Why Sensemaking?

Looking back over 10+ years of learning, synthesizing, and applying sensemaking concepts, it seems clear that their value remains largely untapped.

Possible reasons for this include:

• It's an edge tool - sensemaking focuses on fast-changing, complex, ambiguous decision making contexts where domain expertise dominates. These situations are usually seen as "wicked", dominated by tacit knowledge that is so contextual that it cannot be formally captured...more art than science.
• The "artists" who dominate edge decision making are, for good reasons, suspicious of any framework that claims to bring structure to a context that they know is inherently unordered.
• Traditional tools (processes, organizations, IT, etc.) have been very successful in non-edge contexts. There's no pressing need to move the edge beyond art.
• "Either-or" thinking that resists seeing tools as being useful in some contexts and and dangerous in others; instead it wants a "magic formula" that can be mindlessly applied, measured, and monitored...regardless of context.

I think we're seeing these barriers start to fall. Possible reasons for this include:

• A growing recognition that some aspects of edge decision making can be captured in frameworks like Snowden's Cynefin framework and Klein's Data-Frame model.


• Information, communications, and transportation technologies, along with commoditized capital markets, are shifting the business landscape from "80-20 core" to "80-20 edge", at least on those areas related to competitive advantage & innovation.


• Technology is shifting from instantiating structured repeatable models of well-defined decision making contexts, to exposing composable chunks of business logic that a decision maker can easily integrate in an ad hoc fashion.

Dave Snowden characterizes this as a shift in emphasis from Scientific Management (control of function) to Systems Thinking (control of information) to Sensemaking (ability to situate a network).

As with all such shifts, they're subject to a Gartner-style hype cycle...with lots of either-or and magical formula swirling as expectations inflate. Perhaps the whole social-mobile web-enterprise 2.0 flurry is the leading edge of a sensemaking hype cycle...or, perhaps not.

Regardless, we seem to be moving from a "that's the way it is" era characterized by a mindless edge and centralized "control" centers, to a "collaboration" era with mindful decision makers inventing the future on the edge.