Mapping for Alternative Futures

Charlene Sequeira

Charlene conducted a 2-day in-person workshop on social impact innovation with a grass-roots community-based organization called the Sisters of St. Ann, Luzern (SAL) that allowed us to test the concepts of agent pathways by using frameworks around challenge framing and journey mapping. The workshop activities were specifically designed by Charlene and Prateek for a congregation of 33 nuns working across India, and was facilitated by Charlene on Aug 29 and 30 in Hyderabad, India.

Below are the insights and learnings from some of the key activities we designed.

Context:

Initial conversations with Sister Sugana Francis of the Sisters of St. Ann Luzern (SAL) led to the following understanding of their situation and needs.

SAL works across India on four major missions that include:

Right to Education, Protection & Safety
Empowering Women to Advance Gender Equality, Dignity & Diversity
Human Capital Formation
Protection & Promotion of Environment

According to Sister Sugana Francis, SAL is aware of the paradigm shift happening in the world, but the majority of sisters (especially the younger members of the congregation) are comfortable following methods and processes of the past. Although hardworking and dedicated, they lack initiative. Those sisters who are driven—don't know how to break away from set methods even if they wanted to. There seems to be a lack of shared vision and language, and confusion in the congregation over the meaning of impact. Connected to this is the lack of strategic focus and long-term planning.

A desire was communicated to upskill the sisters in new methods and ways of addressing current world problems while also scaling their impact and outreach to other communities/stakeholders, thus connecting their grassroots work to national and international levels. As Prateek Shankar and I did our initial research and interviews, we noticed the impacts of the historical hierarchical systems at play in their internal workings, along with a deeply committed sense of service and selflessness as a way of life.

Considering all of the above, we saw scope in introducing the congregation to the concepts of agent pathways by using frameworks around challenge framing and journey mapping.

Individual Introductions

Insight 1: “Thinking about yourself” as being a selfish and negative trait is difficult to unlearn for individuals who have pledged to live a life of service.

For this particular set of participants whoes identity is largely based on selfless service, thinking about their own joy was extremely difficult. During the introductions at the start of the workshop when asked what brings each of them personal joy, almost every participant's response was connected to the upliftment, betterment, and joy of other people. E.g.: “I find joy seeing the upliftment of women.” or “I am happy when children reach their potential.”

In response to this, “thinking about yourself”, “personal joy”, and the importance of self-care was explicitly framed as an act of greater service to the world in order for the sisters to allow themselves to think about and share their personal joys without the negative label of being self-indulgent. When the topic was approached on the second day, most of the sisters shared beautiful nuggets of everyday joy. “When I ride my two-wheeler in the morning when the sunlight is at the right angle, to have fresh coconut water on the side of the road.” “When I get the window seat on the train.” “When I make a cup of coffee and walk in the garden.” “When I joke and tease my friends.” “When I gossip with my mother.” “When I play on the beach with my brother.” This was celebrated and its importance was reiterated in order to do “God's work”.

From the feedback collected, one of the participants said “I was really so happy to know about my personal joy, which is very personal. And I have never reflected before.”

Possible Iterations: Being more informed about participants’ core beliefs and epistemological worldviews can help avoid or minimize engagement roadblocks. Using phrases like “recharge to reach out” or “filling your cup so you can give unto others” reframe a personal gain in the context of meeting their vow of service.

Insight 2: Communicating a vision of the future we want often lacks detail and clarity. Activities that are vague, open, and/or unfamiliar are best done in a guided session during the workshop.

The sisters completed the task of visualizing “a future where the SAL missions were achieved” during the workshop itself and not before as planned. Metaphors were heavily used to communicate intangible ideas like freedom, equality, hope, and growth.

When asked to provide a description or details about themes in their vision like “happiness” or “being healthy”; the sisters found it challenging to verbally describe how these ideas would manifest/live in their imagined future.

The above two images are examples of the majority of outputs from the vision exercise that are metaphorical.

The above image is one of the few outputs from the vision exercise that shows details on what exactly a ‘green world’ would entail.

The simple and interpretive prompt resulted in metaphorical and abstract outcomes. Allowing an open interpretation of this question helps provide a baseline understanding of the participant’s ability to imagine and communicate possible futures.

Possible Iterations: Activities that do not have a clear answer format or objective should be done during the workshop to provide a psychological safety net to engage with creative tasks. A guided framework that provides prompts to help thinking about details like who, what, where, when, why etc can be provided as a second iteration to the task of visualizing “a future where the organization missions were achieved”

Verbing Exercise

Insight: Using language and lists is an light lift first step towards creative practice

Using familiar words connected to the larger topic at hand helps bring participants to expand on its possible meanings. The minds are primed to think about these concepts more deeply and therefore can tap into divergent names more easily.

Educate | Empower | Capital | Protection

However, a deep familiarity with a word could result in strong opinions about its meaning. In such cases, an exercise on associations or examples of how to do the verging exercise can aid in loosening one's epistemologies.

