1. Sensemaking is ubiquitous.

The second point we need to understand is the fact that sensemaking, as we’re defining it here, is ubiquitous: it  is the invisible cognitive and relational glue that binds us together, socially and culturally.

Our sensemaking is so much a part-and-parcel of our daily life, that we scarcely even notice it.

It is like the proverbial water fish swim in. Every aspect of that fish’s life—its very movements, its very breathing—everything—is determined by that water.

Similarly, every aspect of our social life is determined by the shared background, and the conversations and activities, that constitute our sensemaking. Our capacity for effective action is shaped by it.

To the degree we are unaware of the constitutive nature of our sensemaking—and the hidden background by which it is shaped—we can’t possibly begin to discern the source of the ineffectiveness of our actions. We are quite literally blind to it.

2. Sense is Made Not Given.

Sensemaking is not about discovering what’s “true or real”—it isn’t about finding a world that is distinct from activities of sensemaking.

It’s about constructing the cognitive and psychical frames that determine how we understand a given situational reality, and the actions and decisions by which we invoke that understanding as we endeavor to impact the unfolding of that reality.

Two things follow from this.

First, the very activity of sensemaking already, and almost always, introduces interpretive artifacts that distort and otherwise reconfigure what’s actually happening. How we see things, and how we understand things, is not necessarily how they actually are.

Second, and perhaps even more problematically, is that it’s not at all apparent to us is that our understanding is a product of the activity of our sensemaking: we think that how we understand the situational reality is the way that situational reality is.

Now our actions are always—always—correlated to our sensemaking, not to how things actually are.

The quality of our actions will, therefore, be a product of the quality of the conversations, vocabularies, interactions, and the shared assumptions and beliefs by means of which we make sense of things together.

When those conversations, vocabularies, interactions and shared assumptions lack the complexity and nuance needed to meet the complexity and nuance of the situational reality which we are currently facing, our actions are not likely to generate the outcomes we intend or want.

Sensemaking Intelligence is what happens when we can reveal the hidden assumptions, beliefs, and stories that determine how we make sense of our world—whether individually or together—and, with that awareness, deliberately make a sense whose complexity is a match for the complexity we are facing in any given moment.

The capacity for sensemaking intelligence comes on line—when we can deliberately reflect on, and even name, the beliefs, assumptions and theories that determine how we understand the world around us—it becomes possible to intercede in the distorting effects they exert on our view of the situations which concern us.

It becomes possible, that is, to consciously engage in the interpretive frames by which we make sense of the world, both internally and collectively.

To exchange a distorting sensemaking apparatus for one that embraces the nuance, the complexity, the inherent ambiguity of the world in front us.