My favorite sensemaking question is “What’s the story?”
For three reasons:
- It defines what sensemaking is right there in the question: identifying the story of what’s going on in any context
- It speaks to the natural way we make sense of our world, whether at work or outside of it: by creating stories about what is happening
- It reveals an analogy for how to do sensemaking: The job of a journalist and reporting a story
Reporting a story—more classic sensemaking—requires (broadly) three activities:
- Doing research
- Talking to sources
- Thinking to connect the dots
It’s the same for sensemaking at work:
- Doing the work to learn what’s really going on
- Connecting with others and sharing knowledge
- Thinking to connect the dots
Better sensemaking: you gotta think, you gotta talk to others, and you gotta do. It’s easy to miss the connection between doing and learning, but that’s how experience happens.
Here are a few ways to be a more effective at sensemaking (inspired by this Deborah Ancona writing):
- Seek multiple sources of data; define data broadly, it’s not just something in a spreadsheet or on a dashboard
- Involve people in your sensemaking; diverse perspectives will bring diverse mental models to sensemaking
- Skip the stereotypes and seek out nuance; the complexity we work in ensures that every situation is going to be different
- Remember the employees doing the work have the most information about the work
- Create mental models, or maps, that emerge from the activity of sensemaking; it’s easy to overlay what we think we already know onto a new situation; communicate the model or map with images, analogies, metaphors, and stories
- Attempt to change the system (system is broadly defined) to learn from it
- Be aware your behavior influences the environment in which you are working; people create their own environments and can be constrained by them
