Thursday, August 11, 2011

Hints of things to come

How is the book coming? I have nearly finished reviewing hundreds of books and papers and typing in must-have quotes from them, all so I can remove the unpleasant "sorry there are so few references here" bit I had in the book before. I have been having a wonderful time re-reading lots of things I first encountered a decade ago and finding parts I never noticed before and so on, but all good things must come to an end. This means that nothing remains now but to finish all the parts of the book not quite finished and pull it all together. Which will still take a while. But it is happening.

However I wanted to show you this nice little bit of coalescence: some new diagrams on the stages of a PNI (participatory narrative inquiry) project, which came popping out of somewhere onto paper the other day. I put a full description of this on the PNI page.



If you study this diagram you may find something exciting about it. (Well, I found something exciting about it.) The parts of the process inside the triangle are all emergent, unordered processes -- things that rely heavily on the meshwork of many connections and perspectives coming together. The parts outside the triangle feature stronger components of hierarchy, structure, order. So in a sense this shows how PNI brings together organization and self-organization into a dynamic interplay for the purpose of supporting collective narrative sensemaking. (If this makes no sense to you, read about the confluence framework. That may help ... or it may just make things worse.)

Feedback/encouragement accepted with wild enthusiasm.