TLDR;

This is a rather lengthy and "meta" essay attempting to make sense of the concept of "sensemaking". It's the product of a few years of notes, research, and conversations. If lots of text isn't your thing, please enjoy this sensemaking icon set I curated. 😆

Disclaimer:

I'm no expert in any of this. I tried to be as comprehensive as I could without getting too into the weeds, but if there's anything glaringly missing or flat out wrong (which I'm sure there is), feel free to leave a comment or shoot me an email, I'd love to discuss!

In this essay, I'll be covering my thoughts about:

1. The what, why and how of "sensemaking" in general

2. The specifics of "solo" sensemaking

3. The specifics of "community" sensemaking

4. Putting it all together and a bit of a call to action

Ever since I first heard the terms "sensemaking" and "collective sensemaking", I haven't been able to get them out of my head.

All the while, it's been difficult to conceptualize because it's so ubiquitous. Sensemaking is an automatic process taking place both in our brains and in every social encounter we are a part of.

As if that isn't enough, sensemaking is a never ending process since the world isn't static and each action we take changes the context to make sense of. An infinite sea of ever-changing complexity.

In other words, a human talking about sensemaking is like a fish talking about water:

Note:

Before I go any further, I want to distinguish between 2 kinds of sensemaking: passive and active. Passive sensemaking is what our brains do automatically almost all the time whereas active sensemaking is a more focused, conscious, and intentional process. For the scope of this essay, I am focusing on active sensemaking.

"There is no single agreed upon definition of sensemaking, but there is consensus that it is a process that allows people to understand ambiguous, equivocal or confusing issues or events."

~ Wikipedia

So it's at least a process that facilitates/enables understanding amidst confusion, ambiguity, and complexity. Let's get a bit more detail:

"Sensemaking is widely considered to be the process of searching, collecting, and organizing information to iteratively develop a mental model of an information space in service of a user's goals."

~ Liu, 2023, p.22

Based on these definitions, let's say that sensemaking is an ongoing process of building and refining meaning and understanding from information.

I think it follows that to "make sense" is to understand a "thing" or to work it into one's existing mental model of the world. When someone says something "doesn't make sense" they're more or less saying it doesn't fit their understanding or they don't find meaning in it.

When I talk about "complexity", I'm referring to a thing, environment, or system that has the following qualities:

• An unmeasurable amount of interconnections, interactions, and feedback loops between the parts that make it up

• Internal or external changes to a single part can have disproportionate effects on other parts or the whole thing

• Can self-regulate or be highly adaptable to change

• Predicting its behavior is difficult or impossible

• Cannot be understood by "reductively" breaking it into its parts and independently understanding them

• Exhibits behavior that is "emergent" in that it is not found in any single part, but newly "emerges" from the interactions between the parts

It's difficult for humans to consciously engage with and understand complexity for many reasons:

• We have hard cognitive limits (focus, attention, working memory) to the amount of things we can consider at the same time; it's information overload and we have to draw the line somewhere!

• We tend to think linearly and in terms of cause and effect.

• We tend to over simplify things rather than properly evaluate nuance, especially when emotions, stress, or fatigue are involved.

• Our perspective is limited as our senses can only detect so much.

• Our brains are more wired for quick survival-based decisions.

• We tend to prefer stability to change in an effort to preserve what's already been established.

• We're prone to a whole host of cognitive biases.

Without the process of sensemaking, we wouldn't be able to:

• Learn about and understand oneself, one another, and reality

• Reduce uncertainty / ambiguity and gain clarity

• Find, discover, and create meaning

• Identify and solve problems

• Enable better future decision-making, action, and adaptability to change and the unknown

The definitions we started with focused on a "process".

It's important to note that the process is iterative and the steps are often happening in parallel and refer to each other. It's not linear.

There are many different core cognitive components at play here throughout the process:

• Perception: noticing, sensing, and filtering information from the environment.

• Attention: selectively focusing on information or context that is most relevant.

• Interpretation: analyzing, identifying, organizing, categorizing, and assigning meaning to information

• Retrospection: iteratively looping back for evaluation and course correction

• Integration: processing and encoding new information into existing mental models

• Communication: expressing the sense that was made and engaging with others

In addition there are many uniquely useful modes by which sense can be made:

• Experiential: intuition, personal experience, sensory input

• Verbal: language, narrative, verbal processing

• Visual: diagrams, spatial organization, concept modeling

• Practical: making, building, hands-on interaction

• Analytical: logic, reasoning, and thought

• Social: discussion, debate, group dynamics

1. The not-so-fun way is if it feels difficult. It's probably a good sign that you're doing the work.

2. The more fun way is the good feelings that come with the discovery of novel connections and the "aha!" moments that pave the way to understanding.

All of the above seems to apply both to "solo" and "community" sensemaking, so what's the difference? Let's take a quick look at the ingredients, advantages, and disadvantages of both.

Sensemaking is never truly "solo" because you're always getting sensory input and information from the world around you, but for the sake of this distinction, let's pretend you're trying to make sense of something by yourself in your favorite hideaway.

