If you've ever wondered why meetings are often inefficient and unproductive, look no further than Tic-Tac-Toe. Find a colleague, and challenge them to three games. Sound simple enough? Here's the twist: You're not allowed to write anything down.
This was the first exercise at Jeff Conklin's two-day Dialog Mapping Workshop, held July 10 and 11 at SRI in Menlo Park, California. Dialog mapping, invented by Conklin, is a meeting facilitation technique — a way of visually mapping a group's conversation using the Issue-Based Information System (IBIS) grammar. Its end goals are more productive meetings and concrete records of meeting content.
My interest in the workshop was mostly pragmatic. We would all like our meetings to be more productive. However, I also wanted to hear Conklin's thoughts on how to apply our understanding of process and human behavior to designing better collaborative software.
Conklin didn't disappoint. Not only did he build a convincing case for dialog mapping as a meeting facilitation technique, he also demonstrated and suggested ways in which tools could support this methodology.
Tic-Tac-Toe and the Need for Dialog Mapping
Playing Tic-Tac-Toe without writing anything down is challenging, but not impossible, and most of us managed to complete three games successfully within the time allotted. Afterwards, Conklin asked us to repeat the exercise, this time on a 4x4 grid. This, we discovered, was virtually impossible.
The problem is that humans have a limited capacity for short-term memory. This was shown by Bell Labs researchers 50 years ago, who demonstrated that humans are pretty good at remembering sets of seven numbers, and designed the telephone numbering system accordingly. Classic Tic-Tac-Toe requires keeping track of nine values, which is within the average range of human capacity. However, playing 4x4 Tic-Tac-Toe means following 16 different values, which, for most of us, is beyond the scope of our capability.
This basic human limitation is one reason why meetings are often so inefficient. Because people have limited memories, and because we are often unsure of whether or not our ideas have been heard and are being taken seriously, we often spend the bulk of a meeting repeating the same thing over and over again. This repetition cycle makes it extremely difficult to move forward and make progress.
Recording ideas on a shared display while they are being proposed is one way to address this problem. Simply writing down the idea so that everyone can see it is an instant, visual way of saying, "I heard you, and am taking you seriously."
In his book, Shared Minds: The New Technologies of Collaboration (Random House, 1990; ISBN 0394565878), business journalist Michael Schrage wrote extensively about this idea of shared display. One technique that Schrage suggested was to take minutes of a meeting live during a meeting and on a projected screen, so that everyone can follow the minutes as they are being created. Doing so reassures participants that ideas are being heard, and that the transcriber understands those ideas. If the transcriber interprets an idea incorrectly, the meeting participants can correct the minutes instantaneously. Taking live minutes also allows the contents of a meeting to be available immediately afterwards.
Shared display is a critical component of Conklin's dialog mapping technique. However, one key difference between dialog mapping and other live transcription techniques is that the former uses a specialized grammar called "IBIS."
Tackling Wicked Problems With IBIS
University of California at Berkeley professor Horst Rittel and his colleagues devised IBIS in the 1970s to help tackle what Rittel described as "wicked problems." Wicked problems are novel, challenging problems that have no single right or wrong answer (although some answers can be better or worse than others).
IBIS consists of three simple constructs: ideas (questions), issues (possible solutions), and arguments for or against those issues. Ideas respond to issues, and arguments respond to ideas.
These constructs are enough to map any discussion. In particular, graphical transcriptions using these constructs often reveal interesting facts about the structure of a discussion within a meeting. However, IBIS is not meant purely as a transcription technique.
One of the main goals of IBIS is to force people to consider the issues underlying a wicked problem. For example, one of the workshop exercises was to facilitate a group discussion about any wicked problem. I chose "Should Major League Baseball have interleague play?" Subsequent discussion led to a number of ideas and arguments as well as a more fundamental question: "What should Major League Baseball do to generate more fan interest?" You could argue that this latter question was implicit in the first, and you'd probably be right. However, making this question explicit noticeably shifted the discussion into a more constructive direction.
The Nature of Collaboration
Conklin built a compelling case for dialog mapping as a meeting facilitation technique, although there were some clear drawbacks. One vital component of dialog mapping is that the person building the dialog map is an active participant, not just a passive transcriber. This slows the pace of a meeting, and the facilitator runs the risk of being perceived as disruptive rather than beneficial.
One standing question was whether dialog mapping could be useful outside of face-to-face meetings. On the second day of the workshop, Conklin demonstrated QuestMap, software that he and others had designed for generating IBIS maps. Although Conklin used QuestMap as a whiteboard replacement for live meetings, he added that it could be used to develop IBIS maps collaboratively and asynchronously over a network. In fact, this was the original intent of the software.
Unfortunately, Conklin found that most people could not use QuestMap effectively this way. Several people found the IBIS grammar too constraining, while others did not show either the desire or the discipline to periodically check and contribute to an IBIS map in flux.
I found myself nodding my head in agreement throughout the entire workshop. Most of Conklin's insights rang true to my own experiences. The most valuable part of the workshop, however, were the exercises, which were brutal reminders of how difficult it can be to put theory into practice.
When done well, dialog mapping can make discussions run more smoothly, and reveal hidden insights into a problem. But dialog mapping is hard to do well. Nevertheless, despite my lack of proficiency, I still found it a worthwhile technique. Trimmed away of its grammar and methodology, dialog mapping boils down to writing things down. If you don't think this is important, try playing Tic-Tac-Toe without it.
Eugene can be contacted at [email protected].
