Sense-making in uncertain times
What skills do we need right now to navigate in an uncertain time? What helps in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) situation? I would argue that it’s our skills in sense-making that will have a great impact in the coming months.
Sense-making is the skill of constructing a mental map of what you cannot see. We do this when we enter a new social group - we observe, model, and refine our behaviour to fit in. When we get it wrong, we adjust our model and behave differently. Well, that’s the idea at least. It’s like learning to play a new sport without anyone explaining the rules - through trial and error, observation, and testing things out we will get the rules eventually.
This article gives a series of tools which help avoid traps, and enable better sense-making so that you can provide more stable leadership.
What can sense-making look like?
It is the process of creating a map, using data, critical thinking, and intuition. Looking at what has happened before that can teach us. And then also not relying on any of this input too heavily. This is the art of creating a map or model of reality, and holding it lightly. Be open to change things when:
New wisdom emerges
Reality doesn’t match your model
People offer alternative models
When sharing your model with others, observe their reaction. Are they resisting it because it’s painful to consider a new reality? Or are there gaps or flaws in your model that they can see?
By sharing this map, you provide a shared reference point for your team. This map will not be right, or correct, but it gives everyone a reference point. Critically, this map should also change over time - if it isn’t then you’re missing something.
Remote sense-making
People working remotely generally have fewer “data points” from which to build a realistic model of how things are relating to the company. In-person offices provide a rich space for learning about norms, culture, and possibilities. Interactions around the coffee machine, over lunch, or during those critical few minutes before a meeting starts. We have body language, accidentally overheard conversations, and people’s physical movements around a space (who is in a meeting with whom and are they having a good time or not?).
We get very little of this working remotely. We don’t understand which people spend more time talking, and what their rapport looks like. We don’t see a leader walking with confidence or sloping their shoulders. Instead, we have small windows into someone’s home office, and this can be easily “polished” by each participant in a call.
So what replaces this? How are leaders going to provide a shared sense of reality to a team, or a whole company? Without this, you’ll bump into some very strange ideas, rumours, and perspectives. Someone who is particularly poor at sense-making will come to you with a very skewed perspective about how things are. In the absence of knowledge, they’ll invent things to help it make sense, which is part of sense-making. However, they may not have the ability to challenge their own perception, seek out new information, and to update their sense of things with much skill.
With this in mind, it is critical that leaders create a shared and transparent understanding of how things are and show a willingness to change it when new wisdom emerges. Technology is our friend here. Written blogs, short podcasts, vlogs, virtual town halls, etc., are good ways to build and understand a shared view of things.
How can you help a team with their sense-making?
If they get stuck in analysis mode, get them into a space of creation and synthesis. Use some of the innovation tools on https://toolbox.hyperisland.com/
Get them to write down or illustrate their models and compare them.
Notice the topics they shy away from, and explore that - delicately.
As a leader, notice your own triggers that shut conversations down, this is likely to be holding things back. Whatever your blind spot is, it becomes a blind spot for the team too.
Encourage people to be open about their emerging views of the new reality - be prepared for some extreme ideas. Also, encourage people to not be too attached to their ideas and to remain open to new information - lead by example here!
Remind people not to reference the past as a solid view of the future. Everything has been thrown up in the air, some of it may land back in place, some of it won’t.
Create online contexts for collective sense-making. Allow time for lots of dialogue to help people compare views and form their own.
Let go of the past normal
If you’re putting things on hold, waiting for the world to go back to normal, then you are failing to plan. Things will not go back to how they were.
Think about past events such as the ones we are experiencing today (wars, natural disasters, revolutions of thought, etc.). They are the reference points in history, the moment things change permanently. This is one of those times.
Yes, many things will start up again. But will they resume as before? How will people think and behave differently? How will policies change in organisations?
So when you’re taking in new information ask yourself, how might this become the new normal? What are the long term implications for us? Treating new information as simply novel or temporary might represent a failure to adapt.
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. - Marcel Proust
War is the mother of invention (and I believe pandemics are too). What new patterns, habits, technologies, and attitudes will emerge? Look for them now and you’ll be quicker to benefit.
Don’t rush to resolve paradoxes
When we are presented with conflicting information, we’re often in a rush to decide which is true. Try learning to sit with ambiguity. Perhaps two ideas are true but in different contexts, or at different times. Or one idea is more true than the other.
