Enter sensemaking session records

As workshop participants follow threads of connection, they will sometimes find themselves saying, “Look, there's that story again.” Those are the pivot stories. Pivot stories keep coming up because they are situated at the intersections of the collection. In pivot stories, all of the things that matter in the project come together. Trust meets rebellion, or the official story meets the ground truth, or the reason nobody will talk about the problem meets the reason nobody will fix the problem. It's all in there. Read them and you can see what the project is about.

These are the stories that sing out, that beg to be heard, that have wings and are poised to fly. They are memorable because they break through barriers of misun- derstanding, assumption, and reluctance. They bring perspectives or experiences that are not widely known into wider awareness. Voice stories involve some risk to their tellers, but they also include relief and gratitude for the chance to finally speak out.

These stories solve mysteries. They are not particularly memorable or intersectional, but they are surprising. You could also call them “aha” stories. When people encounter a discovery story, they say, “Oh, is that how it is?” or, “I didn't know that.” Of course, whether a story contains a discovery depends on who is doing the discovering. A discovery for one person might be something another person thinks everyone knows and still another person thinks is an outright lie. That's fine, because discovery stories are not about facts; they are about perspectives. A discovery story reveals “how it is” not in general but to a person in a context from a perspective. A discovery story is one in which people discover things about the experiences of others that they had not understood before.

Discovery stories create bridges of understanding among the people who told the stories, the people who made sense of the stories, and the people who were not involved in the project at all. The best discovery stories grow stories of their own, stories in which understandings change from one state (before encountering the story) to another (after). These larger stories enter into and change the stories of the workshop, the project, and the community or organization.

Don't ask for pivot stories, voice stories, and discovery stories by name. Official-sounding labels can intimidate people or push them out of discovering and into performing. Instead, use indirect questions like these:

1. Were there any stories that kept coming up for you today? Did you ever say to each other, “Hey, there's that story again”? Which stories were like that for you?
2. Which stories cried out to be heard today? Which stories did you find yourself wanting to tell to everyone in the workshop, or outside it?
3. Which stories surprised you the most today? Which stories taught you something? Which stories do you want to remember the most?

You can ask these questions in a whole-workshop discussion, or you can ask each small group to choose some stories, then describe or retell the stories to the whole workshop. In either case, ask people to also explain why they chose each story and what it means to them. Then write the story names (and summarize the explanations) on a whiteboard under three headings (e.g., stories that kept coming up, stories that cried out to be heard, stories that surprised us).

Don't mention convergent stories until you get to the wrapping-up part of your workshop. Don't even say that you will be asking people to pick out stories. Convergent stories can only be found in retrospect, after participants have been working with the story collection for some time. If you ask people to look for them at the start of the workshop, they won't find them.

If you used catalytic material in your exercise (and motivation is high), you can ask your participants to list convergent patterns as well as convergent stories.

1. Pivot patterns are like pivot stories, but instead of saying “there's that story again” people will say “there's that pattern again.” Participants can highlight them to help people who did not attend the workshop understand what it was about.
2. Voice patterns cry out for greater and wider attention. Participants can highlight them for wider discussion or action in the community or organization.
3. Discovery patterns are the closest a sensemaking workshop can get to the findings of an analytical study. Participants can highlight them for further discussion or exploration (maybe in a new, more focused project) after the workshop is over.

You can ask people to pick out convergent patterns using the same questions you use to help them choose convergent stories; just say “patterns” instead of “stories.” But don't do this if your workshops are short or your participants are apathetic. Most people don't find this activity as interesting as picking out stories.

One way to bring closure to a sensemaking workshop is with a list-making activity. Building a wrap-up list helps participants tell the story of the workshop to those who did not attend it and gives them a chance to express their wishes and concerns. These are some ideas for lists you can help people build. For each I have listed some prompts you can use (or adapt) to help people write list items.

Items	Prompt
Discoveries	We were surprised to find out ___.
Learnings	Hearing about ___ helped us to understand ___.
Perspectives	When we saw how ___ experienced/saw ___, we felt/thought ___.
Differences	When we saw how ___ and ___ experienced/saw ___ differently, we felt/thought ___.
Connections	When we saw that ___ and ___ shared ___, we felt/thought ___.
Curiosities	Seeing ___ made us wonder ___.
Dilemmas	When we saw ___, we wondered whether ___ or ___.
Concerns	When we saw ___, we became concerned about ___.
Ideas	Seeing ___ gave us an idea: ___.
Opportunities	Hearing about ___ made us realize that ___ could ___.
Suggestions	Seeing ___ led us to suggest that ___.

Note how each of these prompts is a story people can tell about the experience they had in the workshop. You don't have to use these exact prompts, but you do need to find a way to give people permission to express their feelings, values, and beliefs about what happened to them in the workshop in their own words. Don't let them get the idea that they are building lists to come to definitive conclusions (they aren't), to be judged (they won't be), or to set policy (they can't, probably). They are building lists to make sense of what happened and to be heard and understood.

I find it works best to give people two or three lists to build, not just one. That way each participant can find something they would like to add. You can come up with your own list types, and you can give (motivated) participants a choice of list types or the option to come up with their own.

As for filling the lists, you can ask people to think of list items in any of these ways:

• Individually (and anonymously) during a time of private reflection
• During small-group discussions (followed by a report-back period)
• During a whole-workshop discussion (with people randomly shouting out items for you to write down)

Which is best will depend on how comfortable your participants will be adding list items in front of their fellow participants.

You can ask people to write on (or put sticky notes on) a whiteboard (in-person or online), or you can write down what people say. In either case, ask people to keep their list items brief but clear. Make sure they understand that the lists they write will be featured in the workshop record. (Then make sure you do feature them.)

People build amazing things in sensemaking workshops: timelines, land- scapes, story elements, composite stories, and so on. Sometimes these things convey meaning so well that they reach far out past the workshop and become touchstones people talk about for years afterwards. So it's important to capture them.

If you are meeting in person, it is best to both save and photograph these constructions (in case either version is lost). This is one of the reasons I like to use giant sticky-note pads: you can peel them off the wall, roll them up, and take them home. Later, when you build your workshop record, you can reproduce the constructions in a way that makes them easier to read, like in a spreadsheet or a slide presentation program.

If you are meeting online, you can simply save the documents people build and incorporate them into your report. (But make sure to back them up!)

Be careful not to place too much emphasis on constructions as workshop outcomes. You don't want anyone to get the idea that the point of the workshop is to build things. The point is to make sense of your topic. It's the process of building the things that helps people do that. The things themselves are of secondary value.

So why keep the things at all? To tell the story of the workshop to the people who weren't there. A workshop construction is like a sketchbook a traveler fills up on a journey. It helps the traveler think about each place they visit, and it helps them describe the journey to the people back home. But nobody goes on a journey just to fill a sketchbook