Sensemaking

Sensemaking, simply put, is the process through which people give meaning to their collective experiences. It helps individuals understand what is truly happening in their environments, rather than focusing on what they think is happening or wish were happening. In essence, sensemaking is about making sense of the world to act effectively within it.

It is particularly valuable in complex and unpredictable situations where conventional approaches like detailed plans, technical knowledge, or “predict and control” strategies fall short.  Sensemaking is especially useful in navigating the VUCA world (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous), where technical solutions alone are insufficient. According to the Cynefin Framework, which helps categorize problems, complex adaptive systems require a different approach. 

With the right tools, we can better understand how people within organizations perceive their leadership, relationships, and live their daily interactions. This collective intelligence provides authentic, real-time, and context-specific data that organizations can use to address current challenges and uncover emerging trends and innovative ideas.  

This approach, in our view, holds immense potential beyond organizational development. It can be applied to areas such as community engagement, governance, climate change, refugee crises, environmental issues, leadership development, and project evaluation.

In organizational development, the key is to work with what is actually happening, rather than focusing on what should be happening. It’s about understanding what people are truly sharing with their colleagues, friends, and partners about their work.

Dave Snowden suggests a few things that need to be happening.

• We make it easy for people to tell little stories that indicate what is really happening in the company. The stories can be about a certain attitude towards change or safety, they can indicate problems, challenges, or trends. The stories tell about the way things are done in the company.
• A software, SenseMaker, can capture the stories and search for trends and challenges and the actual tendency for the company to engage a certain topic (like change, leadership, safety, collaboration, etc.). Snowden calls this mapping out the current dispositional state of the organization.
• Then the whole organization, or a department, can be nudged into the direction of the next possible generative steps. A guiding question is: “What can we do tomorrow that gets us more stories like these, and fewer stories like those”

This approach is both relevant and elegant because it works with people and situations as they are right now. It assumes that employees know their jobs and understand what’s going on, both good and bad. This taps into the “organizational gold” of lived experiences, without requiring large-scale change initiatives, mindset shifts, or lofty goals for employees to reach. By working with stories and the systems they reveal, organizations can uncover culture, values, and behaviors in a natural, powerful way.

This approach offers a way to engage with what is actionable, meaningful, and generative in the present moment—an incredibly potent tool for transformation.

Image: Banksy

Some client cases with the use of the SenseMaker App: