What harvesting tool works best?
Art of Harvesting, BC, Collaboration, Design, Emergence, Facilitation, World Cafe
A colleague emailed today and asked me this question: “which tool do you use when you have to analyse the content of your harvest with groups?”
My answer was that it depends on so much. Which means there is no one rule or tool but rather a principle. The principle would be this: “Participatory process, participatory harvest, simple process, simple harvest” The primary tool I use in complex decision making domains is diversity.
A story. Once, working with the harvest of a a series of 4 world cafes that had about 100 people in each, I ended up with 400 index cards, each containing a single insight which we later transcribed. It would be folly for me to work with a taxonomy of my own design, so I invited eight people to help me make sense of the work. We all read the 18 peages of raw data and noticed what spoke to us. From there we created a conversation that drew forth those insights and organized them into patterns. The final result was a report to the 400 people that had gathered that was rich and diverse and as complex as the group itself without being overly complicated to implement.
So it depends. If you use the Cynefin framework, which I have been studying and using a lot lately, you will see that different domains of action require different harvesting and sense making tools. So be careful, use what is appropriate and try to never have a place where one point of view dominates the meaning making if you are indeed operating the realms of complexity, chaos or disorder..
I come at this as a Phd candidate, cognisant of the disconnect between research and practice. Academics have a long history of “qualitative analysis”. They (umm, we) invest weeks and months in various techniques and methodologies (eg. “grounded theory”) of reducing and categorising texts to some essence. The dominant positivism and scientifism that permeates the academy pushes researchers to adopt techniques that objectify and reify these reductions. On the other hand, practice needs to work quickly and is generally not interested in producing an absolute truth when it comes to the pattern formation of harvesting. It’s definitely post-modern in its stance. It’s just subjectively reflecting sense back to those in the conversation, rather than trying to “discover” categorical laws. Generally, harvesting isn’t good enough for the orthodoxy of the academy. And that’s a real shame.
We see harvesting as both actually…it can involve quantitative analysis and date gathering and qualitative work as well. It also includes making visible our learning about content AND process, even going as deep as mapping the energetics of a process (where did things start slowing down? What made the magic happen? Why did we get sidetracked here?)
For me the issue is the complimentarily of the polarity of quality/quantity and not the dichotomy of it. Appropriate moves for appropriate contexts. And skillful combinations