One of my misgivings about PNI, and a thought that has always made me cringe, has been the thought that it is “only” anecdotal evidence. I cringe for four reasons, two for “anecdotal” and two for “evidence.”
To begin, the English word “anecdote” has two meanings in regular usage: a story that is short, and a story that is trivial. Let’s talk about the length of stories first.
PNI, short stories, and participation
Most of the stories we collect and work with in PNI are short. They are usually just a few minutes or paragraphs long. That’s because we usually ask people to choose a specific event or moment to recount: a surprise, a disaster, a moment of calm, a crushing disappointment, a miraculous recovery, an hour or a day in which something happened to them that mattered to them.
We do this for a simple reason. When you do not ask people to recount a specific event or moment, they tend to give you a complex mixture of talk that winds its way back and forth between stories, facts, and opinions, sometimes including several nested or multi-part stories.
When the reason you are collecting stories is to preserve them, as in oral history, or to study them, as in narrative inquiry, this is just what you want to hear. As a historian or researcher, you have the time, willingness, and ability to work your way slowly and carefully through every word your research subjects choose to say.
In participatory narrative inquiry, however, we gather stories not to preserve or study them but to help project participants work with them in sensemaking workshops. These participants are our co-researchers in the project, but they rarely know anything about research methods or story structure, except in the intuitive way we all understand stories and exploration.
More importantly, the time and energy – and patience – of sensemaking participants is almost always severely limited. In a typical PNI project, if you can get 20 participants to attend a 4-hour sensemaking workshop, you are doing very well. Also, a lot has to happen in those four hours. So the part of the workshop in which participants take in the stories has to be short, typically 30-90 minutes. If your participants can only take in a small fraction of your stories in that time period, they won’t be able to make sense of your topic. So the stories you collect have to be short.
If you do happen to gather some long stories – and this can happen when people have a lot to say – you must provide your sensemaking participants with relatively short “excerpt” stories drawn out of the full responses you have collected. You might not want to do that, but you have no choice if you want to help people make sense of the diverse collection of experiences and perspectives you have gathered.
There are exceptions, of course. Once a while, in one project out of dozens, a PNI facilitator does find sensemaking participants who are willing to work with the project’s collected stories for days on end. But the great majority of sensemaking workshops convene with more typical levels of participatory energy.
It is less intrusive and more transparent to gather shorter stories in the first place than to draw excerpts from long, complex mixtures of stories, facts, and opinions. So we try to do that. And we do our best to excerpt well and transparently when we can’t do that.
PNI, short stories, and limitation
But wait. I haven’t answered the question that makes me cringe. Does the fact that PNI gathers and explores short stories, even though it does it for a purpose, doom it to surface-level exploration?
Partly yes and partly no.
As a PNI facilitator, and as a coach and consultant to PNI facilitators, I have read tens of thousands of stories told by project participants, and I can tell you that many of them were deeply meaningful to their tellers, even though they were only a few minutes or paragraphs long.
But having said that, it’s also true that PNI explores individual stories less deeply than most other narrative methods. Participatory approaches that rely more heavily on expert guidance (narrative therapy, narrative coaching, narrative medicine, participatory theater) do tend to explore longer stories than PNI does. That’s a limitation of PNI. It’s a limitation with a purpose, which is to increase the agency and control of project participants, but it’s still a limitation.
It’s not just about expert guidance, though. There are participatory story methods that work with longer stories without relying on expert guidance. In the Collective Story Harvest exercise of the Art of Hosting practice, for example, groups of people work with individual stories in detail, drawing out various elements of the stories for discussion. This is a different way of working with stories than we use in PNI, which has a greater emphasis on working with patterns among stories than elements within stories. We do sometimes draw out elements of stories in PNI (particularly in the story-elements and ground-truthing exercises), but we look at those elements across multiple (and sometimes many) stories.
Why does PNI pay more attention to patterns among stories than to individual stories? Because of its focus on two things: diversity (helping people see situations from multiple points of view) and emergence (helping people discover global patterns that emerge from local interactions). Why does PNI focus on diversity and emergence? Because that’s what we were thinking about when we built it. PNI began with a focus on helping corporate and government policy-makers and decision-makers understand diverse points of view in order to make better policies and decisions. And PNI was created by people who were intensely interested in multi-perspective thinking, participatory empowerment, and complexity theory. That’s why it is the way it is.
