Sensemaking is a process by which a large population of people are able to give meaning to their collective experiences, referred to as story-based or narrative-based assessment, and 'the first form of scalable ethnography'. By collecting real, unfiltered experiences on the ground, sensemaking can be used to create a story-based repository of insights and learning through a crisis or transformation. Sensemaking helps glean a clearer understanding of what is really going on to minimize the negative impacts from the past, find the evolutionary potential in the present, and help shape a regenerative future.

7 Principles of Sensemaking

Sensemaking theorist Karl Weick identified seven properties of sensemaking (Weick, 1995):

1. Identity (Self and community) Identity and identification is central – who people think they are in their context shapes what they enact and how they interpret events.
2. Retrospection (Reviewing the past) Retrospection provides the opportunity for sensemaking: the point of retrospection in time affects what people notice, thus attention and interruptions to that attention are highly relevant to the process.
3. Enaction (Manifesting identities through action) People enact the environments they face in dialogues and narratives. As people speak, and build narrative accounts, it helps them understand what they think, organize their experiences and control and predict events and reduce complexity in the context of change management.
4. Social (Relationships) Sensemaking is a social activity in that plausible stories are preserved, retained or shared. However, the audience for sensemaking includes the speakers themselves and the narratives are "both individual and shared...an evolving product of conversations with ourselves and with others".
5. Ongoing Sensemaking is ongoing, so Individuals simultaneously shape and react to the environments they face. As they project themselves onto this environment and observe the consequences they learn about their identities and the accuracy of their accounts of the world. This is a feedback process so even as individuals deduce their identity from the behaviour of others towards them, they also try to influence this behaviour.
6. Extracted Clues (Presencing, Emergence, Adjacent Possible) People extract cues from the context to help them decide on what information is relevant and what explanations are acceptable. Extracted cues provide points of reference for linking ideas to broader networks of meaning and are 'simple, familiar structures that are seeds from which people develop a larger sense of what may be occurring.
7. Plausibility/Reasoning Over Accuracy People favour plausibility over accuracy in accounts of events and contexts: "in an equivocal, postmodern world, infused with the politics of interpretation and conflicting interests and inhabited by people with multiple shifting identities, an obsession with accuracy seems fruitless, and not of much practical help, either".

Each of these seven aspects interact and intertwine as individuals interpret events. Their interpretations become evident through narratives – written and spoken – which convey the sense they have made of events, as well as through diagrammatic reasoning and associated material practices.

Definitions

"Sensemaking is defined as, ‘How do I make sense of the world so that I can act in it?’" Dave Snowden

"Sensemaking is a form of distributed ethnography that helps organizations detect emergent patterns, trends, and weak signals. The narrative-based approach (collecting people’s stories) links qualitative data with quantitative data in order to understand, manage, and measure situations that are complex, uncertain, and ambiguous.” Agile Alliance

“Sensemaking is the process by which we make sense of the world, especially complex situations for which there are usually no simple, apparent explanations.” Conversational Leadership

"The basic idea of sensemaking is that reality is an ongoing accomplishment that emerges from efforts to create order and make retrospective sense of what occurs". Karl Weick

“The process whereby individuals make sense of their contexts (i.e., a problem-solving arena at work, or navigating their family through a challenge).” As individuals encounter situations, they also encounter discontinuities, things to figure out, and they are compelled to develop strategies for overcoming them. The process of overcoming discontinuities is a central feature of sensemaking.” Spryng.io

“Sensemaking is coherent (the quality of forming a united whole) heterogeneity (the state of being diverse in character and content).” Dave Snowden

“The process by which people give meaning to their collective experiences.” Wikipedia

“The ongoing retrospective development of plausible images that rationalize what people are doing”. Wikipedia