Narrative Complexity in Self-Knowledge

Part Two of my “Self-Sense” Series

Series Context

In Part One, I reflected on the tension between the structured tasks of job seeking and the more nuanced reality of professional identity. The disconnect I felt when my Job Search Council (JSC) activities required standard performance feedback led me to critique existing approaches and develop a more generative option: a narrative-based “Self-Sense” study.

Part Two builds on a reframe of work identity as dynamic and relational, rather than a fixed set of traits, and finds a way to make career conversations collaborative rather than transactional.

This series of posts is intended for collaborative practitioners, researchers, and reflective professionals curious about designing feedback systems that are enlivened and expansive. These essays are generally organized around:

• Key design steps: each post focuses on one SenseMaker survey component and its rationale

• Reframes: places where our experiment pushed or rethought conventions

• Emerging throughlines: recurring ideas that crystallized throughout our mini-project

Part Two Introduction

In this second post, I explore how Kyle Godbey and I developed an alternative approach to exploring professional self-knowledge—one that meets complexities without reducing them. By adapting SenseMaker’s methodology, we created a narrative-based feedback option that integrates past experiences with imagined futures, and concrete memories with emerging possibilities. We were investigating a more honest and human way to understand how we show up in professional life.

Methodological Framework: SenseMaker

To understand our work, it helps to see how SenseMaker—developed by The Cynefin Co—differs from traditional surveys:

• Story-driven rather than response-driven: participants share real experiences instead of answering ratings or Likert scales

• Self-interpreted rather than externally analyzed: participants make sense of their own stories using conceptual filters

• Pattern-oriented rather than hypothesis-testing: the goal is to reveal naturally occurring patterns, not to validate preexisting assumptions

SenseMaker’s design recognizes that meaning resides in the connections among events, perspectives, and contexts—an approach aligned with complex thinking rather than reductive analysis.

From Critique to Play

Our main question was: How might we design a feedback process that honors the fullness of reality instead of simplifying it?

My own objectives included:

• Co-creation over extraction: inviting former colleagues into a reflective process rather than collecting evaluations

• Timeframe integration: connecting past collaborations with future possibilities

• Contextual identity: understanding my professional self through the lens of others’ systems, not as an isolated figure

• Blending insight and exploration: seeking both useful feedback and methodological insight

• Making it engaging: creating an experience that felt authentic, compelling, and even enjoyable for participants

These goals emerged from my tension between wanting meaningful feedback and resisting the superficiality of conventional evaluations. To get there, I spent several hours mapping ideas visually and textually—trying to organize these aspects into a combined proposition that could support rather than flatten their interrelationships.

Designing the Story Prompt

The central challenge was crafting a story prompt that could integrate these qualities successfully. After several iterations, Kyle and I landed on:

“You have an opportunity to invite Elizabeth to lead an event at your conference. Based on a memory of working together, write a summary from the future about her event and the value it provided to your network.”

This language felt usable, and what we intuited about the prompt’s arrangement was underscored by AI research after the fact. Our invitation managed to incorporate multiple desired elements:

• Time integration: connecting past experiences to imagined futures

• Contextual translation: applying knowledge of past contributions to new scenarios

• Relational framing: positioning professional identity in context, not as isolated skill

• Narrative evaluation: surfacing value through storytelling rather than direct ratings

It offered enough structure to support the reflection process while leaving room for individual expression and variety.

Balancing Complexity

One of the trickiest parts was finding the right level of tension. As Kyle noted in our planning, asking for too many conceptual “jumps” could discourage participation in what we envisioned as a creative, lightly structured inquiry.

The calibration process offered several emerging design principles:

• Start with the right brain hemisphere, support with the left: prioritize imagination, context, and relationships while offering just enough structure (more on this below)

• Avoid imbalance: overemphasis on analytic structure can reduce richness; too little structure can confuse

• Foster integrated thinking: make room for multiple modes of knowing to work in dialogue

Finding Patterns

Here are a few story snapshots from my colleagues:

“Elizabeth is a deep thinker and sense-maker whose work traverses systems thinking and the human identities that shape those systems …The session allowed us to deepen our relationships across the network and uncover a range of new possibilities for our next steps.”

“Elizabeth was able to lay out the general scope of what we were trying to achieve in simple and accessible terms. She respectfully and graciously led stakeholders through ways to think about the topic, as well as how we could focus our time and attention …”

“Elizabeth and her team were effective in helping us navigate difficult conversations in such a way that people truly began to understand and respect different perspectives …The team also helped the group stretch to significantly challenge assumptions and the status quo as we worked through various topics …”

Everyone I’d recruited knew me in strategy, design, facilitation, and sense-making roles. All of their projected stories were different, yet patterns emerged that I could perceive and potentially choose to amplify or weaken in my actual work:

• Attuning to self, others, systems, and emergent futures

• Using play as an entry point to depth and a counterbalance to seriousness

• Nonlinear time—blending memory and anticipation

• Integrating structure and felt experience

• Moments of meaningful shift—in perception, relationships, or direction

While these patterns show what people experienced in my fictive events, they don’t explain how those experiences actually happened. To understand what created these qualities, I looked at the specific pieces within each story that either helped or limited what became possible.

