Contexts and Perspectives

I’m participating in microTOOL’s user conference. Today I listened to Peter Gerstbach‘s talk on “The Six Top Secret Concepts of Business Analysis”.
Two things were inspiring me:

Conversation Game

Peter uses the model in conversations with clients using dice. Independent of your starting point (IME mostly the solution – “we want a new CRM system”), you throw a dice, move to another concept and look at the connecting line. Say you throw a 2, move to “value”. Then you talk about “how does the solution deliver value?” Continue as long as that’s useful, then throw the dice again. Repeat.
I believe that’s a good idea for our toolbox, as a sense-making device to understand and challenge all sorts of endeavors.

Perceptions and Perspectives

In the conversation after the talk, someone asked:”how do you make sure that all the lines are comprehensively covered in your analysis?” Peter’s answer was, you don’t. It’s not a process!
We had a conversation later on how people interpret new data in ways that fit their knowledge. I’m a complexity freak, give me an image with multiple lines and I’ll see patterns and maybe a map. Other people see a process, assume rules. (You need to be quite persistent to make me interpret something as a rule. More so if it might apply to me.)

So what if we turned this around? What if we interpreted process diagrams as conversation maps, as sense-making devices?

.