CB.10:4.3 - Recover the path from experience to use
Ask for one particular occasion, preferably in the person’s own account. Recover what happened, what the person received, what they subsequently did with it and what difference that made. A story can begin with a later result and work backwards. Check time order and retain where the account ends.
For social learning, the Guidebook’s four basic value cycles help ask different questions:
| Part of the account | Useful recovery question | What the answer can establish |
|---|---|---|
| Immediate experience | What happened in the exchange, and what did it mean to you then? | A reported experience, such as useful discussion or being able to ask a difficult question. |
| Potential resource | What idea, contact, explanation or other resource became available? | Something that could support later work, with its actual content or availability. |
| Applied use | What did you do differently, where and under which conditions? | An account of adoption or adaptation, including failed use. |
| Realised difference | What changed in the receiving situation, and what was that worth to those affected? | A reported or observed result and burden, qualified by the other evidence. |
Follow each consequential connection. If someone says the meeting improved a repair, ask which contribution they used and how it changed the action. If they received an idea but have not had an occasion to use it, keep that as potential value. Agree a later return only when it can answer the decision.
Recover the conditions that enabled or altered the path. The Guidebook distinguishes enabling value, such as obtaining time and support for practice, from strategic value, such as a conversation that connects the community’s contribution with a stakeholder’s decision. Understanding a relevant external development can provide orienting value. Transformative value concerns a change in participants’ identity or the systems and culture around their practice, such as an adopted change to an organisation’s rules. Follow these additional contributions when they help explain the use or its limits.
Ask about cost, unwanted effects and failed attempts with the same specificity. What extra preparation was needed? Who could not use the resource? Which expected result did not occur? A useful negative account can show where the proposed method or support fails.
Keep the person’s experience and the investigator’s interpretation distinguishable. Let the contributor correct an attributed account before it is circulated. If the purpose is simply a valued social experience, the immediate account can answer it; inventing a later productivity gain would change that purpose.