Beyond Data Visualization
Humantific CoFounder GK VanPatter posts to his LinkedIn blog:
Visual SenseMaking continues to rise and for us that’s all good news. Some of our Humantific readers will know that long before the “Big Data” wave arrived, Elizabeth Pastor and I first presented on the subject of how information informs innovation at a Cooper Hewitt Design Museum conference, here in New York City in 2001.
Since that time, we have learned more and more by working with organizational leaders using visualized information as fuel to help tackle complex challenges and drive change. By 2001 we already knew that SenseMaking in an innovation context involves more then just making sense of data. 🙂
The secret sauce of Humantific has always been the combination of SenseMaking and ChangeMaking, how to integrate various forms of insight directly into the cocreation or innovation process.
Being engaged in this work for a prolonged period of time certainly accelerated our understanding early on, regarding how methods need to change in order to be reflective of this information-based fuel. Writing an R&D type book on the history of innovation methods helped to drive home this realization. 🙂
For us the vast overblown overemphasis on “Big Data” has been a bit of a side show distraction but realization is finally emerging in the marketplace that data itself is not a magic bullet. Unless you widen the inputs beyond just data and integrate those insights into to a learnable changemaking process, nothing much is going to occur with just the data visualized.
In our Humantific work, data is not the king of the castle but rather is recognized as one form or one dimension of insight that we want to weave into the SenseMaking puzzle. In our Humantific practice we created the 5 Dimension model of SenseMaking that includes the integration of upstream framing, ie; making sense of the challenge or opportunity space……
What we are teaching is how to operate and move forward constructively in contexts where the challenges and opportunities are uncertain.
What we are not teaching is downstream assumption-based Design Thinking methods. By 2001 we had already figured out that in the context of complex organizational and societal contexts, assuming up front that you know what the challenges are does not make much sense.
Participants in our Complexity Navigation skill-building program receive this workbook. We are trying to decide whether we should publish a public version of this book this year so if you would like to send us your vote feel free!
See the entire post here.
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