There are many different methods and approaches to story work because there are many people in the world, and we want many things, and we think in many ways. That’s why I have always tried to encourage PNI practitioners to use PNI in combination with other approaches. PNI is compatible with, and can be used with, many other methods and approaches. If you are using PNI all by itself, you are not using it to its full extent. Expand your awareness to every way in which people work with stories, and you’ll be a better PNI practitioner.
As a PNI practitioner myself, I would like to get better at blending PNI with other approaches. I have done a little of this, but not as much as I would like. I am always pushed up against some deadline or other. But I would like to have the time and freedom to explore more connections between PNI and other methods.
A poor worker always blames their tools, so I should get moving and just do more cross-method experimentation. If you do participatory story work that is not PNI, and you would like to collaborate with me on an exploration of blending, I would welcome a conversation. We may not agree on everything, but we will probably agree on something.
PNI, trivial stories, and discovery
Most definitions of the word “anecdote” include the words “interesting” and “amusing.” I’ve never seen any dictionary define an anecdote as anything relevant, meaningful, or useful.
That’s why I am wary of the word “anecdote” and never use it in anything I write about PNI. The word carries with it the potential insinuation that PNI is about gathering useless things.
Does PNI collect trivial stories? Yes. Some of the stories we collect in PNI, because of the questions we ask and the way we ask them, are bound to be trivial. To someone.
Whether a story is trivial or important depends on the perspective of the person who is telling or hearing it. Because PNI exists to gather and explore multiple perspectives on topics of common interest, this means that non-universally trivial stories are the opposite of useless. They are the power that fuels discovery and insight in PNI projects. In fact, I’d say that if you are doing a PNI project and you do not collect any non-universally trivial stories, you aren’t doing PNI right. Some of the stories you collect should seem trivial to some people and important to other people.
As a PNI facilitator, it is your task to convince the ordinary participants in your project (and they are almost always ordinary people) that their ordinary stories of their ordinary experiences – which may have been dismissed as trivial by those around or above them for years or decades – do matter and are worth talking about. It is also your task to convince other (usually more powerful) people to take those stories seriously and to work with them even though they appear to be trivial at first glance.
PNI, trivial stories, and failure
But let’s talk about universally trivial stories, those that don’t matter to anyone. Does PNI ever collect those? Yes. Yes it does, when it is not done well. I have seen large proportions of universally trivial stories collected in each of the following scenarios – and believe me, I’ve done every one of these things:
- Facilitators understand too little about their topic to be able to guide participants toward recounting experiences that will be relevant and meaningful to the topic of the project. As a result, even though participants have stories to tell that are relevant and meaningful, and they want to tell them, they do not feel that they have been given permission to tell them. So they don’t tell them. They tell protectively trivial stories instead.
- Facilitators choose a story collection method (e.g., interview, group session, survey, journal) that seems easy or safe for them without considering whether the method will work well for their participants. The participants don’t feel comfortable with the method, so they hold back the stories they want to tell and tell protectively trivial stories instead.
- Facilitators send subtle messages of requirement, implying that participants must tell stories that are well-told, memorable, compelling, interesting, impactful, or positive. For example, facilitators sometimes fail to understand that telling people “Your story does not have to be important!” comes across as “Your story had better be important.” (Beware the negative energy of the weirdly placed exclamation point.) Participants don’t usually respond to these messages by stepping up and telling the right stories. They usually step away and tell protectively trivial stories instead.
- Facilitators present participants with unwelcome challenges by using esoteric jargon or convoluted logic, or by asking people to answer questions in strange or confusing ways. Challenging participants is just the right thing to do in the sensemaking phase of PNI. But in the collection phase, if you want to collect non-trivial stories, you must give your participants the safety and freedom to choose any story they would like to tell, tell the story in any way they want to, and answer questions about the story in any way they want to. For example, if you ask a question with a fixed list of answers, you must provide an opportunity to write in an answer as well. The reason for this is simple. If you tell people that you are listening, then give them only a constrained way to speak, your actions betray your words. Most people are able to recognize and respond to this situation by – you guessed it – holding back the stories they want to tell and telling protectively trivial stories instead.