In fact, working with opposing or contradictory ideas can be a powerful tool. These are sometimes called Wicked Problems, these are problems that cannot be resolved. For example, how can we centralise decision making for greater efficiency, while decentralising decision making for greater agility? How can we experiment and learn, while creating predictable results for the business? There’s a great liberating structure for dealing with paradoxical challenges.
Related to this topic is polarity thinking. The process of “reconciling two seemingly opposing values that can complement each other when applied in a balanced way.”
Analysis & synthesis
Sense-making is the ability to take multiple points of information and data, and synthesise it into a single picture.
I hear people talking about analysis a lot - analysing something in order to understand it. But what next? Once we’ve understood it, what do we do? This is the process of synthesis.
“analysis is defined as the procedure by which we break down an intellectual or substantial whole into parts or components. Synthesis is defined as the opposite procedure: to combine separate elements or components in order to form a coherent whole.” - Swedish Morphological Society
Do you, or your team, have a preference for just one of these processes? I’ve seen people escape into analysis (analysis paralysis). It feels safe and productive. The bit that feels risky is the creative part, building things up into a whole. Watch out for this, in the process of trying to make sense of rapid change, people might feel safer digging into detail.
Remedy this by taking the pressure off the creative part where possible. Allow for mistakes and accept that the new model might need to change over time.
Learn some of the classic logical fallacies
Logical fallacies have been well documented elsewhere. Some key ones to refresh yourself on would be:
Hasty generalisation - generalising based on a small sample of information
Either/or - creating a false choice, when both might be possible. Replace with both/and
Slippery slope - the idea that one event automatically leads to the most extreme version of it
If you’re unfamiliar with logical fallacies, take a look through this site and you can ruin any casual conversation with ease. A better application is to learn a few, then watch a politician or sensationalist news anchor for a few seconds. They commit all sorts of logical fallacy crimes.
But remember, just because someone falls into one of these traps, it doesn’t mean their argument is wrong. This is called the fallacy-fallacy.
The limits of logic
I find that logic is helpful for spotting bad arguments. However, it isn’t a creative force. When people need to be inventive, they need to trust their intuition and do things they can’t immediately explain to others. Jumping straight in with analytical thinking kills creativity in my experience. So know when to apply it and when to leave it to one side. Try letting an idea mature for a few moments before demanding data and evidence.
Many people in a professional context seem only to value the analytical/rational mode. Now, more than ever is the time for people who can be both creative and analytical. It’s our creativity that is likely to make sense of a changing situation faster than our rational side. And our rationality will help us test new ideas against reality.
Conspiracy theories
Naturally, these are commonplace right now. Here are a couple of questions you can use to debunk them:
How much effort would it take to coordinate such a conspiracy (including keeping it all a secret)?
Taking that effort into account, what would be the motive and is that strong enough to go to all this effort?
Often conspiracy theories have a vague sense of “the baddies”. Like a poorly written film script where the villain is simply evil for no reason.
But, again, this is the limit of using logic. It will convince only some people. Instead, it’s worth trying to understand what need it is meeting for people. Why do they emotionally grasp for a fiction like this? Each person might have a different answer. So listen to them. My observation is that a conspiracy seems less scary to the believer than the reality. If the government is deliberately harming its citizens then at least we can fight it, and there is a person in control. The idea of “bad things just happen” feels more alarming.
And…don’t immediately dismiss a conspiracy theory. Lots of unthinkable things have happened in recent years. Sometimes there is a partial truth in these stories.
Our collective inability to “think the unthinkable” has repeatedly left us unprepared for what comes up. Only 52 US companies have been on the Fortune 500 since 1955 - perhaps if they’d been willing to contemplate the changing realities, they’d still be in there.
In summary
So sense-making is the process of creating structure out of the unknown, and we’ve covered a few tools and ideas that can help.
People describe current events as that of continual change and uncertainty. This is not actually new - reality is always like this but it’s not always so obvious. Change isn’t the new normal, it is simply normal. Buddha spotted this earlier than most.
Regardless of your philosophy, experiment with action - failure is a brilliant opportunity to improve your model.
Ask, is this “good enough for now, safe enough to try?” If the answer is yes, then do it.