Intentional Observation Dialogue (OBREAU)

Intentional Observation Dialogue (OBREAU)

Outwardly Facing: Helping a Group See an Issue More Clearly

In practice, when considering complex challenges, people often move quickly to explanations, analyses and solutions they favour. There’s little attention to first asking what the relevant and significant data are, what each individual is seeing, and how the group might move to more common understandings.

Intentional Observation Dialogue creates a disciplined space for exploring what can really be observed about a particular issue, situation, or challenge – and only then, how the group might begin to make sense of what people are seeing.

The focus is primarily outwards, towards the issue being explored – which differentiates it from the inwardly oriented Collective Pause.

Participants work together to identify and explore relevant observations, emerging patterns, important contextual factors and other things they might ordinarily not notice.

The emphasis is on developing a richer shared understanding of the situation, as far as possible, before attempting to explain or resolve it.

You are encouraged to use and adapt this process as per the terms of the Creative Commons licence, outlined on the Contact and Permissions page.

Why Intentional Observation Dialogue is Needed

When facing a difficult issue, groups – even high-performing ones – often move quickly into explanation, evaluation, and problem-solving.

While group members might assume that they “know what they see”, it’s easy for people to notice different things, overlook important details, not recognise emerging patterns, and be caught up in existing assumptions. In such situations, people commonly react to events, justify their existing positions, and push their preferred solutions.

Intentional Observation Dialogue provides a disciplined way for a group to step back and strengthen the quality of its collective attention before drawing conclusions or making decisions.

The Process

The process involves:

Step 1: Opening

Step 2: Generating Observations

Step 3: Reviewing Observations and Strengthening the Set

Step 4: Exploring Observations

Step 5: Reviewing and Reflecting

Timing

A common question is, how much time does an Intentional Observation Dialogue require? There is no fixed answer, though as a guide, for a group of 10-12 participants, 100 minutes to 2 hours should allow a reasonably solid exploration.

Additional time might be needed for dialogues involving larger groups, where issues are especially complex or sensitive, or where the group is strongly focused on its own agenda.

In a 100-minute session, 20 minutes could be provisionally allocated to each of the above elements, with flexibility to reallocate time as needed on the day.

Step 1: Opening

Initial work includes clarifying the focus question or issue and outlining the session structure and flow.

Whether the dialogue is in a workplace, community or education context, the focus issue is preferably one where a group could benefit from building more genuinely shared understandings. The issue is best significant without being a crisis, relatively bounded, and not highly charged, politically or emotionally.

Step 2: Generating Observations

Participants individually generate observations and then contribute them to a shared pool. This can happen in small groups, with each group having some visibility of other groups’ outputs (e.g. with all groups displaying their observations separately on a wall or virtual equivalent).

At this stage, the emphasis is on describing what has been noticed rather than explaining why it has occurred.

Observations can include, for instance: specific actions and behaviours, events, interactions, recurring instances, relevant contextual factors, such as organisational policies or resource allocation practices – just about anything that can potentially be captured on a video camera or recording device.

The accent, though, is not on observations that state the obvious. It’s on things that potentially could aid understanding of the focus issue or question.

Participants can be encouraged to think carefully and write no more than 4 or 5 observations, especially those they think are important for the group to talk about.

The aim is to create a rich field of observable information that the group can examine together.

Step 3: Reviewing and Extending Observations

Before interpreting the observations, participants pause to examine – mainly in their small groups – the observations they have generated.

The purpose is to enhance the group’s observation field, equipping them with a richer set of data to work with. Doing so helps build the group’s observational discipline and improves the quality of the subsequent discussion.

Participants may explore questions such as those below:

• Can we make the identified observations “higher quality” – by making them more directly observable or otherwise sharpening them?

• What are the relationships among the observations – connections, patterns, tensions or contradictions?

• What might we have missed – or mis-emphasised – including background factors, subtle signals, emerging developments, things visible in their absence, or that others might notice?

Step 4: Exploring Observations

Only after the observations have been generated and reviewed does the group begin exploring what can be learned from them. Questions for group consideration might include:

• What possible ways of understanding these observations can we identify?

• What story or stories seem to be emerging from the observations?

• How might different stakeholders frame these observations?

• What questions do these observations bring up for us?

While at this stage, participants are developing interpretations, a key is that these are held lightly. Participants are encouraged to view their interpretations as hypotheses to be tested, or preliminary explanations, rather than as firm conclusions.

Step 5: Reviewing and Reflecting

At this stage, the group looks back over the activity. While there’s an eye to further work, this is not an action planning session.

Useful questions can include:

• How has our understanding of the issue developed or changed from prior to the session?

• How might we further explore and test the interpretations we’ve provisionally developed?

• What might we pay attention to from now?

If time permits, individuals can also be invited to reflect personally: What insights have they gained? How has their understanding shifted, if at all? How might they incorporate more attention to observation in their own work?

Outcomes

By the end of an Intentional Observation Dialogue, participants can have:

• a richer and more nuanced understanding of the issue

• greater awareness of what is known and what remains uncertain

• increased appreciation of different ways of noticing and interpreting events

• a stronger foundation for subsequent work, including further dialogue, planning and decision-making.

The process is not designed to produce immediate solutions. Instead, it helps groups gain a clearer shared understanding of what they are actually dealing with.

Intentional Observation Dialogue and OBREAU

As is obvious, Intentional Observation Dialogue is most strongly based in the OBREAU practice of Observation.

Reasonableness comes in particularly with Step 4, Exploring Observations. When forming interpretations, and where these involve other people or groups, participants are encouraged to avoid judging them adversely.

Instead, assume that those individuals/groups are acting in ways that seem reasonable from their own perspective, even if that perspective is not yet fully understood. Doing so can prevent the discussion from slipping into blame or judgment and keeps attention focused on learning.

Authenticity is pertinent both with Step 4 and with Step 5, Reviewing and Reflecting.

In each case, it can be easy for participants to revert to previously held opinions and express those strongly. Yet authenticity in OBREAU calls for something different: keeping an eye on the observable data and holding that things can make sense differently from different perspectives. Then participants can respond with what comes up for them, having regard to the data and other views as reasonable to those holding them.

An Intentional Observation Dialogue Facilitation Guide is under development. Please see the Contact and Permissions page for information on obtaining a copy.