Sensemaking

The process of constructing meaning from ambiguous, uncertain, or contradictory information before taking action. Sensemaking asks "What is going on here?" rather than "What should we do?" It prioritizes understanding the situation over solving the problem.

The Question Before the Solution

Organizations face constant pressure to act. Leaders are rewarded for decisiveness, teams are measured on output, and stakeholders demand results. This bias toward action creates a dangerous pattern: jumping to solutions before adequately understanding the situation.

Sensemaking is the deliberate practice of pausing to construct meaning before committing to action. It asks: What is actually happening here? What are we seeing and not seeing? What assumptions are we making? What would change our understanding?

This isn't analysis paralysis or avoidance of decisions. It's recognition that acting on a misunderstood situation often makes things worse, while taking time to understand the situation properly enables more effective action.

How Sensemaking Differs from Analysis

Analysis assumes the situation can be broken into components, studied systematically, and understood through data. It works well for complicated problems where cause and effect are stable.

Sensemaking acknowledges that some situations resist analysis. In complex environments, the act of observing changes what's being observed. Multiple interpretations coexist. Data conflicts. The situation evolves while you study it.

Where analysis seeks the right answer, sensemaking seeks a useful frame—a way of understanding the situation that enables appropriate action. The frame may be provisional, subject to revision as more is learned.

The Sensemaking Stance

Effective sensemaking requires a particular stance:

Curious, not corrective. Approach the situation wanting to understand it, not immediately fix it. Premature correction often addresses symptoms while missing underlying dynamics.

System-focused, not blame-focused. Look for patterns and interactions rather than individual failures. When something goes wrong, ask what conditions made it likely rather than who made the mistake.

Comfortable with not-knowing. Tolerate ambiguity long enough for better understanding to emerge. Rushing to certainty often means settling for superficial explanations.

Precise in language, modest in claims. Distinguish between what you observe, what you infer, and what you assume. Name uncertainty explicitly rather than papering over it with confident language.

The Discipline of Slowing Down

Sensemaking often feels unproductive to action-oriented leaders and clients. "We already know the problem—we need solutions." "We don't have time for more analysis." "The situation is clear enough."

These objections reveal the bias sensemaking challenges. If the situation were truly clear, solutions would already be working. If time is short, wasting it on misguided action is worse than investing it in understanding.

The discipline lies in holding space for sensemaking despite pressure to skip it. This means:

• Naming when the group is jumping to solutions prematurely
• Redirecting attention to weak signals and tensions
• Inviting reflection on underlying assumptions
• Documenting insights rather than action items

Example: The Obvious Problem

A leadership team convenes to address declining employee engagement scores. The "obvious" diagnosis: managers need better training. The proposed solution: a leadership development program.

A sensemaking approach would pause before accepting this frame. What do the engagement scores actually measure? What patterns exist across departments, tenure levels, or job types? What changed when engagement began declining? What do employees say when asked directly? What signals are we missing because we're focused on the survey?

Investigation might reveal that engagement declined specifically among high performers after a reorganization that disrupted informal networks. The problem isn't manager skill—it's structural change that severed relationships. Leadership training would address the wrong problem while the real issue continues.

The "obvious" problem often isn't. Sensemaking creates space to discover what's actually happening before committing resources to solutions.

Outputs of Sensemaking

Effective sensemaking produces:

• A shared framing of the situation (not necessarily agreement on what to do)
• Explicit identification of core tensions and contradictions
• Surfaced assumptions that can be tested
• Recognition of what remains uncertain or unknown

These outputs create foundation for action. Without them, action often addresses the wrong problem or misses leverage points that would make intervention more effective.