Card Sessions: Insight

In a network, requisite variety.

Sometimes Card Session participants ask me if they’re doing it right.

Each and every time they’re considering a card in light of a question and adding a comment — yes. Yes, you are almost always doing it right.

It might not be THE way of doing it, but that means it’s better than THE perfect procedure, whatever that would be.

Also, by inviting ourselves to the table, with our different perception, observation, orientation — how we read, think and find ourselves and others — we happen requisite variety.

103% of the rest, is in how we converse, how we weave thinks, things and gatherings. In conversations, in chat and in comment threads.

A comment thread can be a vehicle where we invite a weaving of questions and shared understanding conducive to (actionable) insight.

Here’s how, seven steps in a generative sequence:

1. Context
   Invest sufficient time and attention reading the post, in order to focus your unique intelligence how to add value to the thread.
   The heuristic to avoid is: attention -> opinion. Notice your own inference ladder and inference ladder shortcuts. Contextual intelligence for additional context. See also lesswrong dot com.
2. Dialogue Space
   Don’t add a throwaway opinion, blurt, statement, meta, re-stating, verdict, anodyne (eg “Great!”) or an attaboy, since these all tend to shortcut inferences, conversations and threads. Refrain from adding others to the thread, until well after you are participating in a way that holds and invites into a space for dialogue. Provide context for why you add others.
3. Possibility Space
   Adding knowledge to our mostly uninformed opinion, can help turn problem spaces, eg problems outlined in the post, to possibility spaces.
   Resist sharing your fave opinion, even though you might feel certain it makes for a snug fit. Instead, consider adjacent perspectives, adjacent strategies, different lenses through which to articulate additional, possible paths.
4. Learning to See
   The generative review of all comment threads, with our adding considered, considerate comments to threads, with threads turning conversations, is learning to see.
   This also forms a core, essential part of literacies, play, and life as play and possibility.
   Again, resist sharing your own fave opinion. Instead, hold and keep to a generative listening forth and learning into aliveness and joint sauntering, with outcome yet unknown. This is also key for our jointly seeing in more or less an aligned direction, aka meeting and learning together, imagineering a shared vision.
   A shared vision can be as simple as a coming together for a short while in a comment thread, and as complex and worthwhile as coordinating 8bn humans, in order to see ourselves through our 21C, coordinating in service to One Million Trees, One Million Villages and One Thousand Eco-cities.
5. Analogy
   Social cognition, at individual, small group genius, community, societal innovation and scale, hinges on our cultivating inferences, threads, comment threads, chat and digital wise playgrounds.
   With these and other related, relevant means we can then address our shared, orchestrating, imagineering purposes.
   Throughout this stage of analogical reasoning we are learning to see and learning to understand in order to build something that will make a lasting difference.
   The generative review of analogy is culture, at all levels and at all scales.
6. Story
   Story is the confluence of the five preceding stages. Again, sharing your own opinion, goes against what larger story that we are holding space for, our cultivating our threads, our joint inquiry, conducive to emerging, unfolding and evolving meaning-making and meaning.
   The key practice here, is how we address the thread, in a context of circles of concern, influence, confluence, consilience and considered, considerate conversations.
   Conversations that mind and matter is my shorthand for the whereto, why, what, who with, how, when and where of conversations turned circles, circles turned conversations, circles and conversations turned spirals.
   Conversations and knowledge, spiraling, scaffolding paths between today and preferable outcomes.
7. Action
   Actionable insight is the result of our knowledge navigation, our navigating structures, processes and knowledge flows: our negotiating an emergent, unfolding and evolving path through our every comment thread, with our knowledge and understanding applied to weaving a larger story into being.
   Maps, models, diagrams, theories and approaches can here be seen as enabling action. Theory in service to (wise) action.
   The strategic outcome of all comment threads, is knowledge weaving.
   The “and” in Conversations that Mind and Matter.
   From such a weaving, it is perfectly possible to return and rekindle, any which other post and thread, and invite others: from everyone according to ability, to everyone according to need.

A premise for conversations in service to preferable outcomes.