The second cringe moment I will consider in this series is the moment in which someone says that Participatory Narrative Inquiry “does not scale.” That moment makes me cringe for two reasons: because PNI does not scale, and because it does.
When people say this about PNI, they typically mean that it can only impact relatively small numbers of people at a time.
Is this true? Yes. When PNI projects listen deeply, they can only listen to small numbers of people, and when PNI projects listen to many people, they can only listen in shallow ways. That’s because it takes time and effort to listen to people. Even if your role as a PNI facilitator is not to listen to people but to help people listen to each other, that still takes time and effort, and we all have limitations on how much time and effort we can put into anything.
So I can’t counter the claim that PNI “does not scale” if the word “scale” is understood to mean only how many people are directly involved in a project. But the word does not have to be used in such a narrow sense. “Scale” can also mean many other things, such as depth of exploration, breadth of diversity, intensity of focus, level of respect, degree of listening, amount of inclusion, extent of departure from the status quo, strength of connection, expansion of innovation, and impact of change. There is a universe of meaning within the word “scale,” but we can only see it if we are willing to think beyond simple numbers.
For example, a project that listens as 200 people tell stories about experiences few people have ever paid attention to – and brings those stories to the attention and understanding of 200 other people who need to hear them – could arguably represent a greater “scaling up” (in terms of impact) than a project that listens to 20,000 people tell stories about experiences they themselves consider to be trivial.
Ways to scale up PNI projects
Thinking about aspects of scale that go beyond numbers led me to list some ways in which PNI projects can be (and have been) scaled up. I came up with ten ways, which I sorted into two large groups: scaling up with respect to topics and goals, and scaling up with respect to project participants.
Scaling up PNI projects with respect to topics and goals
- Extension. Sometimes follow-up PNI projects go back to the same topic but work their way deeper and deeper into it each time, exploring more emotional, more intellectual, or more meaningful aspects of it each time. Like a sculptor discovering the shape of the work within the stone, participants begin to make sense of the topic at a surface level, then enter into it more and more deeply over time. For example, a working group could come back to the same topic every three months, each time asking new questions that explore their topic more deeply as they build their mutual trust and collective capacity.
- Iteration. Sometimes follow-up PNI projects go back to the same topic in the same way and at the same depth but after a period of time has passed, in a series of inquiry pulses, asking “How is it now? How about now? And now?” Participants explore and compare their experiences across time, perhaps across a time period of transformative change. For example, a project that explores student experiences at an educational institution could follow each year’s cohort from matriculation to graduation.
- Exploration. Sometimes follow-up PNI projects move from topic to topic the way a person might cross a stream on a series of stepping stones, each exploration opening a path to the next. Participants (and facilitators) might not be able to perceive the shapes of the stepping stones that lie ahead of them on the path, but their intent to follow the path where it leads expands the project far beyond its original scope. For example, a research collaborative could plan to carry out a series of projects that explore a broadly defined topic by allowing each project’s specific sub-topic to emerge from the previous project’s sensemaking workshop.
- Interpolation. Sometimes follow-up PNI projects discover diverse (and sometimes surprising) sub-topics nested within the original topic of exploration. They then roll out projects that explore each sub-topic, including them all within the umbrella of the original overarching topic. For example, an organization could explore the broad topic of work-life balance, discover four sub-topics nested inside it (say power dynamics, learning, cooperation, and health), then decide to pursue four additional projects, each focused on one sub-topic within the broad scope of the exploration.
- Experimentation. Sometimes PNI projects end in the design and implementation of multiple interventions (narrative or otherwise). Each of these interventions can create its own follow-up PNI project that explores the experiences of people who are involved in or impacted by the intervention. Each of these projects can still be encompassed within the umbrella of the original overarching topic and goal. For example, a town could use PNI to support the generation and selection of specific initiatives to improve community resilience, then use PNI to follow each initiative as it is rolled out in the community.
Scaling up PNI projects with respect to project participants
- Expansion. Some follow-up PNI projects go back to the same topic in the same way and at the same depth but with more people involved. For example, a facilitator might run a pilot project with 20 people, then carry out the exact same project again, but with 200 people. This is the narrow meaning of the word “scale” I mentioned above, and this is a perfectly reasonable way to do PNI. If you’re just getting started with PNI, this is the best way to start.
- Inclusion. Some follow-up PNI projects go back to the same topic in the same way and at the same depth but with more groups of people – specifically, with additional groups of people whose voices were not heard (or sufficiently heard) in the previous project. This style of scaling up works particularly well with the exploration (stepping stone) style of scaling up, in that when some people are heard, what they have to say may naturally lead the project in the direction of other groups who can/could/should also be heard.
- Negotiation. Some follow-up PNI projects discover distinctions of perspective among participants who did not seem to be in disparate groups at the start of the project. After such a discovery, such a project may expand into multiple sub-projects in which specific perspectives are heard and explored. Finally, the project might bring its participant groups together again into a single exploration, perhaps with facilitated exchanges of stories for mutual understanding. For example, a project that begins by exploring the experiences of volunteers at an organization could expand to explore – and negotiate among – the distinctive perspectives of founding, longer-term, and newly-joined volunteers.
- Comparison. Some follow-up PNI projects expand out from one participant group to many different but related groups in order to provide a bench-marking comparison to each group. For example, a small town that uses PNI to explore connections between its past and present could attract the attention of three neighboring towns, and all four towns could work together to explore the interplay between local and regional patterns of change over time.
- Replication. Some PNI projects result in the creation of a repeatable toolkit similar groups can use to explore the same topic in a related context. For example, a project designed to explore the contours of a specific learning experience – say learning how to cook – could be described in such a way that other groups could use it to explore similar learning experiences – like learning how to sew or work with wood.
Conclusion
So those are my thoughts about scale in PNI. Yes, the approach is limited, but so is every other human endeavor. What excites me most about PNI is that even within its limitations, there is plenty of scope for exploration, understanding, imagination, and change.
For example, here’s an interesting take on interpolation (number 4 in my list above) as a way of scaling up PNI projects. A colleague, Marco Koning of StoryConnect, recently told me about (and said I could tell you about) an idea he has been playing with for scaling up PNI projects: allowing sub-projects to emerge from the stories themselves by asking unfocused questions like “What has happened at work lately that mattered to you?” and looking for emerging trends that participants might want to explore in focused story-sharing sessions and sensemaking workshops. I love this idea, and I look forward to seeing what comes of it. It could turn into an eleventh category of scaling up: emergent interpolation, you could call it.
This is what I mean when I say that “If you do not make PNI your own, you are not doing PNI.” This is what I mean when I encourage PNI practitioners to “make PNI bigger than it was before you got to it.” That second statement is also about scale, but it’s about the scale of PNI as a field. If every person who uses PNI brings their own ideas into it – and tells other people about those ideas – its scale will increase in ways that go far beyond simple numbers. That’s what I would like to see happen.