Jeff Conklin

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This is a Work-In-Progress. Feel free to edit!

Jeff has been a friend and mentor since the early 2000s. I learned many of my core principles and practices directly from him, and — in addition to lots of informal gab and jam sessions and ongoing support and encouragement — I had the pleasure of working with him on a project with NASA regarding lunar dust and on the Delta Dialogues.

He is a brilliant, visionary practitioner who has focused his entire career on managing wicked problems. In the process, he has made significant contributions to the framing of wicked problems and the role that artifacts can play in how we work our way through them. He is generous, humble, caring, passionate, and obsessively committed to his craft. Like Doug Engelbart (which is how I met him), he is underappreciated by society and way, way too hard on himself. I owe him a tremendous amount.

For an excellent guide to his work, check out his book, Dialogue Mapping: Building Shared Understanding of Wicked Problems.

How I Met Jeff

My initial work with Doug Engelbart focused on augmenting human processes with technology. Even though Doug cared about hypermedia, we focused largely on hypertext. We also were focused more on high-level group processes rather than... well, meetings! We facilitated meetings in very traditional ways — there was an agenda and a facilitator, and the facilitator would try to get the whole group (regardless of size) through the agenda.

Most folks who self-identify as professional collaboration practitioners focus on meetings. While meetings are important, they are only one potential tool when folks collaborate. I think this overarching emphasis on meetings is problematic. I also think that, while most practitioners are meeting-centric, very few are actually good at designing good meetings, especially as the number and diversity of participants grow and the problems get more complex. --Eekim (talk) 23:01, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

In my work with Doug, two things happened. First, one of my colleagues — Jack Park — kept saying that we should look more closely at Jeff Conklin's work. Jack was particularly interested in Jeff's work with gIBIS — Graphical Issue-Based Information Systems. I took a look, and I thought it was interesting, but I didn't know what to do with it, so I didn't do anything. Jeff's background was interesting, too — software engineer turned researcher who had written a widely cited survey paper on hypertext systems and who was interested in how teams design things. He cited Doug as one of his two intellectual grandfathers, and so I mentally filed him away as one of Doug's people I would like to meet one day.

The other thing that happened was that Doug was extremely hard to work with. He knew it, and one of the original reasons he had asked me to work with him was that he thought I could compensate for some of his deficiencies. In particular, he had big blocks around language and trust. He had a big, complicated worldview with his own language to describe how everything was connected. He had trouble understanding other people's worldviews, and he didn't trust that others understood his, even those with whom he had worked for a long time.

As our technical work petered out, Doug asked me to join a small core team trying to help him re-launch the Bootstrap Alliance. We had been meeting regularly for several months, and we had gotten stuck. We needed some external help to get unstuck.

As it turned out, Jeff had made a bit of a career pivot. He was helping groups tackle hard problems (wicked and otherwise) by facilitating meetings using a process called Dialogue Mapping via a tool called QuestMap, which used gIBIS. He was leading a workshop in the Bay Area on Dialogue Mapping, and he invited me to participate.

All those weird sounding names and acronyms did not do justice to the simple elegance of Jeff's ideas nor to the immense skill with which he wielded and taught them. The technique was mind-blowing, and I couldn't wait to try them. I had a meeting the day after the workshop, so I gave it a shot. I crashed and burned. I was terrible, and half the team got really mad at me. Despite this terrifying experience, I recognized that it was my lack of proficiency and not the technique itself that was a problem, and I felt confident that I could improve. But I needed help.

That help came in the form of hiring Jeff to facilitate one of our Bootstrap Alliance meetings. He was the perfect person to facilitate the meeting with Doug. He was very familiar with Doug's ideas, Doug knew and trusted him (as much as he trusted anybody), and his work was all about developing shared language and trust, which was where we were blocked. In addition to skillfully guiding us through that meeting, I got to see a master practitioner do his work, which made me see some mistakes I had made. Not only was my next attempt at Dialogue Mapping a success, I took away lessons that affected how I facilitated and how I thought about collaboration in general.

In the ensuing years, I used Dialogue Mapping extensively. Much of my reputation as a facilitator was built on that technique. More recently, for a variety of reasons, I have incorporated the principles of Dialogue Mapping into my practice in other ways using tools other than Compendium (the successor to QuestMap, which sadly, hasn't been maintained for several years). I've been able to do this, because it is the principles that matter, not the specific form that I first learned. Jeff taught me this, and has been supportive of the evolution. Still, I badly wish there were a good successor to Compendium.

Lessons Learned

Two intellectual grandfathers: Doug Engelbart and Horst Rittel.

Framing around wicked problems.

Shared display, shared understanding, and artifacts. Strong role this plays in facilitation.

Tic-Tac-Toe

IBIS grammar

Question-centrism and the Left-Hand Move

Making the display part of the room

Pointing.

Humility in learning. Story of how Dialogue Mapping came about.

Toolkits.