. All rights reserved. 12

15. © nuCognitive LLC & FiveWhyz LLC. All rights reserved.

16. Pattern Analysis Exercise
16
What is your overall sentiment
of the experience you shared?To what degree will the events in your
story persist or happen again?
13
9
21
11
19
16
1
20
4
10
LEGEND COLORED BY ROLE
Scrum Master, Internal Coach, RTE
Product Role
Architect, Dev, or QA
Leader, Project or Program Manager
External Coach, Trainer, Vendor
© nuCognitive LLC & FiveWhyz LLC. All rights reserved.
15
22
7
5
18
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23
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6 01
24
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018
14
2
Story Page #s
Temporary Persistent
Highly
Negative
Highly
Positive

17. © nuCognitive LLC & FiveWhyz LLC. All rights reserved.
LEGEND COLORED BY ROLE
Scrum Master, Internal Coach, RTE
Product Role
Architect, Dev, or QA
Leader, Project or Program Manager
External Coach, Trainer, Vendor

18. © nuCognitive LLC & FiveWhyz LLC. All rights reserved.
Stories that give hope
If this story was on the news,
what would the headline be?
Stories that give concern
If this story was on the news,
what would the headline be?

19. Narrative Capture
STEP 1: Use the form provided to write up
your experience that gives you hope or
concern for the future of Agile.
STEP 2: Post and visualize your experience
STEP 3: Repeat
© nuCognitive LLC & FiveWhyz LLC. All rights reserved. 19

20. © FiveWhyz LLC. All rights reserved. 20
Break
Before you take a break, post your story
form on the wall.

We will take photos, load them to a
Google Drive, and read them when we
return.

21. © nuCognitive LLC & FiveWhyz LLC. All rights reserved. 21
Collect Stories Analyze
Patterns
Collective
Improvement

22. Self-signification
Self-signification is the process by which individuals answer questions, tag,
or categorize their own narratives and lived experiences.
●provides context by adding layers of meaning beyond plain text
●enables data analysis by linking quantified data to qualitative narrative
●reduces bias associated with interpreting another person’s experience
© nuCognitive LLC & FiveWhyz LLC. All rights reserved. 22

23. Research Questions
What is the current mood of the our community?

Where is there agency and motivation for change?

What are the impediments to change?

What are the differences based on role?

23© FiveWhyz LLC. All rights reserved.

24. Patterns before stories
Humans evolved to notice patterns

Tip: Identify patterns across the whole
narrative landscape BEFORE reading the
stories that produced the pattern
•Reduces recency bias and anchoring
•Improves weak signal detection

© nuCognitive LLC & FiveWhyz LLC. All rights reserved.
What is your overall sentiment of the
experience you shared?
To what degree will the events in your story
persist or happen again?
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25. Making Sense of Patterns
Adaptive Action* is an iterative, deceptively simple planning process that
allows you to move forward in uncertainty.

What

So What

Now What
© nuCognitive LLC & FiveWhyz LLC. All rights reserved. 25
*Reference: Human Systems Dynamics Institute - Adaptive Action

26. Making Sense of Patterns
Step 1: What
-Review the patterns and align on interesting one to explore in depth
-Formulate several hypotheses about what might have produced this
pattern

Step 2: So What
-Read the underlying stories associated with the pattern to confirm or
invalidate your hypotheses
-What do these stories mean to your team?

Step 3: Now What
-What might be done to amplify positive and dampen negative
experiences?
© nuCognitive LLC & FiveWhyz LLC. All rights reserved. 26

27. © nuCognitive LLC & FiveWhyz LLC. All rights reserved. 27
Collect Stories Analyze
Patterns
Collective
Improvement

28. Enables Action at Every Level
Enables leaders at every
level to affect change based
on the stories from their
respective teams

Parallel efforts across
multiple initiatives to shape
the narrative landscape over
time
© nuCognitive LLC & FiveWhyz LLC. All rights reserved.
Team A
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9
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5
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7
Team CTeam B
15
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3
9
17
7
24
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16
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2
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3
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6
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3
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Company Pattern
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2 3
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How do we get
more stories like
these and fewer
like those?

29. Measure Progress
The only way to make progress
is to change the nature of the lived experiences
of many people.
© nuCognitive LLC & FiveWhyz LLC. All rights reserved.
Company Pattern
9
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2
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311
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01 21
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3
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1
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40% positive
and
60% negative
Company Pattern
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2 3
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10
5
6
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2
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311
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2
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12
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3
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5
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3
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9
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7
1
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60% positive
and
40% negative
Current Landscape Future Landscape

30. © nuCognitive LLC & FiveWhyz LLC. All rights reserved. 30
Collect
Stories
Analyze
Patterns
Collective
Improvement
people share their lived experiences
and answer questions about their
stories to add layers of meaning
review the patterns, trends, and
weak signals, and use underlying the
stories to make sense of things
enable leaders at every level to take
effective action to generate more
positive stories & fewer negative ones
Repeat & Measure Progress
Closing the Loop

31. Wrap up Exercise
Step 1: Nominate a scribe for the group

Step 2: As a group, share insights and takeaways about the sense-making
methodology

Step 3: Prepare and write down a 1-3 sentence summary about the
approach and benefits on your hand-out

Step 4: Each group will read out their summary to share with the rest of the
room.

We will collect & load photos of the hand-outs to the Google drive
© FiveWhyz LLC. All rights reserved. 31

32. Why Sense-making?
The problems with surveys
© nuCognitive LLC & FiveWhyz LLC. All rights reserved. 32
Surveys Sense-making
Question framed with an obvious “right” and “wrong”
enables gaming and gifting
No obvious ”right” or “wrong” ways to respond to
questions
An average or overall assessment from participants
lacks fidelity
Broad patterns drill down to specific experiences
that includes a rich context and layers of meaning
Difficult to quantify qualitative data or the
quantitative data lacks context
The explanatory power of narratives is directly
linked to quantitative data
Interpretation of comments are subject to
researcher bias
Participants interpret their own stories
Numbers are easily dismissed
Stories based on the lived experiences of
employees are impossible to ignore

33. Use this same sense-making framework and
method for your next retrospective
© FiveWhyz LLC. All rights reserved.

34. What Questions Do You Have?
Collect
Stories
Analyze
Patterns
Collective
Improvement
Repeat & Measure Progress
© nuCognitive LLC & FiveWhyz LLC. All rights reserved.

35. References
•The Schools of Sense-making -
https://cynefin.io/wiki/Schools_of_sense-making
•Narrative Inquiry - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrative_inquiry
•Sense-making - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensemaking
•Human Systems Dynamics Institute - Adaptive Action
© FiveWhyz LLC. All rights reserved. 35

36. © nuCognitive LLC & FiveWhyz LLC. All rights reserved. 36