User:Hvgard/Participatory Narrative Inquiry

Participatory Narrative Inquiry (PNI) is a concurrent mixed methods approach to facilitate people to share and work with stories. Its focus is on the exploration of values, beliefs, feelings, and perspectives through collaborative sensemaking with stories of lived experience.

The term PNI was coined by Cynthia Kurtz and titles her book in which she positions the approach as related to both Participatory Action Research and Narrative Inquiry and further draws on Complexity theory, Anthropology, Oral history, Participatory theatre, Narrative therapy, Sensemaking, Folklore studies, and Decision support.

History

PNI developed from 1999 onwards from the work of a large group within IBM. Building of the traditions of Narrative Inquiry the group was targeted on the use of story for knowledge management in organisations. Within this group Cynthia discovered the power of asking questions about stories and this idea developed into one of the core practices of PNI.

Between 2001 and 2007 PNI developed as Narrative Sensemaking, first within the Institute for Knowledge Management (IKM) later within the Cynefin Centre, both at IBM. In this period also the Cynefin model developed and further augmented from 2007 onwards into the Confluence SenseMaking Framework.

Between 2007 and 2014, Kurtz published three editions of Working with Stories thereby integrating a wealth of experience from her own practice as well as that of others. This further honed the PNI approach, documentation and concomitant methods.

To support the further development of PNI, a group of PNI practitioners and companies established the . The Insitute is a membership organisation for people who seek to improve the methods and tools of participatory narrative inquiry. Its mission is to actively share new ideas and engage in open, creative conversations and collaborations in order to continually improve PNI theory and applications.

PNI Process & Phases

PNI applications are developed and delivered by executing iterative Cycles of three crucial and up to three supportive phases. The crucial phases are: collection, sensemaking and return.

• Collection - During story collection, people share stories around a topic of concern, either individually or in groups. People are guided to share a story by posing elicitation questions and tell about a personal event that happened to them. After they have told their story the storyteller is asked to respond to questions about the story. This way people interpret their stories by answering questions like “Who most needs to hear this story?” or “How do you feel about this story?” 
The stories and data are collected on paper and /or uploaded via the web (and/or an optional App) and stored in a database.

• Sensemaking - The individual stories are interesting but may remain anecdotal. Once more than a few dozen stories are available, patterns can be discerned. To achieve that, participants work with the collected stories to construct larger stories, discovering insights as they work. For example, people might build a timeline or landscape of collected stories, or cluster narrative elements they find in stories. They come up with a list of insights and key messages that are based on the multiple stories.

• Return - The insights and key messages need to be turned into action. During return, what has been created in the Collection and Sensemaking phases is returned to the community. Supporting the return phase means making stories and sensemaking outcomes accessible, gathering feedback, and helping people who want to continue the conversation. If that is not done the likelihood that the PNI circle will continue is very low. If for example important barriers have been these should be discussed with the organisation or community.

The three supportive phases that feed into the essential PNI cycle are planning, catalysis and intervention.

• Planning - In each PNI cycle planning activities take place. At the start, the planning is often a mini-PNI project to create an overall plan for the project. Here interviews with stakeholders, study of local culture, habits and specific barriers and facilitating factors take place. Small but dedicated collection and sensemaking workshops are a good way to uncover and test those. The outcome of the planning goes into the PNI chapter of the project plan that describes the goal, relations, focus, range, scope and emphasis of the project. In later Cycles the planning activities are geared at incorporating the learning and any changes into the project plan.

• Catalysis - During catalysis, participants and/or helpers look for patterns in the stories and answers to questions using mixed- methods (qualitative and quantitative) analysis. Each pattern is annotated with multiple competing interpretations, and this “food for thought” is incorporated into group sensemaking. Quite often catalysis is done as a support activity before the sensemaking workshops take place. A report is prepared to highlight patterns of interest, and list questions for further exploration. The results are made available to the organisation or community to make sense of the patterns and discuss the results.

• Intervention - Participants work on changing the collected stories and the ones they tell themselves. They come up with a list of insights and key messages that are based on the multiple stories. Methods well suited to intervention, such as narrative therapy and participatory theatre, complement PNI well in this phase. 
In some contexts however intervention-design is (also) done by separate committee’s or decision makers. For example when policies need to be changed, funds need to (re)-allocated or processes need to be adapted. So quite often intervention design takes place in more places. In that case the return phase becomes more complicated and becomes even more important.

PNI Cycles

• Inception?
• Insight?
• Impact?
• Independence?

Scalability

PNI is an extremely scalable method in time, scale and location.

• Time - It can be used for an afternoon session, a 2-day workshop, a short project to gain some insights and continuously to signal and work with the dynamic change in social systems.

• Scale - PNI provides solid results with just a few dozen stories and usually no new insights are gained when over 300 to 500 stories are gathered, depending on the diversity in the social system involved. For continuous applications the heuristic is that some 200 stories per unit of time are sufficient. So for highly volatile systems such as services the time unit can be hours while for product affinity and slower social processes quarterly or even yearly time units are sufficient.