- Facilitators don’t test their plans or questions. They rely on scant prior knowledge, assumptions, and stereotypes to guess how their participants might respond, and they never put their plans or questions in front of any actual participants. As a result, they don’t know that they are making a mistake (perhaps one of those above) and aren’t able to fix it.
- Facilitators fail to understand their own goals, hopes, fears, and needs. They ask the questions they think they want to ask, but they fail to ask the questions they need to ask to address their actual goals, of which they are not fully aware. Maybe they were pressured into doing the project, or they don’t think the method works, or they don’t really want to explore the topic or problem. The stories they gather in the project are trivial because the whole project is trivial.
There are other ways to gather trivial stories, but I think you can see the common thread that runs through these scenarios. When facilitators start projects without paying adequate attention to goals and needs (their own and those of their participants), they collect a lot of universally trivial stories.
The good news is that it is often possible to recover from a highly-universally-trivial story collection. In many cases you can start over, pay more attention to everyone’s needs and goals, rethink your plans, and gather more stories.
But these are the exceptions. In most projects, things do go well, and facilitators gather a mix of universally important and non-universally important stories that provide excellent support for sensemaking.
Anecdote -> experience
So what’s a better word than “anecdotal”? I like the word “experiential.” In the same way that double-loop learning is learning about learning, PNI is about experiencing the experiences of other people. You could call it double-loop experience.
PNI, evidence, and context
Now let’s look at the second word: evidence.
PNI is not a scientific method. For something to be scientific, it has to produce results that can be replicated, and PNI cannot pretend to do this. Because it is a participatory method, PNI is highly self-selective and context-specific. As a result, it cannot provide definitive, conclusive, universal proof of anything.
However, PNI is a form of Participatory Action Research (PAR), and PAR is considered a rigorous form of social science. So if you want to use the word “science” in that way, you could speak of PNI as scientific, I suppose. The statement seems weak to me because I came to social science from the “hard sciences” of ecology and evolutionary biology. But that’s a contextually-specific detail of my own story, not a universal truth.
I do sometimes cringe when I tell people that one of the uses of PNI is to “find things out.” I sometimes think people think I mean that PNI can provide universal, context-free proof. But that’s not what I mean. I mean that people can find things out like “how these people felt about this topic at this time and place when we asked them about it with these words in this context.”
I don’t consider this a limitation of PNI. I think it’s a strength. When it comes to people and how they think and feel, contextually-bound exploration and discovery can be immensely valuable, and I think we need more of it, not less. Universal, context-free statements about how “humans” think and feel do have their place in the world. But we need a better balance between them and contextually situated, relevant, and meaningful explorations of meaning in context.
I do worry sometimes whether PNI is sufficiently rigorous. I have tried to keep myself informed about the principles and methods of Participatory Action Research, and I have tried to convey them in the resources I have created for PNI practitioners. Still, to improve my PNI practice, I would like to continue to learn more about PAR (and PNI’s siblings in the PAR family) in the future. If anyone would like to collaborate with me on that, let’s talk.
PNI, evidence, and action
This brings us to my second problem with the word “evidence,” which is that it is a noun, and a noun is too passive of a word to describe what happens in PNI.
People in sensemaking workshops don’t examine stories the way you would examine evidence, from afar, careful not to touch anything or even breathe freely for fear of contamination.
Sensemaking participants get stories all over them. They pick them up, move them around, sort them into piles, pull them apart, put them back together, and build bigger stories out of them. And they get themselves all over the stories too. They put them on, take them off, laugh at them, cry on them, throw them across the room in anger and frustration, and tack on layer after layer of their own stories.
Sensemaking is play, and play is messy. It is the seeing of the thing rather than the thing that is seen. That’s why it needs an active word to describe it.
Anecdotal experience -> experiential exploration
So the next time I’m talking about PNI and somebody says (or I think to myself) “Isn’t this just anecdotal evidence?” I will say: No. It isn’t. It’s experiential exploration.
I’ll probably still cringe (because is it experiential enough? is it exploration enough?) but at least I’ll have an answer.