At 09:11 AM 11/14/2001 -0500, Al wrote:
>I studied communication in grad school in the early 80s. In that
field,
>much of the newer and promising work going on was a reaction *against*
a
>model of communication as persuasion, which had dominated the field in
the
>previous decades. Brenda Dervin, for example, contrasted a sensemaking
>approach to the persuasion approach. For her, sensemaking is a process
>where people confront obstacles or discontinuities in their progress
>towards some goal; when they hit such obstacles, they cast about for
ways
>to understand their situation so that they can design effective
movements
>around, through, or away from the obstacles. It has little to do with
>persuasion and much to do with figuring out what's going on and what to
do
>in a situation where the normal rules are upset.
I don't understand the distinction being made here. If I enjoy a
personal sense-making insight into a problem, isn't it even better if I
can persuade others of it's value? Conversely, what use is it to try to
persuade someone of something that doesn't make any sense to them?
Persuasion and sense-making are two facets of the same communication
diamond.
A good insight or interpretation is inherently persuasive, IMHO. That
doesn't imply that the intention of all communication is to persuade ...
sometimes we're trying to be persuasive and sometimes we're just trying
to find our way around some obstacle. I believe that an implicit goal
of collaborative work is to create high levels of shared commitment and
ownership (in product, process, etc), and the ability to be persuasive is
instrumental in this process. Hence the increasing importance of
marketing and political skills, even on "technical" projects.
And Jack wrote:
>As it turns out, I read TR 74 and was somehow primed for this response,
> which also corresponds to my intuition that seeking truth or making
sense
> cannot and should not involve persuasion. It is for this reason that I
> have been thinking that keeping the participants (at least in the non
> face-to-face) dialogs anonymous.
Anonymity cuts both ways. It can be great for leveling the playing
field. But there's also literature to support the view that people rely
heavily on the source of a piece of information or
viewpoint as an indicator of it's validity. Denied that indicator, they
can feel that the system, full of anonymous comments, is too sterile to
be useful. Anonymity is a useful tool for certain situations ... but I
doubt it can be the norm for effective project work.
Jeff
--
Dr. Jeff Conklin <
CogNexus Institute ... Collaborative Display, Collective Intelligence
http://cognexus.org Phone/Fax: 410-798-4495
304 Arbutus Dr., Edgewater, MD 21037 USA