Reflecting on analysis

Drawing pictures helps to discover and analyse my thoughts on a situation.

Checkland's soft system analysis requires the drawing of a rich picture as the first stage of the analysis of a messy situation. For those who immediately say, "but I can't draw", it's the quality of the analysis that matters , not the quality of the artistry, which you don't have to show anyone anyhow. The pictures draw attention to features that you otherwise don't notice. Interviewees that use visual metaphors help me to draw such a picture. For example, they talk about

• the middle ground
• positions drawn
• adversaries

which gives a picture of a battlefield, and you have the start of a story you want to write.

Draw first, then check. If you check your picture includes:

1. facts
2. structure
   
3. process
4. climate
5. queries

you probably have done a lot of thought and analysis.

1. Facts include little charts of numbers, or graphs or percentages.
2. Structure can be of accountability, or hierarchy or informal structure, and again can be little charts - who needs drawing skill for those?
3. Process is the way that things get done.
4. Climate is the interesting one - not weather climate but the atmosphere in a work situation because it reveals issues and problem situations. I once had an interviewee that referred to someone being in the firing line, so my sketch had a blindfolded person facing a row of guns. Maybe the process create the climate or maybe new processes can change the climate - you can't tell until you notice them.
5. Queries is a kind of catch-all because it's the bits where you don't yet know something, but at least you know you don't know, so I tag them when I'm coding in Nvivo, in the hope that I can go back to a participant and ask for the missing information.

How do I do use these sketches for writing? I can take the features and pull stories from them, especially from the climate sketches. But by checking that I have something against each of those five headings, they're most useful for analysis.

I can't blog my pictures - initial analysis isn't sequential enough to write about. I draw the pictures by hand, sometimes left handed so I get both sides of my brain to tackle the problem, and a computer doesn't afford that kind of work.

Drawing pictures is about analysis, not about writing.

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Checkland, P. (1981). Systems Thinking, Systems Practice.
Checkland, P. (1999). Systems Thinking, Systems Practice : With, Soft Systems Methodology ; a 30 Year Retrospective. Chichester, Wiley
Checkland, P. and J. Scholes (1990). Soft Systems Methodology in Action. Chichester, Wiley
Checkland's work is also referred to in Miles & Huberman in Miles, M. B. and A. M. Huberman (1994). Qualitative Data Analysis : An Expanded Sourcebook. Thousand Oaks, Sage Publications.

Interviewing

There is so much on interviewing that Kvale has written a whole book on it. Although it might have been useful to read earlier, reading it now with a little more experience of research interviewing means that it makes more sense to me. For example, chapter 7 has a table that matches research questions to interview questions. I have problems matching mine because I've let the social capital framework interfere. The social capital framework guides the interview questions. What I want is to relate the research questions and the social capital framework. So my interview structure is based round:

1. background (to project and to participant)
2. relationships
3. knowledge (or learning)
4. value

The background is important as a start to make sure I've got the context. The questions may sometimes elicit structural dimensions of social capital.
Relationships matter. That is the crux of my interest- how do the relationships create value? So the interview questions here concern social capital in the relationship and structural dimensions. But they don't elicit information about knowledge. I ask what's helped and hindered relationships. And specifically what challenges to relationships have there been and how have they been overcome. Another interview question address specificity by asking for an anecdote or story. the question sometimes falls on blank faces. perhaps I should reword it.
Knowledge I ask about learning - what have people learned from each other? And how do they use that knowledge. I can't see how these questions address engagement though.
Value Sometimes in asking about learning I get an answer that suggests qualitative value in the learning process through building shared meanings, which is part of the cognitive dimension of social capital, and probably the most valuable non-financial and immeasurable gain from the relationship. But the valuable relationships need not be client and consultant, but developer and user, perhaps, mediated by the outsider, i.e. the consultant. So the value is a value chain! A valuable learning comes from a valuable relationships mediated and catalyzed by a consultant intervention. I've drawn a diagram of it, starting from the left with the people creating the relationship and moving to the right where the outputs are learning and a new IT system.

So I've got somewhere in my thoughts but not arrived at what I set out to do - depict in a table the relationship between my research questions and my interview questions.

The diagram must also include the value added impact on the IT system being developed. It's the human element, the soft side that matters. Engagement is soft. Perhaps I should draw rich pictures for each case study, following Checkland's soft systems methodology.

And I don't have many why interview questions - it's my job (Kvale, p131) but one I did use once was quite revealing, when someone said "It's changed", and I asked "Why do you think it's changed?" The participant wondered if they were doing something different, and it was something do with using consultants.

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Kvale, 1996, InterViews: introduction to qualitative research interviewing