Insight and methods that the IA community may learn from sense-making theory will be proposed on this page.
Lesson 1: Reframing strategies
Watzlawick, Weakland, and Fisch (1974) propose strategies for reframing that may be relevant for IA practitioners that want to enhance their reflexivity on noticing, labelling, and story-creating activities. The strategies are here rewritten with IA terms:
1) Redefine undesirable environmental impacts to make them desirable (The redefinition may reveal nuances and interconnections between impacts)
2) Relabel aspects that are uncertain or ambiguous so that they acquire new meaning (The relabeling may enhance reflexivity on the taken-for-granted use of words, their importance in the stories of impacts, and how we communicate these)
3) Suggest ways to increase an intervention's negative environmental effects or reduce the positive (this may help determine what impacts and measurements are most important - and suggest creative solutions)
Does it make sense to you? If you have comments to the relevance and appropriateness of these strategies, please send me an email. More "lessons" will come...
