Ask any of my colleagues and they will tell you I’m a conceptual model machine. Given a topic, problem, or complex situation, I’m likely to grab a pencil and piece of paper (yes, I’m old school); write down thoughts and ideas (concepts); and start drawing triangles, circles, circles within circles, boxes, pyramids, spirals, single-headed and/or double-headed arrows, and solid and/or dotted connecting lines. I can’t help it; it’s a compulsion. I even will create a new conceptual framework when an existing one seems adequate. It’s a form of doodling with a purpose.
Back in the late 1990s, Alan Greenspan spoke about the growth in the “conceptual component of output,” which has brought about a demand for people with not just technical knowledge and know-how, but for those with the ability to create, analyze, and transform information. Daniel Pink took up this theme in his book, “A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future” (New York: Riverhead Books, 2005). As trainers, we must recognize and support conceptualizing as a critical skill.
What Is a Conceptual Model?
A conceptual model puts together thoughts and ideas in a reasoned (and often visual) way in order to make something in the world more meaningful and accessible. A conceptual framework is a simplified representation of some aspect of reality showing the interdependent relationships among concepts—each concept has an integral role to play.
The simplification of reality in order to understand it is, of course, fraught with dangers. To paraphrase statistician George Box, essentially all conceptual frameworks are wrong, but some are useful.
Concept creation and modeling is a way to connect and organize knowledge, and is dependent on our pattern—and sense-making capabilities.
Why Create Conceptual Models?
Isn’t it the height of perversity to keep creating/re-creating conceptual frameworks? Perhaps, but I have reasons for doing so. I look to gain:
- New insights when concepts are uncoupled from “traditional” and well-worn assumptions and models.
- Deeper understandings through finding new patterns and linkages among concepts that weren’t visible to me before.
- More personalized understandings of a problem or subject. I become an active participant in my learning process, not a passive receiver.
- Rapid prototypes of my ideas, which may not last very long but help move my thinking forward (or backward).
- A degree of simplicity I might not have reached by swimming in an ocean of data.
- Revealed tacit knowledge that was hidden in the jumble of my neural connections.
Utilizing existing conceptual frameworks at face value entails an acceptance of an “absorb-and- apply” notion of learning and development. Habitually using predefined conceptual frameworks of, for example, leadership or team development can be efficient and effective in many contexts. However, in a world full of complex and dynamic challenges that do not submit easily to existing knowledge, we must not only become more proficient ourselves in developing new frameworks for understanding, but enable our learners to do the same in their own contexts.
Can’t we just help our learners to gather more data to increase their understanding? Perhaps to a limited degree, but the paradoxical complexity of our borderless and volatile world cannot be grasped and managed with data alone; we need the conceptualizers who can provide some coherence and meaning through their frameworks and in-process theories. They provide a map, a narrative, an organizational structure to make sense of “facts.”
Much of the great work in team collaboration comes from collective conceptualizing—jointly thinking and sense-making to arrive at new shared frameworks of understanding.
What Kind of Feedback Should We Hope Our Conceptual Models Receive?
Ultimately, a conceptual model earns its right to exist by exposure in the public sphere, e.g., a training program, an article, a presentation, or a report. Feedback from the public sphere will determine the usefulness of the model (the George Box criteria).
- “That really helps me navigate the complexity.”
- “I can work with that.”
- “That helps me think about this problem.”
- “That gives me a great starting point for going further.”
The goal for much of our work on this planet is to make something meaningful and generalizable (up to a point) rather than something absolutely true or perfectly representative of reality. When the “true” or the “perfect” are uppermost in our thoughts, the fear of the blank page (literally or metaphorically) takes over and debilitates us.
Conceptualizers know—or should know—that their map is not the territory, that their models are wrong, even if useful for a while!
What have I learned from my own compulsion to conceptualize?
- Immerse yourself. Get to know the existing literature and other sources of data, e.g., relevant past and present frameworks, research studies, surveys, interviews, colleague perspectives, self-perspective, and other experiences. You don’t have to do this alone. Collaborate with others to deepen this immersion process. The result is often a list or collection of concepts, some of which might contradict each other or not relate directly to your needs.
- Trust yourself. Let your conceptual understanding emerge from your inquiry rather than rushing to impose an existing framework that most likely you will have to shoehorn into your context. The absorb-and-apply model of training doesn’t do justice to our brains. Use and teach individual and collective cognitive tools to deconstruct, categorize, synthesize, integrate, link, visualize, and prioritize concepts that enable us to see, think, and act more effectively.
- Think out loud. This isn’t voicing your opinion, but allowing yourself and others to gain insights into how you are making sense of the problem space. By writing or talking about your thinking, you can gain feedback quicker and tune faster. One danger of this phase is that people take your latest iteration as their fixed end point. You must clearly state that you are thinking out loud.
- Fight the fear factor. There is always fear when you are creating something and setting it free. If you really want to add value and make a difference, you need to push on. Marginalize the inner voice that says, “What right have you to seek another way of seeing or thinking about this? You’re not the expert!” This fits nicely with the old nugget, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”—a sure fire way to minimize the value of our training.
Terence Brake is the director of Learning & Innovation, TMA World (http://www.tmaworld.com/training-solutions/), which provides blended learning solutions for developing talent with borderless working capabilities. Brake specializes in the globalization process and organizational design, cross-cultural management, global leadership, transnational teamwork, and the borderless workplace. He has designed, developed, and delivered training programmes for numerous Fortune 500 clients in the United States, Europe, and Asia. Brake is the author of six books on international management, including “Where in the World Is My Team?” (Wiley, 2009) and e-book “The Borderless Workplace.”
