Thanks to the company of many generous people (storytellers, anthropologists, curators, researchers, artists) in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s1 I have woven the practice of using objects into my work in many ways. Here is the first of a few instances I’ll share over the next few weeks. Recognising Julie Reynolds’ particular contribution and influence on me in design, research, curation, and above all in conceiving of the ‘object symbols’ tag that was an ‘aha’ for me.
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context
Over six months from autumn 2009 to spring 2010, we2 ran a workshop and interview series for the Audit Commission that sat alongside a multi-case research project looking into strategic financial leadership and governance in councils across England.
Our task was to find the stories that leaders don’t normally tell in formal settings, the first hand, private accounts that illuminate the collective, public discussion and move people to new actions and attitudes.
We needed to do this with sufficient rigour to bear scrutiny by a demanding, investigative, organisation intolerant of fluff and new-age methods.
We were to surface the hidden and untold stories about leadership, prioritisation, allocation of resources, handling of conflict and preparation for a tighter financial situation. Also to identify experiences to be used as ‘quiet teaching stories’ to enhance understanding and motivate action. Curated stories were intended to act as prompts for asking questions and initiating conversations, not to provide easy answers and solutions.
invitation
As well as conducting interviews, we ran workshops. There’s lots to say at another time around the overall narrative research process, but here, I’m selecting the unexpected turn the planned workshop opening took each time we ran it. But first, how did we position the invitation?
What is the aim of the workshop?
Our main aim is to get personal insights into your experience of developing a culture of governance and leadership that support strategic financial management.
We want to capture these insights with a view to sharing them with your peers in other local authorities. In the first instance, this will involve using them to illustrate a report on strategic financial management being prepared by the Audit Commission.
This differs from the more traditional case study fieldwork conducted by the research team at the Audit Commission in encouraging unvarnished accounts, and the smaller, perhaps surprising stories of achievement, failure, regret and satisfaction that can easily get overlooked or go unshared for a variety of reasons.
extract from briefing note agreed September 2009
Ahead of the workshop we ask each participant to bring along a picture or an object that for them represents a significant moment in the council’s journey towards strategic financial leadership and governance.
object/ive
(Irresistible pun.) Each workshop is in three blocks, starting with objects:
Introductions through objects and images that participants had brought with them to illustrate a significant moment for them in their council’s journey towards strategic financial leadership and governance.
Creation of an outline map of the authority’s journey towards strategic financial management, through small group working sessions with prompt cards that would then be laid onto a collective timeline.
Selection and exploration of some key experiences to emerge from the map. A discussion about the most significant changes to date.
arrivals and set up
Before participants arrive, we have reorganised the Council chamber, laid out a tablecloth on which to gather, label and arrange objects as an exhibit.
As participants arrives, we asked them each to write a luggage label that explains their choice of object and has their name on it. The objects go into the exhibit on the tablecloth.
The facilitator asks each participant in turn to introduce themselves by taking a minute to say who they are and to talk about the object/picture they’ve chosen – what it is and the experience it represents for them and why it’s important (‘It’s a conker, I chose it because when this started out I thought we were just playing a game and now I’ve come to think of this as the seed for something’) and to lay the object and the label on a table. [The curator takes pictures of the objects and the labels for the record and make a catalogue of the objects. They may want to take notes as people speak to supplement the labels for a catalogue.]
After all the participants have spoken, the facilitator invites them to talk about what the collection says to them about their council’s journey towards strategic financial leadership and governance in terms of process and emotion.
Most people do bring objects, which we lay out on a table cloth and labeled/curated in quite a ritual and deliberate way. (Julie’s presence is important here, performative curation of collections.) Those who don’t bring an object all think of one in the end. At least two people point to other participants as their chosen objects.
I brought an along a stressball’. The stressball is there because the financial strategy does bring with it certain stresses, particularly for managers that are having to deal with cuts. It brings me personal stress in terms of the work that’s involved in managing a process, coordinating the figures etc. But the other interesting thing about a stressball is that you can see it also has Guinness on because it reminds me that, when I am stressed, I love a Guinness.
In one workshop, an elected member sits in silence, clearly uncomfortable with no object to hand. We have decided not to press if people are too way out of their comfort zone, and are about to move on. Suddenly pick up the notebook resting on their lap, and say, holding it up:
This is my object. I carry aide-memoires with me in the front of my notebook here to do with amount of loans we’ve got, the latest budget...
What follows on is an in depth conversation about how elected members are not primed for the steep learning curve they need to go on to make an effective contribution to strategic financial governance.
object symbols
This exercise is simply meant as a kind of opener. It has turned into much more an icebreaker and overruns, cutting into the rest of the plans. We let it run and make cuts later in the workshop. There is a real sense of a gathered space between people that has emerged. You can feel the quality of that connection, without exactly being able to name that quality.
And then afterwards Julie comes up with the most brilliant way of coding up this, together with coding interview materials. We must call these fragments object symbols she says. Some of them exist as actual objects, some of them are in peoples’ minds but all of them are symbols of patterns around strategic financial governance and we can use those symbols both to make patterns visible, and to convey insights in the reporting.
Identifying object symbols enables fragments of stories to be compiled with an image story in mind that could be conveyed or act as starting points for the final story documents. Objects and object symbols are crucial visual literacy research building blocks, enabling users to go into the raw research material and quickly see part or the whole of a story that they could easily remember due to a visual tag.
In this, we also hold onto an idea from Karl Weick3:
Vivid words draw attention to new possibilities suggesting that organisations with access to more varied images will engage in sensemaking that is more adaptive than will organisations with more limited vocabulary.
Thanks Carol Russell, Stephanie Matthews, Chris Heimann, and to Julie Reynolds for the idea for object symbols. Also important was insight from Rick Stone, who would use objects with wealthy clients in a wealth management context to run anecdote circles in which people used the objects to express what wealth meant to them.
We, in those days, was Sparknow. The client was Agnieszka Scott, whose brilliant commissioning and leadership was a particular factor in the way this work went.