Possible Iterations: As a next step, an exercise can be done on sharing participants’ answers in smaller groups with the objective of finding patterns. Finding patterns that emerge across individual answers can help ignite conversations around individual and shared meaning and the act of working together to reframe a challenge through language.

For participants that are not literate in a written language, verbal sharing can be captured by the facilitator in written form on a shared board.

Challenge Framing and Mapping

Insight: The practice of mapping was both extremely useful and the most challenging.

For the teams, identifying and making visible (through language and maps) the specific challenge being addressed was time consuming. It pushed participants to think about details and relationships in the system around the chosen challenge. Visualizing relationships and connections between elements was the most challenging. This framing and mapping exercise was done in three parts.

First, the participants were guided through getting specific by using a simple set of questions. This allowed them to think at a somewhat granular level using written language as a form of communication they are familiar with.

Then, the participants were asked to map out the challenge visually and add more details of relationships and connections. This process was supported by specific questions about the relationships, connections, motivations, and resources of the “who” in their challenge. The use of visual nonlinear methods had a bit of a learning curve for those not accustomed to the design process. The collaborative method of mapping helped ease the learning curve and increase engagement.

This was reflected in the feedback gathered, where one participant said: “Analyzing the problem in the form of a map - that exercise helped (me) to learn more and think actively.” Another participant found the mapping exercise to be a useful method to implement in their work with the community. They said “I want to use drawing and making connections, exercise. I want to use them for women and youth, to find out what sort of problems they face in their daily life. And what do expect from our center. I like to conduct workshops for them in the center.”

Finally, participants moved into a more immersive and embodied form of communicating the challenge by enacting a 5-minute skit. Tapping into the rich culture of theater and cinema in India, this creative method allowed for creative expression, collaboration, team building, and human connection to be experienced through a rich story-telling medium.

After being pushed to work with granular details and specific connections, the participants were asked to reflect on the question of interventions at different scales - for this particular challenge and its actors, and if this were a nationwide problem to address.

Possible Iterations: Providing examples or modeling the process for mapping novices could help ease any apprehensions about diving into the process. Because mapping connections could be overwhelming - providing artificial boundaries of time, space, and/or ingredients could help lessen any choice paralysis.

Reflecting on Previous Work

Insight: Reflecting on learnings from previous work before starting new work, helps break mental silos and promotes connected application.

Reflecting as a whole group allows for collective learning in the moment. Typically, reflecting practices at the end of a mentally packed day might be shallow. Having time to internalize and sleep on a full day of new or reframed work, allows participants to reflect with a fresh mind more deeply.

Expansion of the Challenge Frame

Insight: Expanding mental boundaries through the process of mapping requires multiple iterations of practice and feedback.

When teams were asked to expand their detailed challenge map, participants found it challenging to pull threads of connections from the framed challenge back to ingredients that resulted in the framed challenge. Using the same simple framework of who, what, where, when, why for each of these mapping attempts, most participants were able to make lists of the who and what that could have led to the challenge. Similar to the process of mapping the challenge, some participants found it challenging to map relationships that connected to the current challenge.

Possible Iterations: Provide a very simple example of a problem or object and ask what came before that allowed for the problem or object to exist. Eg: No milk for Monday morning tea is the problem. What led to the challenge could be things like the shop being closed on Sunday, not having time to withdraw cash on Saturday to buy the milk, and using all the milk to make tea when guests arrived on Saturday. Identifying the who, what, where, when, and why in this simple example could help participants understand the mapping concept. The same could also be used for the outcome/s section (what could happen after the challenge).

Choice of Interventions and Presentations

Insight: Mapping helped participants to actively think about possible interventions and their impact across the system, but did not lead to innovative ideas.

In their teams, participants used the map to think about possible interventions, collaborators, contexts, challenges, and outcomes with the help of some guiding questions/prompts. The ability to bring connections and impacts to the forefront of participants’ consciousness helped them better understand the problems they were trying to solve. The mapping exercise helped bring out ‘unknown-knowns’ but did little to open them to ‘novel’ opportunities.

Possible Iterations: Building in time to cross-pollinate ideas through peer feedback and review before final presentations can help teams read their maps from a different perspective and test the legibility of their work.

All images are listed here in order of appearance.

Image 1-3. Examples of drawings created by the sisters of SAL in response to the prompt “Imagine the ideal future where this mission has been achieved completely. Can you communicate this future in a creative way? Draw it or write a poem or prayer about it. Feel free to use a form of creative expression you are most comfortable with.”

Image 4. Sisters doing the verbing exercise individually.

Image 5. In groups, the sisters discuss specific scenarios they wrote out around the chosen challenge using the provided “who,what,when,where,why” template.

Image 6. In groups, the sisters start to create visual maps of their chosen challenge.

Image 7. Charlene critiques and celebrates one of the maps created with the whole group.

Image 8. An emotional scene from a skit performed by the sisters on the issue of farmer suicides in India

Image 9. Studio practice with the sisters of SAL.