Thresholds and Triggers
Category
lab
Date
February 1, 2015
Challenge
[Exercises (how-to) Materials How to do questions Reason]
As the stories were told, participants captured phrases and thoughts that triggered an internal response on post-it notes. Medical providers used blue post-its, while storytellers and designers used pink post-its. At the end of the exercise all the participants placed their post-its on a stage in the front of the room. Positive associations were placed on the left side and negative associations were placed on the right. This created an analog heat map of two dimensions —sentiment and experience.
[Photo of heat map] Examples of triggers “Grammar mirrors hypomania; narrative structure does too” -Healthcare worker’s positive trigger “Is the story you are told true?”
-Healthcare worker’s negative trigger “…develop a nuanced understanding of another person over time” -Storyteller’s positive trigger “Speaking for others” -Storyteller’s negative trigger
Of the 505 post-its received, there was a fairly even split in sentiment, with Healthcare workers expressing positive reactions 55% of the time and Storytellers expressing positive reactions 50% of the time. While the content of the reactions varied, this similarity in sentiment is notable. Though, further analysis on the language itself would yield a stronger insight. As a next step, we open up analysis for any data scientists working in Natural Language Processing, who would be interested in examining a small corpus for trends in emotional language use.
HOW TO
Thresholds and Triggers are part of an active listening exercise. We often have 3 short talks from various perspectives.
Personal – a story from Stephen Fry was shared that described a manic episode that Stephan experienced
Results
This is a section that would capture results and learnings from the exercise.
