Frequently Asked Questions

I provide project design help and narrative "catalysis" for projects in organizational and community narrative. I also provide general data analysis, research and software development services. These are some of the questions prospective clients often ask.

What is organizational and community narrative?

Organizational and community narrative is a field of inquiry and practice concerned with stories told by or to people in groups important to an organization or community -- its members, customers, consituents, clients, and so on. Other names for the field are business narrative, organizational narrative and organizational storytelling. Some consultants in this field help clients craft and tell stories; some help clients listen to and make sense of stories; some do both. I work mainly on the listening side of the field.

What sorts of projects do you help clients with?

The type of research I help clients with is often called action research. I help clients ask people to tell stories and answer questions about them, then work with the stories and answers to find things out, catch emerging trends, make decisions, get new ideas, resolve conflicts, connect people, help people learn, and enlighten people.

How do you help with project design?

A lot of what I know about organizational and community narrative is available for free in my book Working with Stories, but sometimes people need more specific advice than that. I help people figure out the best approaches to take depending on why they are doing the project, what they or their clients want to achieve, and what special features of the context require attention. I listen, propose, discuss, and provide feedback. In particular, I help people decide how they will ask people to tell stories, what questions they will ask for and about stories, how they will handle the collected data, whether and how they will hold sensemaking sessions, how they will reach their desired result, and so on.

Project design help is especially useful when people have not done very many projects yet, or when they are facing a project outside the range of their previous experience. Because I have helped with several dozen such projects across a range of goals and contexts, I can usually help people plan their projects with those experiences in mind.

What is narrative catalysis?

Often people use collected stories (and answers to questions about them) in sensemaking sessions where they ask people (the storytellers or others) to interpret the stories and answers on their own. However, it is also helpful in some projects to have an outsider who is experienced in looking at narrative patterns - but critically, naïve with respect to the subject matter of the project - highlight some trends to stimulate sensemaking. This is where I come in. I take all of your collected data and "converse" with it, looking for interesting or surprising patterns that might be helpful to you given the goals of your project. To look at qualitative patterns I use the methods of grounded theory (where patterns emerge from "soaking up" data). If quantitative data (groups of answers to questions) are available I combine visual and statistical comparisons with the qualitative element. The end result is a catalysis report.

What does a catalysis report look like?

When I'm finished I send you PDF and PPT files of your catalysis report. These can range from several to fifty or more pages depending on the scope of the project. (I prefer the slide-show format because it prevents me from writing too much detail on any topic.) Here is an abridged, anonymized catalysis report from a real project, which the client has graciously given me permission to place on my web site as an example of my work.

Why do you call it catalysis? Don't you analyze data?

I like to call what I do catalysis instead of analysis, because a catalyst speeds up chemical reactions, and catabolic processes break up large molecules and release energy. In a similar way, I help people speed up sensemaking, break down previous solidifications of thought and belief, and release energy to consider new ideas. I can do analysis when it is called for, but when the purpose of the project is to help people find new solutions or make decisions, analysis tends to shut down thought just when it should be opened up. This is what I mean when I say that my work is more along the lines of action research than hypothesis-based research.

In the Who is listening to whom? section of my book I talk about how people outside the group of interest (the storytellers) should never interpret stories unless they follow two rules: separate statements into observations, interpretations and implications and provide provoking perspectives. I follow these rules in my catalysis reports. In some ways this is the most difficult part of the work, because every pattern, no matter how obvious or iron-clad it appears, must have at least two competing interpretations. For example, if the stories and answers show that respondents value profit above honesty, the pattern might mean just that. But it might also mean that the respondents didn't believe the anonymity statement and were worried that the project was really a weeding-out exercise to get rid of people who wouldn't help the company grow. Or, it might mean that the words used to describe honesty and profit led people to value one more than the other. And so on.

After each interpretation or implication I essentially pretend I am a nay-sayer, crossing my arms and saying "Yeah, yeah," and then I see what I can come up with. The purpose of this nay-saying is to help people break out of comfortable ways of thinking (and thus it is important never to resolve any of these dilemmas). Sometimes people say these competing interpretations annoy them enough to think of a good response; other times they say the interpretations bring out an issue everybody knows about but nobody is willing to talk about.

The three statements - observations, interpretations and implications - are all optional elements of catalysis. I've done reports where only observations were noted, and I've even simply given clients hundreds of pattern visualizations (graphs) and let them choose which ones to highlight, with no report being built at all. It depends on the goals and plan of your project.