Actants and Emergence

Analyzing the collected narratives through the lens of actants—as described by Dave Snowden and Alicia Juarrero (and derived from Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory)—means paying attention not only to human participants, but to anything that plays a role in enabling or constraining energy, needs, and interactions. This includes tools, ideas, environments, emotions, artifacts, and other elements within a story that shape possible actions and meanings.

Put simply: actants are building blocks and constraints, while patterns are the emergent behaviors or system-level effects that result from their synergies.

Here are several actants—explicit, implicit, or both—that appeared in our responses:

• Clear visuals: helped people see and make sense of what’s happening

• Mixed methods: allowed different ways of participating and learning

• Attunement practices: invited people to be more present with themselves and others

• Loosened norms: freed people to act differently than usual

• Props and materials: provided playful or tangible ways to engage ideas and feelings

• Attendees: shaped the space by how they showed up, responded, and related

• Imagination: opened doors to possibility, helping people move beyond current constraints

Actants like these generate the patterns I mentioned through their interplay. They are the dynamic elements guiding how (imagined) participants sense, act, and respond. Conveyed as features and viewed as variables in everyone’s stories, actants highlight where agency resides, and where change is possible—this is the value of perceiving them.

I’ll delve more specifically into actants in Part Three.

Theoretical Grounding: Analysis Through McGilchrist

To further understand our prompt’s effectiveness, I analyzed it through Iain McGilchrist’s theory of brain hemisphere attention (from The Master and His Emissary). His work presents a nuanced view of the brain’s two hemispheres—not just in terms of function, but in terms of how they attend to and construct reality:

Left Hemisphere (LH): Narrow, focused attention. Abstracts, categorizes, manipulates symbols. Sees parts, uses language, likes clarity and control.

Right Hemisphere (RH): Broad, open attention. Perceives wholes, context, living presence. Is embodied, relational, intuitive, and deeply aware of interconnectedness.

McGilchrist argues that our culture has become dominated by the left hemisphere—leading to a distorted, fragmented, overly literal experience of reality. He frames the LH as the Emissary, while the RH is the true Master and holistic guide.

Our prompt design implicitly balanced both modes, with a tilt toward the RH. It aligned with complex understanding, McGilchrist’s sense of which side should lead, and my own dispositional way of perceiving and engaging with the world as a contributor.

We relied on these RH elements:

• Flowing time: understanding time as continuous experience rather than separate moments

• Context awareness: perceiving connections rather than isolated elements

• Creative integration: blending memory and possibility in imaginative ways

• Relational focus: emphasizing value within networks rather than abstract skills

And found this LH support:

• Language coherence: translating complex perceptions into communicable form

• Logical plausibility: maintaining believability between remembered past and imagined future

• Concrete details: providing specific elements to ground imagination

The RH and LH mix encouraged participation that was both imaginative and anchored. Again, this wasn’t a theory we applied in advance—it was a realization that came with reflection on why the approach worked.

When I queried for an edit with better integration, LH priorities were further boosted:

“You have the opportunity to invite Elizabeth to lead an event at your upcoming conference. Based on your memory of working with her, imagine and describe the event as if it has already taken place.

Your response should include:

• A brief narrative summary of the event as if written from the future (e.g., an event report or thank-you email).

• Reflections on what made the event meaningful, drawing on your past experiences with Elizabeth.

• A description of the value the event provided—to individuals, your network, or the broader community.

Aim to combine storytelling, personal insight, and a clear articulation of the event’s impact.”

This scaffolding makes the prompt substantially longer, but the additions of sequence, structure, and a manageable frame for organizing the task may make it more inclusive and supported overall—especially for those who feel safer with clear instructions. I think time and further experiments with this type of reinforcement will tell.

Summary

Our small project indicated that generative professional feedback emerges when we position identity as something that unfolds between people, rather than something that resides within individuals.

This opens questions about feedback culture more broadly: What if evaluation became a collaborative creative act that participants find energizing rather than extractive? What if organizations moved from asking “How did this person perform?” to “What becomes possible when we work together, and how might we amplify that?”

While not a replacement for all evaluative practices, our research direction offers a rich complement—one that better fits the ambiguous, adaptive realities of contemporary work.