Convergence Leadership Series #3
Complex Way of Seeing and Sensemaking
The third seminar on April 7 was dedicated to sensemaking. We talked about what is sensemaking, why is it important, and explored two methods for complex sensemaking: story telling and the debate.
As is our tradition, we started the seminar with a warm welcome to the whole human in our team members. This is our moment catcher check in question: over the past month, what were the moments you would like to remember? This is a gentle easing into the story telling part of the seminar.
Sensemaking: What and Why
Sensemaking is the process by which people give meaning to their collective experiences. It is the proccess people answer the question “what is going on”? Today I attended the NSF Leap to Large series of seminars, where coach Muffet McGraw shared the importance of open communications to make sense together, esp. during a losing streak. She said “because otherwise people are going to make up stories in their minds and blame each other.”
The truh of the matter is, if there is no space for making sense properly, everybody will make up stories themselves, make decisions based on those stories, and take actions accordingly. That is where it will become random arrows shooting at each other, without coherence or synergy. If organizations wonder about the amount of resistence in the action taking phase, maybe the answer lies in the upstream sense making stage (see image on the right). Think of the complex realities organizations have to wrestle with as the ‘elephant’, and individuals in organizations as the ‘blind men’ (see image on the left). The chance of gettting closer to reality is so much higher with making sense together.
Story telling
We focused on the question “why storytelling”? I believe too many communications workshops focus on the skills of story telling without fully opening participants’ mind and heart to the importance of storytelling. I also belileve we are alll natural born story tellers. Once we fullly grasp the importance of it, we can all come up…
