Rich Pictures

A rich pic­ture is a way to rep­re­sent what we know about a messy sit­u­a­tion —  the issues, actors, prob­lems, processes, rela­tion­ships, con­flicts and moti­va­tions — so that we can rea­son about these aspects. It is a graph­i­cal tool that addresses that state of uncer­tainty at the begin­ning of an explo­ration or inquiry when all we know that we are deal­ing with a prob­lem­atic sit­u­a­tion, and moves us to a state where we have iden­ti­fied one or more themes we want to address. Peter Check­land intro­duced rich pic­tures for use in the early stages of his Soft Sys­tems Method­ol­ogy (SSM), an approach that rec­og­nizes that prob­lems do not exist sep­a­rate from the peo­ple involved in them and appre­ci­ates the mul­ti­ple view­points of those par­tic­i­pants. Essen­tially, SSM attempts to under­stand human sys­tems in a way that is mean­ing­ful to actors in that sys­tem. Rich pic­tures are tools to learn not only about the obvi­ous facts of a sit­u­a­tion, but also about abstract or emo­tional things like the social atmos­phere among the actors.

Con­struct­ing A Rich Picture

A rich pic­ture of a rich pic­ture from The Open University’s Fac­ulty of Technology

Begin with large sheets of paper and lots of coloured pens, and then sim­ply draw what you see hap­pen­ing. Draw all that you per­ceive as prob­lem­atic or sig­nif­i­cant — emo­tions and rela­tion­ships as well as group­ings and con­nec­tions of var­i­ous sorts — using sym­bols and metaphors to rep­re­sent the sit­u­a­tion in a way that is explicit and under­stand­able by oth­ers. A rich pic­ture can cope with what­ever chaotic mess of thoughts and per­cep­tions flows onto the page. Rich pic­tures do not have a for­mal syn­tax, and dif­fer­ent peo­ple take dif­fer­ent approaches, but these gen­eral guide­lines have emerged as being useful:

• Include struc­ture. Struc­ture refers to those parts of the sit­u­a­tion which are slow to change and rel­a­tively sta­ble. They may include things like organ­i­sa­tional struc­ture, geo­graphic loca­tion, phys­i­cal lay­out and all the peo­ple who are affected by the sit­u­a­tion. Include only enough struc­ture to allow you to record the process and concerns.
• Include process. Process refers to the trans­for­ma­tions that go on within the struc­ture. These trans­for­ma­tions might be part of a flow of goods, doc­u­ments, or data. Again, don’t cap­ture all aspects of process; broad strokes suffice.
• Include con­cerns (Check­land calls these “issues”). Con­cerns cap­tures a par­tic­u­lar actor’s moti­va­tions for par­tic­i­pat­ing in the sit­u­a­tion. The dif­fer­ent moti­va­tions give rise to the dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives each actor has.
• Include your­self. Make sure your roles and rela­tion­ships in the sit­u­a­tion are clear.

Sources: John Naughton, Soft Sys­tems Analy­sis: An Intro­duc­tory Guide, The Open Uni­ver­sity Press, 1984; Andrew Monk and Steve Howard, The Rich Pic­ture: A Tool for Rea­son­ing About Work Con­text, 1998.

Learn­ing With Rich Pictures

Con­struct­ing rich pic­tures can reveal all sorts of ques­tions and obser­va­tions about the prob­lem sit­u­a­tion. The value of rich pic­tures becomes par­tic­u­larly clear when we share it with oth­ers, iden­ti­fy­ing dif­fer­ent per­cep­tions of and assump­tions about what is going on. That is when we can see con­nec­tions, dead-ends, pos­si­bil­i­ties and con­tra­dic­tions that we may have oth­er­wise missed. It can be dif­fi­cult to face other people’s often sur­pris­ingly dif­fer­ent assump­tions, because this exposes us to the demand­ing task of ques­tion­ing our own. It can mean throw­ing away the solu­tions we thought we had, going back to the begin­ning and start­ing anew. Of course, that is often exactly what is needed at the start of a sys­temic inquiry.

More

• There are few rules for craft­ing rich pic­tures. So it helps to start with exam­ples that oth­ers have cre­ated: Dis­tance Learn­ing Unit, A Pub, and a Dig­i­tal Library Sys­tem (no longer avail­able online), Plant Nurs­ery Oper­a­tions, Knowl­edge Man­age­ment, a web design con­sul­tancy, an infor­ma­tion sys­tems project, and a rich pic­ture itself
• A Rich Pic­ture About Rich Pic­tures walks you through the prob­lem of rep­re­sent­ing a messy sit­u­a­tion in a rich picture.
• An edited ver­sion of a con­ver­sa­tion with Allan Berg, an OU instruc­tor, who share his Energy Debate rich pic­ture and in doing so explains how rich pic­tures are a per­sonal device to explor­ing your own under­stand­ing. “The a rich pic­ture is it trig­gers its debate.”
• Horan (2000) makes the point that rich pic­tures sup­port deep learn­ing. Deep learn­ing approaches are char­ac­terised by an inten­tion to seek mean­ing and rela­tion­ships among areas of knowl­edge. Sur­face learn­ing approaches, in con­trast, seek merely to mem­o­rise and repro­duce knowledge.
• In dis­cus­sion the work­place, Monk and Howard (1998) note how flex­i­ble rich pic­tures are in that they inte­grate all kinds of infor­ma­tion from a vari­ety of sources. This is impor­tant because oth­er­wise “it may be impos­si­ble to see the full process.…Only by using a vari­ety of sit­u­ated and non­si­t­u­ated tech­niques can the fullest account emerge, given the pre­vail­ing prac­ti­cal con­straints [of time and resources].”