• You

• Some sort of ambiguity, confusion, or lack of understanding about something

• A desire to resolve that lack of understanding

• Open-mindedness and curiosity

• Access to information

• A process to evaluate said information (see above)

• Critical thinking, synthesis, and reflection skills

• Lots of opportunities for uninterrupted deep focus

• Potential for quicker initial progress when learning

• Great for simple (not complex) work especially if you have high expertise

• No need to do the work of establishing shared language and context with others

• Time and space to make sense at your own speed without the additional cognitive load of social interactions

• A safe place to explore your thoughts free of external perceptions and judgments

• Solitude can lead to isolation, and isolation is a breeding ground for ignorance

• Less access to varied types and kinds of information and important feedback

• No opportunity for the synergy that comes with community

• Personal weaknesses can hold you back

• A singular perspective leaves a lot out; you don't know what you don't know

• Favoring one mode of sensemaking over others leaves a lot out

• High risk of developing and reinforcing biases without challenge

• Risk of developing an idiosyncratic worldview that, while internally consistent, becomes so detached from common understanding that it's difficult to communicate to others

First, let's define what a "community" is. All the definitions I came across felt lacking so I'm going to make my own here:

A community is 3 or more people who share something significant in common (ie. location, interests, values, or goals) that also communicate with each other on some regular basis.

Community is hard. Sensemaking is hard. Put em together and what do you get?

The "Wisdom of Crowds" principle suggests that the collective judgment of a group is often more accurate than the individual judgments that make up the group, provided certain conditions are met.

It's often high effort high reward.

There's a lot more ingredients for community sensemaking than solo sensemaking because the complexity increases with each person.

Chef's Note:

In addition to the below list of ingredients, each person would ideally bring all their "solo" ingredients along with them to the party.

• A community of people

• A shared context (this should be a given for a community based on our definition above)

• A shared ambiguity, confusion, or lack of understanding about the same or similar thing

• A shared desire to resolve that lack of understanding together through the seeking (and hopefully finding) of shared language / mental models.

• Some semblance of a collaborative culture

  • Trust, openness, and honesty

  • Sharing, and empathy

  • Good communication skills

  • Focus on listening for understanding rather than asserting one's own ideas

• A process of iterative reflection and feedback loops

  • Ask clarifying questions rather than prematurely assuming understanding

  • Check in that others are understanding you and try again if not

  • Question assumptions, and biases to a degree that is practical

• Access to diversity of thought, experience, expertise, disciplines, and modes of sensemaking opening up a whole new world of valuable insights to emerge

• Access to a network of resources, and skills you otherwise would not have

• Potential for faster sensemaking through the parallel processing of ideas

• Potential to co-refine your skills in practice with others

• Refining your ideas and escaping biases via cross-pollination and peer review

• Communities have unique ecologies of sense embedded in them

• Group coordination, facilitation, and consensus building can be extremely time and energy intensive

• Can be difficult to stay focused (gets harder the more people are involved)

• Risk of "group think" and conformity due to social pressure

• Risk of "the firehose effect" where the noise overpowers the signal

• Risk of the loudest voices marginalizing the quieter voices

• Risk of "bikeshedding" where precious time is wasted on trivial things

• Humans can be difficult to work with

  • Ego is hard to set aside

  • We tend to fall in love with our own ideas

  • Listening more than speaking is a difficult skill to refine

  • Interpersonal issues can arise

Solo sensemaking is incredibly valuable for scenarios with medium to low complexity, work in which you have high expertise, and when you need deep uninterrupted focus. But when it comes to scenarios with high complexity, it very quickly falls short and can even turn against you.

For those kinds of situations, we can't rely on our own limited perspective, and it's critical to group up in community, do the hard work together, and let the magic happen.

Sensemaking with community, when done intentionally and consciously, is much more likely to result in deeper, richer, fuller, and more accurate understandings of the world than if you go it alone.

If you're reading this, I venture to guess you'd agree with me when I say the state of the western world is in a pretty dire state. The "Metacrisis", the "Meaning Crisis", the destruction of our biosphere that we forget we're a part of, the rolling out of technology that are poised to exacerbate all of these issues further, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer and the systems are so broken that we can't help but be complicit.

It seems like as a species we're more divided and isolated than ever before and worse yet at a pivot point in history when coordination and community are more necessary than ever.

But I have hope that we'll rise to the challenge. Through sensemaking, we can move towards a meaning-driven culture. A culture where shared meaning is how we find community.

The rise of the sensemaking perspective marks a shift of focus in organization studies from how decisions shape organizations to how meaning drives organizing

~ Weick, 1993

I think the only shot we have is to re-learn how to be in community, how to make sense with each other, and how to coordinate at a grass-roots level from the bottom up.

I'll end with a quote:

"I think another human brain is one of the best tools you can possibly find."
~ Grimes

In another essay, I want to take a deeper look at the broken physical and digital systems we exist in, the tools I think we need in order to climb out of this mess, and a vision for the future of community sensemaking through the lens of Pattern Languages.