Big ears! Big eyes! Sensemaking at work

TL/DR: Sensemaking is a crucial skill for navigating changes and enhancing understanding of what's happening at work

Today I’m writing about 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:

1. is always happening,

2. is as natural as breathing, and

3. 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:

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:

1. It defines what sensemaking is right there in the question: identifying the story of what's going on in any context

2. 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

3. 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:

1. Doing research

2. Talking to sources

3. Thinking to connect the dots

It's the same for sensemaking at work:

1. Doing the work to learn what's really going on

2. Connecting with others and sharing knowledge

3. 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.

(I try to keep it shorter up here … I wrote a bit more about sensemaking below ⬇️)

Around The Water Cooler ⛲

“You shouldn’t have to fight for places to be, for things to do offline. At the present moment, we’re stuck. We don’t know how to make friends or date or follow the news or even buy clothing without the help of our phones, and none of it is really our fault.” It’s Obviously the Phones (Also: what a beautiful website)

“There’s no such thing as work life balance. There’s simply life. And you spend part of your life at work.” Boyle’s Law by Seth Godin

I’ve really been digging on chill YouTube DJ sets for my background listening while working, and this one from Bobby Ghanoush is especially fun 

More Sensemaking

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

About This Newsletter

How To Work is healthcare-focused work design inspiration to nudge your perspectives and practices into better alignment with the world of work as it is, and away from what it was. Read my take on the tension we’re working through.

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