Sensemaking... #1

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Sensemaking 1

Here’s an important question for all of us: How do you make sense of something that’s big and complicated? Say… something like why your users aren’t passionate about your product?
For the past several years I’ve been thinking a great deal about sensemaking—that is, the processes people go through when trying to “make sense” of a body of knowledge.

The author seems to believe sensemaking is a skill, like language, that can improve with practice and can be taught. He asks: what do I do to make sense of something complicated?

1. I get a sense for context, scope and sphere of influence
2. Then, I get a sense for relationships, cause and effect relationships, equivalences, and metaphors related or parallel to it. Basically, break it down; deconstruct it, organize it.
3. Then, I find a way to make fun of it, and find it's humor
4. Is there a way to break it down further?
5. Is there a final "T"-truth about it?

I guess I cast a wide net around context setting questions, divergent questions, until an unknown point where the questions become convergent, until they converge on "answers"

OK, maybe I could be a little more succinct about it; like this:

2. I collect a bunch of information, then organize it, then I get the answer. This is also a fine answer. At least you’re aware of the “collection phase” and some basic collection organizational process. But that last step is the killer—how do you just “get the answer”?
Ahh.. there’s the magic! How DO you know what to do to get the answer?
In 1993 I wrote a paper with the somewhat forbidding title “The cost structure of sensemaking,” which basically points out that people take into account all kinds of factors when deciding what to do when making sense. They worry about how long it will take, how many errors will happen during the process and how much the whole process will cost. Interestingly, many of these “costs” are figured intuitively, and often incorrectly, leading people to do all kinds of strange things.

hmmm.... what does he do? He says this:

What do I do? Well, I’ll tell you.. I collect a ton of information, then organize it, then I map it to the task I’m trying to do. Then I repeat. The iteration is important because I almost never get the right information on the first pass, or I don’t know how to organize it, or I don’t know how to use it to get the task accomplished it once it’s all organized

Still, interesting... how do we make sense of our world?