I sat down to write a blog post about how I find the connection points in conversations when sense-making with a group of people. To be honest I was having trouble articulating how I undertake this activity. So I started to do some research. Deep into a multi-tabbed, bleary-eyed spiral of google-searching I found myself reading papers on mathematical theories that were actually making a lot of sense. (No I was not drunk) These papers were articulating the idea that I was struggling to explain. Now this came as a bit of a shock, those who know me personally will be laughing at this point as ‘mathematically gifted’ is a phrase no-one in history has ever used to describe me. Hell, no one’s even said, ‘she’s okay with numbers’.
So there I was reading about the idea of ‘topology’ and falling in love with how the theory has everything to do with how ‘sets’ connect while having absolutely nothing to do with the distance between them or the speed at which they can be connected. This is exactly how I see the process of finding connections in conversation.
Let me turn to the oracle to properly provide you with a definition of topology. Wikipedia explains, “The motivating insight behind topology is that some geometric problems depend not on the exact shape of the objects involved, but rather on the way they are put together. For example, the square and the circle have many properties in common: they are both one dimensional objects (from a topological point of view) and both separate the plane into two parts, the part inside and the part outside.”
As I continued reading I was particularly captivated by the tale of this one guy, Leonhard Euler who wrote one of the first papers on topology. Leonhard wrote about how it was impossible to find a route through the town of Kalinigrad (previously known as Konigsberg) that would take you across each of the seven bridges just once. Leonhard explained, “The result did not depend on the lengths of the bridges, nor on their distance from one another, but only on connectivity properties: which bridges connect to which islands or riverbanks.” You can read more about Leonhard and his seven bridges on Wikipedia.
When I’m in the midst of sense-making with a group of people, it is the topology of the conversation that is my starting point. Where do these ideas intersect? The detail can come later; the size and shape of the ideas, the winding paths between them; this is all the narrative aspects that I can layer on with time. The starting point is the topology.
“This is great, Hayley” I can hear you saying, “Really love how you’ve hacked apart an actual theory and the life’s work of several mathematicians in order to stitch it back together for your blog post. But you still haven’t explained to me how I go about finding this so-called ‘conversational topology’”. Let me preface this by saying that it is somewhat difficult to go from re-purposing mathematical theory to Hayley’s hot tips within a paragraph while maintaining some illusion of intelligence, but here goes:
Hayley’s hot tips for finding conversational topology:
- Apply a learner’s mindset
Mindset is critical. If you approach the task of sense-making assuming you know exactly where the conversation is going to go – that is all it will do for you, take you exactly where you thought it would. And chances are you’ve missed something amazing. If you bring a learner’s mindset instead then you are allowing yourself to be amazed and awed. The folks at Learning Emergence describe the learners mindset as a way to find enjoyment in making sense of new information in relation to your own context, “Effective learners are on the lookout for links between what they are learning and what they already know. They get pleasure from seeing how things ‘fit together’. They like it when they can make sense of new things in terms of their own experience and when they can see how learning relates to their own concerns.”
Learning Emergence further describe active learners in how they question, “Their questions reflect this orientation towards coherence. They are interested in the big picture and how the new learning fits within it.”
So be open to new ideas, be curious. Find enjoyment in the unexpected. Enjoy the process of piecing together a new puzzle without being in a rush to get all the pieces in place.
- Immerse in the content
Before you can make sense of it, there first needs to be content from which the sense can be extracted. Get people talking, pondering, sharing; and capture the content on paper or a whiteboard as its happening. Don’t be in a rush to find the connections, just let the content flow firstly. If you try to tie a bow on how it all fits together too quickly then you haven’t let the content and conversation diverge enough. There will be plenty of time to reign it in, first let it surprise you by how far and wide it can flow. Just enjoy immersing and learning.
- Listen really, really hard
If you are planning to take a roomful of content and make sense out of it then without a doubt you need to be listening harder than anyone else in that room. The kinds of things I am listening and looking for are connecting words such as:
- sequence – timeline, chronology, beginning-middle-end
- Characters – actual people, archetypes or representative characters
- A set of similar descriptive, action or object words
- Emotions
A whole bunch of content can seem completely random and unconnected at first. If you pay attention to what is being repeated (as above) the connections often emerge.
- Pick up your mental needle and thread
Take an imaginary needle and thread and stitch it through the ideas where you see them intersecting. I often do this in the form of a recap of the conversation that I run through out loud to the participants, playing back their content in the way I see it connecting. Playing it back will give you a chance to verify and adapt the topology using the feedback of the group.
Once you’ve got the ideas on a thread then you can let the rest of the pattern and detail emerge and from there you can turn it into a beautiful narrative. But remember it all starts with the topology.
