Summary
Micro-narratives are the short accounts of everyday experience that people give in their own words: an anecdote from work, a moment in a clinic. The term is used in the sense-making practice of complexity thinker Dave Snowden and The Cynefin Co, whose SenseMaker tool gathers such fragments in large numbers. Its distinctive move is that the tellers, not researchers, say what their story signifies, by placing it on simple graphics. The company calls the result “authentic human analyses of real experiences, rather than external interpretations of them”.
Patterns across many small stories then show what averages tend to hide. In linguistics ‘micronarrative’ is an unrelated unit for analysing gesture.
Rationale
Part 1 calls for “always-on listening and sensing”. Dave Snowden, whom we interviewed, offers one way to do it: gather everyday stories in bulk and let their tellers, not analysts, say what they mean.