How do people use catalysis reports?

The most effective use of catalysis reports is as an input to a sensemaking workshop. What I've seen people do is take copies of the report to a group session and either hand them out to each small group, or simply post them on the walls for people to look at. The patterns, observations, interpretations and implications trigger discussions as people react. Ideally at least some of the collected stories should be easily available as well for people to dive into.

Less frequently, I've seen people use my catalysis reports to feed a process of analysis, where a final report is prepared with answers and solutions (usually to be presented to those in charge of making decisions). The people making the transition from catalysis to analysis should be in the community of interest, or at very least they should know a lot about it. I can help with such transitions, and have done that, but I actively discourage people from using my reports as analysis reports, simply because I am not in the community of interest and I can't possibly get every interpretation right. I don't really think any outside expert can do that.

How long does preparing a catalysis report take?

The amount of time required to create a catalysis report given raw data depends on a few things, but the general range is between eight and forty hours. Some factors that affect time requirements depend on the data set:

  1. How much data do you have, and of what sorts? 100 stories or 5000? 3 questions or 20? No stories but lots of answers? No answers but lots of stories?
  2. What sorts and combinations of questions did you ask? Open-ended? Nominal? Ordinal? Numerical?
  3. Is the data "clean" or does it need to be "massaged?" Are there irregularities?
  4. Is the data set very hard to work with? Were the questions leading or confusing? Were there many similar questions? Is there too little variation? Are there spurious contradictions? Are there a lot of non-stories mixed in with the stories?

And some depend on your goals and context:

  1. How complete an exploration do you want? Do you want me to go down every little alley, or should I stick to the most obvious trends?
  2. Do you want a report? Do you want observations? Intepretations? Implications?
  3. How important are the qualitative and quantitative aspects to you? Is it critical that I read all the stories? Is it critical that there be statistical results?
  4. Who is the report's audience? Should the report be as technical as possible or as clear and simple as possible?
  5. How are you going to use the report? In a sensemaking workshop? To transition to analysis? For your own thought processes?

The best thing is to talk to me at the outset about your project, its goals, what you plan to collect and how, and how you want to use the outcome(s). Based on that I should be able to give you an estimate of how long it should take to help you with your project. I set a minimum project length of sixteen hours, but within that (or within whatever project length you need) you can divide the time up into advice, data manipulation and report preparation however you like.

What methods do you recommend to collect stories?

You can collect stories in many ways, not least by talking directly to people. You can find some advice on asking questions and transcribing storytelling in my book Working with Stories.

If you want to collect stories online, any of the free or inexpensive survey sites, like SurveyMonkey, work fine. I can help you run a survey on SurveyMonkey, but it's easy to run one yourself as well. You can also collect stories and answers using Rakontu, my free, open source web application for story sharing. Rakontu is useful if you want to engage people in a longer process, but it is not the best choice when you want to do a one-time, single-pass story collection. I do offer consulting services to help groups get the most out of Rakontu; see the consulting page for information on that.

What software do you use to prepare catalysis reports?

I use my own in-house scripts (in Python with numpy, scipy, matplotlib, and R) to read your data and prepare the statistics and graphs that make up my reports.

Do you always prepare a catalysis report?

No. I've supported several projects where my help was limited to helping people plan how they would collect stories and how they would work with them. Sometimes I've looked at collected stories and talked to people about ways they might want to work with them, without creating a report. Some projects do better without a report, especially projects where getting stories to people who need to hear them is the most important thing.

Do you also work with non-narrative data?

I like narrative projects best, but I have worked and do work with other data, such as surveys and texts. For example, on a project for a large telecommunications firm I grouped and themed thousands of comments made in response to a series of employee satisfaction surveys to map the changing concerns of employees.

Do you write software?

I've been programming professionally since about 1988, mixed with other work. I'm especially fond of mixing research with prototype building when the goal is exploration of a topic. But I can write and have written full software applications for various clients over the years.

What other services do you provide?

I'm pretty good at having conversations with literature, meaning, you have a topic you want to explore and I dive into what people have written and studied and done about it, and then summarize for you what I've found. I'm not a bad editor and have helped many a friend and colleague improve the coherence and strength of their writings. I also have a long history of doing original research on a variety of topics, favoring action research and grounded theory.

What is the cost of your services?

I charge an hourly rate with a minimum number of hours. These projects usually start in the range of US$3000-4000. For details on project pricing and scheduling please drop me an email.