Sensemaking—gosh, what a funny word, but a word with its meaning right there in it: sensemaking is the activity of making sense of a situation, something we’re doing, well, more or less constantly in our always shifting work environments.
The things to know about sensemaking are that it:
- is always happening,
- is as natural as breathing, and
- is something we should do more deliberately, at least at work.
Think back to when you started the job you're in now: how did you figure out what you were responsible for, or what you were supposed to be doing, or who you should meet, or where the political lines were drawn? Classic sensemaking.
More sensemaking: Unless you started yesterday, what you understood your job to be the week you started compared to what it is today ... is different … because the context changed ... and will continue to change.
"The importance of sensemaking," writes MIT professor Deborah Ancona, summarizing the idea of a trio of researchers, "is that it enables us to act when the world as we knew it seems to have shifted."
New boss? New priority? New problem? Becoming aware of sensemaking as a skill—one that can be practiced and improved—will help us in all of these situations.
There are many definitions of sensemaking—ranging from the simple to the transcendent—which speaks both to the richness of the concept and the challenge in its approachability, so this one from Kenneth Mikkelsen resonated as it crosses boundaries:
Making sense is about gathering impressions, holding them up against familiar experiences, course correction, being open, and not least surrounding ourself with talented people who have big ears and eyes. Those who are able to forage, be critical, and convey meaning. We all do it. Some are just better at it than others.
Big ears! Big eyes!
So here is a terrific sensemaking question worth asking more often, even in those moments when it doesn't seem necessary, to practice enlarging our ears and eyes:
- What's the story?
This is my favorite sensemaking question 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.
Three more questions from Alan Arnett for group settings, because sensemaking is a valuable social activity, too:
- What are we solving?
- Where are we heading?
- How might we get there?
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