4.1 Sensemaking for futures planning

In Activity 10 in which you planned a workshop to discover your Why, you started the process of sense-making. In Section 1.4 you viewed some predicted trends towards a vastly different post-pandemic world to the world before 2020. Irrespective of where these trends are heading, in order for us to continue to deliver on our personal, project, team and organisational mission, we need to respond accordingly.

Responding in an era of uncertainty is complex, especially where people are involved. Fortunately, tools, frameworks and concepts are available to help us through the complexity.

One such concept that builds on thinking by others, was developed by Karl Weick in 1995 and is known as ‘sense-making’. ‘Sense-making involves turning circumstances into a situation that is comprehended explicitly in words and that serves as a springboard into action’ (Weick et al., 2005).

Sense-making helps us understand a situation, how elements of the situation are connected (whether tightly coupled or looser), and how and why people behave in it in the way that they do. Sense-making is particularly helpful in a complex situation when some aspects are not obvious. Taking into consideration the personal interest of those impacted by a change when planning is extremely important to a successful implementation, as ‘personal investment’ in a change can be a great motivator.

Sense-making is particularly useful in understanding how people and teams engage and organise following a crisis or change.

Dave Snowden founder of the Cynefin framework [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] defines sense-making in his ‘What is Sense-making?’ reflections as: ‘How do we make sense of the world so we can act in it’ (Snowden, 2008). ln the video below he explains how sense-making can be used for exploring problems and making decisions.

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Transcript: Video 6 Sense-making for exploring problems and making decisions

DAVE SNOWDEN

Sense-making is defined in my language, which has a hyphen, of how do we make sense of the world so that we can act in it. So, it has that pragmatic, we will never know everything we need to know. But how do we know what decisions we can make in the context of our current understanding?

Naturalising, and this is probably more important for the question, says that you have to link what you do into natural science. So, we use natural science is what's called an enabling constraint. So, to give a really simple example of this. If you take a group of radiologists and you give them a batch of X-rays and ask them to look for anomalies. And on the final X-ray, you put a picture of a gorilla in plain sight, which is 48 times the size of a cancer nodule. 83% of radiologists will not see it, even though their eyes physically scan it. And the 17% who do see it, come to believe they were wrong if they talk with the 83% who didn't.

Now for the last four or five decades, though we've known about this for a long time. People have been trying to train leaders to see everything. And you can't do that. We scan about 3% or 4% of available data. We do a very rapid association of physical, mental, and social patterns. And we do a first fit pattern match. Because the early hominoids, if you think about them on the savannas of Africa. If you have to escape Lions, you have to make decisions very, very quickly based on partial data scan.

So, when you recognise that's a reality, then you say, well, actually, that means anybody making a decision is not seeing the outliers. So, we say, what you need to do is to build human sensor networks, so you can do real-time engagement. So that you can see patterns of belief and patterns of attitudes, and you can find people who've seen a gorilla whereas nobody else has seen them.

So, understanding leadership decision-making and understanding the role of leadership is really important. And there's probably a couple of big shibboleths to challenge. One I've just done, which is you can become a rational decision-maker. I think the other is to focus on the individual decision maker. And we evolve to make decisions in small extended family and clan type groups, where there would be sufficient cognitive and experiential diversity to support decision making.

So, as we get that scientific understanding, we can start to rethink organisational design away from these hyper-rational logical process-based, enlightenment-based models. Which anybody who's been at sea level, and I've been at sea level, that's not the way it works, anyway.

The language we use is actually really important. Heidegger famously said, man thinks he's the master of language, but language is the master of man. And I could give lots of examples. But there are three phrases which concern me, because they're excuse words. So, people talk about mindset, they talk about VUCA, they talk about wicked problems. And so, it all ends up, well, we did this big initiative, and it didn't work because our employees didn't have the right mindset. We live in a VUCA world, and it was a wicked problem, anyway.

So, the language doesn't lead into action, so we would do something different. Instead of mindset, we would say what are the affordances provided with the environment? So, there's no point in trying to plant trees if the environment is a desert, to use the metaphor. So, what's available to us within the environment in which we operate?

Assemblages, this is a delusion reference, but it's what's the patterns of previous history which determine how we see the world. Because organisations have history. So, what are those? That's called an assemblage. And then finally, who or what has agency? Because that may define it. Now, if I do that, I can then say, well, how do I change those things in order to get a better result? So that's a more realistic way of doing it.

VUCA is just a label. Wicked problems, I would talk about what's intractable. Because often, wicked problems-- and you go back to 1970s, the definition is very complex. It's difficult to explain. Everything becomes a wicked problem. Whereas an intractable problem is one where we've tried to solve it, but we failed. We can't get a grip on it. And therefore, people are prepared to do something different. So, I think we need to avoid simplistic labels that allow people excuses. Or which put things into big bucket classes, where we have to do two or three more stages before we can decide what to do. We used to have mission statements, and then value statements, and then purpose statements, right? They're all exactly the same thing, they just knew branding. There's a new one, by the way, now called, deep purpose.

So that's what I mean, the simplistic use of language. And if you look at all of those things. It's the same group of platitudes assembled on the same picture. If we're doing commander's intent, we actually use counterfactual narratives to convey purpose. We don't use two or three words. We use a counterfactual narrative because that can't be gained and can't be misinterpreted.

So, part of this is looking at how human beings communicate. Most human beings communicate novel ideas through metaphors and stories. And that's still the most successful way of doing it. One of the things as I said in the middle of the pandemic, is that it was God's gift to humanity because kind of like it's a containable issue. And it's a chance to sort things out because there's worse plagues coming. And there's worse things happening than global warming. But I think one of the things is-- and I'm feeling quite optimistic at the moment, because we already show the shift from systems thinking to complexity thinking starting to happen. But the pandemic has accelerated it. Because people now know that the world is unforecastable.

You can't model it with a series of feedback loops around multiple entities with a big diagram. And you can't define it as a series of pre-given patterns, which is what most cybernetics does. It's much more complex. So, people are more open to that. And if you look at the big thing, and again, this comes back to the new field guide, we repurposed the programme in the year to get that out fast. It came out last year. It's all about building an ecosystem which can respond to un-anticipatable threat.

End transcript: Video 6 Sense-making for exploring problems and making decisions

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Video 6 Sense-making for exploring problems and making decisions