Overview

Anecdote circles (ACs) is as an agile approach for using before, during and after TTDR processes - between researchers and social actors / stakeholders in order to stimulate and sustain their continued participation in the research process via an on-going process of sharing their lived experiences / realities of the problem situation at hand. Using ACs is, therefore, an effective means of facilitating the 'social contracting' between researchers and stakeholders: the latter agree to share their experiences / stories with researchers in turn for which their experiences / stories will be returned - in the form of richly visualised quant-qual representations - back to the social actors / stakeholders in order to support their real-time decision-making and action-taking.

However, social contracting is not a once-off event, something which can be merely concluded as part of a deal-making process and, some customary hand-shaking across the negotiating table, as it were. Social contracting in research involves a different kind of process, namely of on-going re/assembling the social - as has alluded to on the Home page. What this means in practice is that

Features and uses

Anecdotes are a naturally occurring stories, as found in the “wild” of conversational discourse, usually about a single incident or situation. An Anecdote Circle is a way of capturing these. It is a lightly facilitated, group based Method. People are selected that have some form of common or shared experience. As an example they will be prompted to “Share either a good or bad experience when…” in relation to this common or shared experience. Anecdotes can then be applied across a wide variety of organizational endeavors, from culture to strategy. They may also later be tagged or signified and placed in a Narrative database. The general operating principle of the anecdote circle is this. Because “you only know what you know when you need to know it”, it is difficult to get at aspects of knowledge, values and beliefs that are held in common but rarely talked about. When people tell each other stories about their experiences, the social negotiations that take place create conditions which recreate to some extent the feeling of being “in the field under fire”, or, in the state of “needing to know”. Thus background knowledge surfaces and becomes available in ways it could not otherwise do so.

Features and uses

• Anecdote Circles are mostly used as a capture mechanism, but are also equally valuable as an intervention. One of the earlier Cognitive Edge principles is quite relevant here: "Every diagnostic is an intervention and every intervention a diagnostic". While Anecdote Circles are great for capturing raw narrative material they impact and change the "space" as well. Anecdote Circles have effectively been used for a variety of activities, more common uses include:

• Decision Making / Strategy: Data points can be captured from multiples sources (including Anecdote Circles), then used to develop a contextualised model (Using a Contextualisation method) based on the Cynefin Framework. This has lead to the development of specific strategy actions well suited for strategy and decision making in uncertainty

• Knowledge / Mapping: Many organisations grapple with Knowledge retention and knowledge diffusion. Anecdote Circles are a great way to capture raw anecdotal narrative material, from which contextualised knowledge is normally present

Anecdotes vs. purposeful stories

Anecdotes are usually short and about a single incident or situation. Contrast this with a purposeful story, which is long and complex as well as deliberately constructed and told (usually many times). Some people tell purposeful stories often; others don’t. What you are after in the anecdote circle is not purposeful stories, which are indicative of what people believe is expected of them, but anecdotes, which are more unguarded and truthful. For sense-making and knowledge sharing anecdotes are priceless. They can answer many questions that direct questioning cannot. Telling stories allows people to disclose sensitive information without attribution or blame, because the inherent distance between reality and narration provides safety for truth-telling.

Summary: End-notes

• The agility / versatility of ACs resides in the fact that it can be used either as a synergic - standalone - method or used synergically together with some other agile methods. For example, as alluded to above, it can be used to actually stimulate / initiate the process of sharing lived experiences / stories - especially with groups who have had no previous collaborative experiences of working together on any projects / programmes, and therefore do not have a history of shared experiences;

• Active involvement in facilitating ACs processes can open up multiple and rich opportunities for researchers to work on - refining, changing, innovating - their dynamic epistemic objects - the net effect being that researchers are no longer solely dependent on the literature only for doing this theoretical work - provided that any new insights and understandings gained from this have been well recorded and made available for interrogation by others and referencing purposes.