Collective Sensemaking: The Game Has Evolved
Imagine you were just invited to play a game, but no one knows the rules. What do you do when something doesn’t make sense? Well, as each player makes a move, you attempt to determine their motives and objectives. Through trial and error, you make your moves and look for acceptance or disapproval from the group. Eventually, you decide the rules and play the game. That’s sensemaking in action. In a way, you are constructing a mental map of what you can’t see.
What is sense-making?
Organizational psychologist Karl Weick coined the term “sensemaking,” and just like it sounds, it means making sense of the world around us. Sensemaking can be individual or collective, prospective or retrospective. It’s how groups and individuals socially construct the meaning of an ongoing flow of experience and create structure out of the unknown. It’s about the construction of reality and its consequences. Without realizing it, we try to make sense of things all the time so we can see and act on them. Sensemaking is a vital skill. An important benefit of sensemaking is that it helps to build shared understanding and collective action. However, it’s a skill where many people often come up short when it comes to complex environments.
The terrain has changed and the map is no longer adequate.
Sensemaking has always occurred in individuals and society, however, it is receiving new attention. The economic transition from manual labor to knowledge-based work has pushed sensemaking to the forefront as a useful skill for leadership. The terrain has changed and the map is no longer adequate. Since sensemaking is a cognitive process, we need to create a larger capacity to make sense of uncertainty and emerging behavior.
Our emotions, thinking, actions, culture, and environment shape the sensemaking process. After my wife and I moved into our first house, we tried to figure out a more efficient layout for our kitchen. We slowly figured out the layout problems by using the kitchen as much as we could. For example, we put our spices on a particular shelf when we moved in. Later, my wife found it inconvenient to turn around every time to reach them when she was cooking. As a result of trying many different things, we installed a spice rack next to the oven which makes a lot more sense. Sometimes, making sense does not make sense right away, it takes time.
A constant process of acquisition, reflection, and taking action
A former student of Karl Weick taught one of my first classes at college. A significant part of the course was spent discussing how sensemaking is a simple concept, but not so simple to employ in the workplace. Why? Because sensemaking is a constant process of acquisition, reflection, and taking action on things that are both visible and invisible. We’re always trying to make sense of our thoughts, feelings, relationships, culture, behaviors, actions, and systems in our organizations. The sensemaking process shapes organizational structure and behavior. In return, the organizational structure and behavior shape the culture of the organization. In other words, our sensemaking ability is the reflection of our cognitive ability.
Weick likened the process of sensemaking to cartography. What we map depends on where we look, which factors we focus on, and which aspects of the terrain we decide to represent. Since these choices will shape the kind of map we produce, there is no perfect map of the territory. Therefore, making sense is more than an act of analysis, it’s an act of creativity. Practicing sensemaking is like drawing a map that’s constantly evolving. If you construct an evolving map for a complex situation, you are going to be able to have a better understanding of that situation and you will be able to use the map as a framework to build a shared understanding with others. Sensemaking is not about drawing the right map, but rather, facilitating your team in referring to the same map. The map will change over time, but it’s amazing what you’ll discover through this process.
Leadership is about making things happen, contingent on a context.
Leaders may create change by playing a central role in the actual change process, or by creating an environment in which others are empowered to act. Good leaders understand that sensemaking is a continuous process, and they let the map emerge. In a turbulent environment, leaders need to spend more time sensemaking and connecting the dots by looking through multiple lenses. Marcel Proust, one of the most influential authors of the 20th century, famously said, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands but seeing with new eyes.” As Proust infers, we don’t have to discover new landscapes to be in the creative process of discovery. Sometimes we simply need to change our perspective, to elevate it, and see what we already know so well through new eyes.
Ongoing flows of experience
Sensemaking is different than decision-making because we don’t analyze isolated events but rather, more comprehensive, ongoing flows of experience. It moves our thinking to the co-creation of the organizational context of how people are constructing meaning and influencing one another. In the sensemaking process, individuals do not rely on a single source of information. Instead, they integrate multiple sources of information and synthesize that information together.
The Ceiling
At IDEO, a product design firm, sensemaking is step one for all design teams. According to founder David Kelley, team members must act as anthropologists studying an alien culture to understand the potential product from all points of view. When brainstorming a new design, IDEO’s teams consider multiple perspectives. They build various maps to inform their creative process. One IDEO team was charged with creating a new design for an emergency room. To better understand the experience of key patients, team members attached a camera to a patient’s head and captured his experience in the ER. The result was nearly ten full hours of film showing the ceiling. The sensemaking provoked by this perspective led to a redesign of the ceiling that made it more aesthetically pleasing and able to display valuable information for patients. Sensemaking helps us shift our focus from a rational and static picture that delineates our reality to a continuously changing worldview.
Collective Sensemaking for the Wicked Problems
We live in a world that’s densely interconnected and exponentially changing. Yesterday’s best practices are rapidly becoming outdated. On top of that, our institutional architectures, the way we build large-scale organizations, are reinforcing these outdated practices and actions.
Yet, many of our problems are wicked problems. These problems are not complicated. They are complex and adaptive. In his seminal book The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future, author Kevin Kelly describes how the cycle of obsolescence is accelerating and how things may change in the next 30 years. The book is impressive in its breadth and depth. Kelly explains that the average lifespan of a phone app is less than a month, and how we won’t have time to master anything before it is displaced.
Complex organizational challenges mean we need to embrace collective sensemaking and leadership voids. Advanced sensemaking skills and capacities could enable leaders and organizations to not only face unexpected challenges but also to create opportunities to flourish.
Creating A Shared Meaning
How can leaders remain effective in an environment that only becomes more and more complex? Sensemaking as leadership is the process of creating shared meaning. Without sensemaking, there’s no common view of reality from which to start. Sensemaking enables leaders to have a better grasp of what is going on in their environments, thus facilitating other leadership activities such as visioning, relating, inviting, and inventing. A sensemaking perspective reminds us that it is not merely the reality that matters, but how the problems and situations are interpreted. In this new world of obsolescence and acceleration, new lenses are required. Our sensemaking capacity needs to grow beyond current abilities. The game has evolved. The question is, have you?
