Languages for innovation: when we speak practitioner vs speak project manager vs speak scholar
Last week, we invited leaders from 9 rural revitalization projects to Xinlong Village for a “practitioner summit”. These invited practitioners are based in villages across China, including Henan 河南，Sichuan 四川，Guangdong 广东，Yunan 云南 and Fujian 福建 provinces.
The goal behind the 3 day summit is to build social capital for Xinlong village, ie. for the local leaders to learn from these more experiences practitioners (8+ years within one location), and also to build social capital among the practitioners, by fostering a loose learning network.
I co-designed and co-facilitated the summit with a young colleague (Lixing Zhang), and since this is a learning-based event, we felt a challenge linger through out the planning and execution process: what are the ways that a decade of on the ground, local practice be shared, so others can capture the depth and richness of these experiences?
We decided to do this in two ways, in tandem.
Day 1, on the rooftop patio of the village youth hostel, we ask everyone to give a 10 minute formal Powerpoint presentation on their project.
Day 2, we changed to a public space by the village park, and had an impromptu story-telling session.
Same people, same projects, a Powerpoint presentation vs a story.
Day 1, formal Powerpoint presentation
Day 1, formal Powerpoint presentation
Day 2, impromptu story-telling session
Day 2, impromptu story-telling session
My thinking behind sharing the same projects in two different ways, and in this order, were these:
a formal Powerpoint presentation may give a more comprehensive overview on each project, however it may not provide any information that is not already accessible online;
and a story can be a deep dive into something personal and memorable, but it doesn’t may not provide enough context.
Facilitating impromptu story-telling
To facilitate the story-telling, I first did a 30 minute prep-session, during which 5 key concepts that I thought were relevant in current rural revitalization work in China were hang as inspiration boards. These concepts were:
co-design 共创
social learning 社会化学习
embracing emergence 拥抱“生发性”
local knowledge generation 本地知识生产
beyond the project 打破项目限制
Inspiration boards with keywords I thought relevant in prompting story-telling
I first told a story from my work in Xinlong Village and explained what these concepts meant to me. And then asked everyone to think of what immediately pop into their minds when they see these concepts and add onto the inspirational boards with post-its. After a lightening round of sharing, I then asked each participant to come up with a specific story from their project that resonated with one or more of these concepts.
And finally, the participants were asked to tell their story, one at a time.
Formal presentation and story-telling, what is the difference?
So how did these two ways of sharing provide different types of information?
As expected, the Powerpoint presentations were structured, comprehensive, and imbued with data. And their underlying intention, in my opinion, were to convince the audience that the project was “worth doing”.
And interestingly, the stories were each focused on very particular instance of overcoming an unforeseen challenge, and achieving personal growth, similar to that if the Hero’s Journey.
For example, a participant who is now focusing on community building through the preservation of traditional architecture and renewal of cultural traditions, formally presented his project with a timeline structure, from past impact data to future plans. And during the story session, he went into details about his unexpected personal journey with learning to build trust and collaboration with local government officials, calling back to the keywords “embracing emergence”.
It had also struck me that the stories tended to share the theme of navigating challenging and unsettling power relations, either with an employer, a client or government officials. This was an element underrepresented in formal presentations. For example, a participant gave a vivid account of her resentful experience, as an NGO employee, having to process and sell hundreds of lambs on behalf of a rural community, in order to save (or save face for?) an ill-planned developmental project.
And it occurred to me: the two formats for sharing had drove the participants to adopt two different languages for sharing their project. In the formal presentation, they spoke a structured, methodical, and data driven language, similar to that of a business plan. And with story-telling, they spoke in a language that emphasized on risk taking, dissatisfaction with currently systems, and personal growth, liken to a moral fable.
If we think of the contexts in which these two languages are spoken, one is usually in a formal meeting, and the other in an informal setting, which could even to be passed down second or third hand. Could we be safe to call the former be the language of the project manager, and the latter the language of the practitioner?
Scholarly words, a foreign language?
But my biggest learning is yet to come.
During the story-telling, the participants pointed out to me that the 5 keywords I chose as stories prompts would most never be use in the field. They all understood them, but they would express them in different ways. For example, they explained, “local knowledge generation” could be translated as “inheriting and renewing local knowledge”; “social learning” could be “learning by doing it together”, and “embracing emergence” (difficult one for me, since emergence doesn’t not have a good translation in Chinese) could be “embracing accidents”.
Why did they need to be translated? Was I speaking a 3rd, and maybe even foreign language?
I thought back to the sources through which these concepts had into my cognition, “co-design”, “social learning”, “embracing emergence”, “local knowledge generation”, and “beyond the project”, and understood what the issue was. I got familiar with these terms from reading academic writing. Was I speaking the foreign language of the scholar?
This is not say it was failure to use the words that seemed so removed from daily use. In fact, even though the participants gave me a lesson on translation, they all called back happily to at least one of these terms during their story-telling, one participants even managed to touch on all five and received a round of applause. And each time these terms were mentioned, they were use as a concluding concept, tying bits and pieces of details of a story together. Also, when different stories landed on the same concepts, experiences from different practitioners were also tied together.
These “scholarly” concepts were first story prompts, and the stories also made them richer.
Speaking project manager vs. speaking practitioner vs. speaking scholar
Back to the questions in the beginning of this blog post, “what are the ways that a decade of on the ground, local practice be shared, so others can capture the depth and richness of these experiences?” I guess my answer now is it is beneficial to have them shared with more than one language for “talking innovation”.
To me, a person who triples on the roles of practitioner, project manager and (a budding) scholar on designing for social innovation, what I learned from this experience is the following:
To speak project manager, is to formalize innovation as a plan, partly reached and partly worth anticipating.
To speak practitioner, is to tell about innovation as lived experiences that others can resonate with and/or find lessons in.
To speak scholar, is to solidify the messy/amorphous things that emerge from experimentation into concise concepts, so everyone may share words for what are otherwise messy/amorphous.
It is up to each person to find the most effective language (or a mix of them) under each particular contexts, and we probably all need more practice with translating between them.
And for those like me, often a designer and facilitator for group learning events, we also have to learn to create supportive contexts to encourage the relevant languages to be spoken.
