The Science Behind Spryng.IO

The premise of Liberating Structures, the premise of Spryng is that every voice matters. When you're trying to understand any kind of human organization, community system, whatever it might be, each one is unique. And each one is made up of all the unique human beings, and each human being has a unique perspective, a unique voice. And so Spryng is about how do we not lose those voices when we're trying to figure out what's going on, when we're faced with decisions. Well, and it's another thing I think shared between us and these methodologies we're talking about, these approaches, is this deep respect for people. And their local story, their local solution, their local problem, whatever that may be, that's gonna be the source of moving forward. The invitation to tell the story is a sign of respect, And then in that telling of the story is also enough respect that you believe that solutions can be generated out of that trusting relationship. Underlying principle of active sense making is so consonant with and is drawn from the work of human systems dynamics that I feel like it is my voice just in a different language. It's unique because it captures individual voices within an organization, community, population of interest, and at the same time, uncovers broader patterns of meaning from those voices. how do we make sense of, how do we cope with, how do we negotiate, how do we rationalize, how do we understand as individuals, as collectives of some type, this, the uncertainty of the world, the way things are working, ourselves, each other, all of these aspects. So it's the very user-centric, person-centric. The thing that I have found gets people excited about it, that is sort of what I call the entry point, is that it's stories, right? People are really intrigued by and care about and drawn to how to incorporate voice into their work. So I've always been interested in how can I scale what I'm doing, how can I complement what I'm doing with greater number, but not compromise on the kind of ethnographic sensibility of being there, of learning people's real experiences, of taking their word to be real data, And obviously, you know, doing simple surveys doesn't do that for me. So that's how I first came to talk to Ajay about using Spryng. But you want to be using the data not so much to test hypotheses that you have as to challenge hypotheses that you have and potentially grow new ones and new conversations that you can trigger that might lead to new ideas or new approaches. It was really the narrative sensemaking that made the big difference. Using and collecting micro-stories helped us understand how our design choices and our interaction models impacted people from different worldviews in ways that we would never have ever found out by using simple numeric-based ratings. Now what Spryng has given us the opportunity both in terms of looking at training and sessions and teams journey towards an aspiration is looking at continually over time how do the stories change and also really interested in where is there difference in the stories. So where's those opportunities for innovation? Where's the opportunities for change? And with the visuals and the output that we've got from Spryng, it's led to different conversations that coaches, athletes and teams just wouldn't have had without it. And the ability to see the similarities, differences within the stories has meant it's really instigated change. We make sense of the world through stories. It's a very human way of engaging with change, engaging with systems and bringing about improvement. And yeah, the power of stories, I've long believed in the power of words and hearing what someone says about how it affected them personally is so much different than getting a two or a three on a bar scale of how your services are. If others were coming to you saying, should we use this? What kind of advice or what kind of suggestions might you make? Well, first of all, I'd say absolutely. I think we give ourselves too much credit when we assume that we know best and don't ask what our users experience. And sometimes that user experience just reaffirms that we're on the right track. But sometimes it points out glaring errors and like I said earlier, sometimes it shows you what you didn't know you needed to know about. So absolutely, people should do it. I don't understand why everybody doesn't have an active sense-making budget because I know other colleagues who do user experience, but in different ways, but getting the actual narrative is just so impactful.