• Location - When Collection is done via a survey or digital means such as storypoints or apps PNI becomes largely location independent and can be distributed to a certain extent. In practice experience shows that for Sensemaking and Intervertion physical meetings are often needed to gain optimal results. And for return holds that it should be done with great care which often demands a hybrid or even fully physical approach.

Applications

PNI has been used for wide variety of application. Broadly it has been used to help people discover insights, catch emerging trends, make better decisions, generate ideas, resolve conflicts, learn from experience, enlighten situation and connect people.

PNI has been used in a evenly wide variety of industries. Applications include:

• Healthcare - To improve patient engagement, safety and to improve quality of care
• Marketing Research - To identify receptive customer groups, gather customer requirements
• Innovation - To support agile product development and market introduction
• Human Resources - For employee engagement, motivation and safety culture purposes
• Safety Management - To assess, change and support the safety culture in organisations
• Security - To leverage observation power of individuals to network level

Methods for Storywork

• One-on-one expert interview – An interview of one person conducted by one other person who knows a lot about stories or about the subject matter being explored in the interview. While often a structured or semi-structured interviewscript is used, elicitation of stories of personal experience can be a goal, as is including their professional expertise and experience on the subject matter. This method is very useful when people are to busy, when topics are sensitive or when the interviewee has authority.
• Group interview – An expert interview in which more than one person is interviewed at once. In this method the interviews holds quite strong control of the group process. Still one of the goals can be to get people engaged in storysharing. The group interview is very useful when the number of people to be interviewed is too large. Group interview work well for people with high or low status, for very old or very young people and for teams that share operational experience.
• Peer interviews – In peer interviews the people who are being asked to tell stories interview each other. Peer interviews are useful when poorly articulated or deeply held beliefs and feelings need to be brought out in the open. Peer interviewers however may avoid issues they know to be taboo, and they may leave unsaid things “everyone” knows. So in some cases it may be best to complement peer interviews with another method that increases the range of experience, such as an anonymous survey submitted via telephone, computer, or paper.
• Group story sessions – In a Group story session a facilitator provides tasks for groups to complete. The momentum of the stream comes from the participants, not the facilitator. In fact, the facilitator of a group session may not even be present in the room; they might be represented only by a set of instructions on paper. However, group story sessions have fairly high requirements in practice. Our experienced facilitators can help you set them up the right way.
• Group theatre – Some forms of Participatory Theatre are extremely powerful to surface stories. A good example is Image Theatre. Quite often the collected stories are catalysed by the Joker into sensemaking within the same session. Participatory Theatre can therefore be used very well as “pressure-cooker PNI”.
• Surveys – In a narrative survey, people tell their stories without direct human contact. This can be done through a telephone, a piece of paper, a web form, a software interface or an email. But no matter the medium, the interaction in a survey is a distant, one-way communication, more like a message in a bottle than a conversation. That is why TOP innosense designs StoryPoints in StoryConnect using the S.E.E.D principle so that people that share a story feel they are taken seriously, can convey and guard the meaning of their story and ideally even feel better after completing the story sharing process.
• Observation – If you can’t or don’t want or are not allowed to ask people to share stories Observation might be an option. Despite issues around privacy and the fact its time-consuming (costly), observation or participatory observation (joining an operational effort or team) can be somewhat useful. There are many details and drawback to these methods of collection that must be attended to. But when executed in a skilful way it sometimes turnes out to be the best option.
• Journaling – Journaling is surveying on a (more) continuous basis. People are asked to share a story regularly or when some events or trigger takes place. It is particularly useful to gain deeper insight into the daily life or work of people: patients, coachees, citizens, etc. For sensitive subject special care has to be given to how stories are treated in the catalysis, sensemaking and return phases. So journaling can be like a diary on steroids, but to achieve that effect investments have to be made and experiments do be done to hone the journalling system so that it honours at least the S.E.E.D. principle and preferably all the PNI standards for treating stories with respect.
• 'Narrative incident reports – In this method, you don’t ask people to recall stories. You ask people to watch stories happen. Narrative incident reports are a form of participatory observation done by layman or volunteers instead of anthropology professionals. Cynthia Kurtz provides this example:

       Say you are the director of education at a museum. Say you have asked twenty volunteers to follow people around the museum taking notes on what they do: where they stop and read, where they glance and move on, which hands-on activities they touch. Your observing volunteers will probably make their notes on forms with defined places for collected data, such as the length of time each visitor spent at each exhibit, with perhaps a check box for whether people touched any hands-on activities.

• Gleaned stories – Sometimes you may not be able to ask people to tell stories about a particular topic, but you do have access to records of their conversations made beforehand, possibly for some other reason. With the Internet today it’s easier than ever before to gather stories from blogs and other sources. The question of course is if this form of collection can be truly called participatory. We consider the answer to be yes when it is (a) impossible to collect stories from real people and (b) when they are used as a complement to teller-interpreted stories than as a replacement for them.

External links

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