All it took was an appropriately complex infographic about the nature of sensemaking, and the Scenius was off to the races.
There's discrete phases!
A spiral dynamic pattern!
Feedback loops in all the right places!
After Ronen discovered the sensemaking ladder, we quickly turned it into an emergent project. This is our typical process - we find something intriguing out in the vast wastelands of the web and lug it back to our Telegram to share with the community. Then, we transform the shiniest of resources from an inert object into a participatory experience.
This time, we called it the "Shoebox Sensemaking Game", and agreed to focus ourselves on a single topic of exploration. True to form, we went meta: after some deliberation, we settled on the topic of sensemaking itself.
Using the prompt: "What is the language of sensemaking?" and a Telegram channel to capture our answers, we only had a couple of really straightforward rules:
Discuss the language of sensemaking by sharing articles, blogs, thoughts, art, anything we want on the topic
If you share a resource, include your reasoning or explanation for why you're sharing the resource
We kicked things off on January 12, 2024 and over the next two weeks, we amassed a mountain of content about the language of sensemaking! Since then, we've had a number of sessions to synthesize, annotate and otherwise explore the language of sensemaking.
Our home base for content analysis has been FigJam; for each session we create a new section to contain our work so we can easily refer back. This approach has also helped us to maintain momentum, which has been challenging with the sheer amount of content we created.
A Sensemaking Pattern Language Discovery
In our last shoebox session, we did an affinity mapping exercise by grouping together annotated content that had been through a few iterations of synthesis.
Ultimately, we discovered several distinct qualitative topic areas within the sensemaking arena:
Foraging - how are we aggregating, collecting, searching, extracting information within a context? What tools might we use here?
Structure - how can we move foraged info more structured formats? Through qualitative actions, what is our approach for looking for signal in the noise? How might we model and store these patterns? What is an appropriate ontology structure to help us add structure to our data? What tools are best here?
Individual <> Collective - what is the nature of the distinctly different concerns between sensemaking as an individual verses a collective; i.e. different techniques, approaches, constraints, etc.? We're particularly interested in the collective side of the continuum: what are fun ways to find multiperspectival understandings? How to preserve and coordinate collective attention? How can these processes be scaled across synchronous space and time?
Reality (deception) checks - how do you know what you know? To what extent do you know this is true? How can we check ourselves as individuals and as a collective? How do we ensure a wise sensemaking process?
Insight & felt sense - how do we express our individual, unique embodied understandings of being? How do we share and translate our individual experiences with others? How can we embrace both the left & right brain; the rational & the artistic?
These areas are feeling a bit like the beginning of a sensemaking pattern language, a kind of modular & composable ontology we're hyped to explore further. At this point, definitely more questions than answers!
Within the Scenius, we're hoping that this summary of our findings (and the deep-dive in Figjam) will inspire feedback, further discussion, and progress up the sensemaking ladder.
Editorial support from Ronen Tamari, thx!
The Sensemaking Scenius is a community of practice
with a vision for a regenerative, intentional & meaningful internet
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