The Sense of Sense-Making

Perhaps spurred on by experiencing the limitations of analytics, sense-making erupted as a “thing” when it got that portable name, freeing it from being restricted to any one or two special domains.

Given the name, it immediately seduced like the discovery of a new planet, and the mini-industry of codifying its practice was underway on two paths: a religious one (truth!), and a scientific one (proof!).

In the next few minutes, we’re going to undo it on both paths, after which we will all go back to doing what interests us the most — following our preferences — as we reconstitute it for ourselves.

[pic adapted from Freepik.com]

Step One

We’re not going to call it sense-making. We’re going to call it Making Sense. “Making” sense means identifying a meaning from available conditions and experience. Sense is meaning.

In its normal uses, “Making” obviously can mean creating (as the provider) — but for various reasons we also give the same credit for realizing (acknowledging) something in our consciousness as a recipient, as if paying attention is a form of making.

It is almost unnoticeably familiar for us to use our language to say “How does that make sense?” or “It makes sense TO me” or “What is the sense in [or of] that?” as well as (the money shot) “I mean [or intend or assert] it in the sense of…”

All of that falls within a very wide range of human activities — playing / experimenting / composing / learning / teaching / interpreting /solving — as ALL (and more) are episodes of Making Sense.

One of the most unnecessary and common habits in the intellectual world is to coin a term and apply it to a restricted range, but then advocate the narrow term as either the archetype of the entire scope or, worse, as being the entire scope. “Sense-making” is already suffering this treatment.

Even when doing that is just a habit, doing it is always a motivated behavior. Instead of detailing all the motivations, let’s compare in just one example: there’s a big difference between “needing” a “solution” to a “problem” and “enjoying” the “discoveries” of an “exploration”... One is not more important than the other, and both involve making sense.

To get past unnecessary language habits here, we also need to acknowledge our acceptance that meaning may be created or discovered — and that the only really generic reference to making sense avoids presuming either one of those modes.

Instead, we generically distinguish obtaining meaning from not obtaining it. Only more specifically would we intend to refer to how we obtained it or did not.

Step Two

Art, psychology, sports, thinking, analysis, design, planning, and communicating are all Making Sense.

What’s more, any of those can begin its activity in conditions of complete ambiguity or at least with no necessarily imposed primary definition of conditions.

This uncertainty is NOT automatically the same as complexity, and it is NOT by default a negative or inhibiting condition.

In most occasions of making sense, people initially do what they’re going to do based on what they care about at the time. The most important single issue at hand with the initiation of making sense is neither uncertainty nor complexity. It is, rather, priority.

Furthermore, we already know two regular things about encounters with even completely unanticipated conditions. One is that the same conditions can mean different things to different people. The other is that a given person can derive multiple meanings from the same set of conditions. There’s no intellectual authority that says they cannot. There is just a higher or lower probability that they will.

Those facts are also not “about” the complexity or uncertainty of conditions. They are about (if we care) the complexity or uncertainty of the techniques of observation.

Aside from having a priority influencing what they notice and how they act, the important issue here is about what is motivating the priority in awareness and behavior.

Step Three

Current Conditions are the primary subject matter of sense or meaning.

Without attending to motivation and its relationship to priority, there is not much reason to belabor the sense and respond disposition while excluding the create and experience disposition. Sometimes the opportunity to handle uncertainty or complexity is created, successfully, by just changing something to get a reaction.

These days, we don’t think it is risky to presume that current conditions involve interactions and not just static features. So, we accept that if we get involved with the conditions, we may create or alter interactions ourselves.

But, our increasingly frequent presumption that conditions including interactions are a “system” is another unnecessary and potentially misleading disposition— a new habit.

An entirely adequate definition of a system is “persistent or predictably recurring interactions attributable to stimuli affecting persistent or predictably occurring actors”. It’s a definition that serves the only purpose necessary — distinguishing a non-system from a system.

In that definition, it is apparent that the stimuli are not predefined, and that some unspecified variety of stimuli will still provoke a specified range of outcomes from a specified range of elements.

That is the significance of calling something a system instead of just calling it an assembly.

The only reason (not excuse) to presume that current conditions are a system is to test the conditions and see if they actually qualify as a system!

• A detected system is not dependent on the frequency, duration or scale of persistence, recurrence, or impact. So it is definitely possible to use an inadequate test and fail to detect it.
• Recognizing a system in current conditions is what makes the conditions a system. Recognizing conditions as a system is the reason for treating the conditions as a system.
• If a system is not recognized in the conditions, that does NOT mean the conditions are by default “an unknown system”.
• Nonetheless, treating conditions that are not offering a recognized system can be done nonetheless as if there is a system — but that is nothing more nor less than pursuing a hypothesis.

To finish this step and get to the next, we also need to understand that conditions which are evidently a non-system are not by default “chaotic”.

What is chaotic is, instead, the state of our conceptual modeling of order that we rely on to retain an interpretation of conditions.

In a chaotic state, our concepts do not provide actors and interactions that have any regularity in the form of structural coherence. But as we know primarily from science, our conceptual chaos usually reflects our current lack of knowledge about the elements and components of conditions. It is effectively a cognitive chaos.

Once again, we can treat conditions as if they are chaotic, but the presumption is a hypothesis, and our decision to pursue it is explainable mostly in terms of our motives, priorities and preferences.

And that may critically depend on what an observer’s responsibilities are.

We have a long history with what is known as decision science. As Chris Dowsett of Instagram has said, “Decisions need to be made quickly to keep the [business] moving forward based on what is knowable now. This is the job of the Decision Scientist… The Decision Scientist is looking to find insights as they relate to the decision at-hand.”

Step Four

As an example of contrasting responsibilities: we might assume that artists and managers, respectively, do not have the same motives, priorities and preferences. Yet they can easily have the same ambition — which is to obtain a usable meaning from the conditions that they treat as subject matter.

What normally distinguishes them from each other, in general, is that the artist, being the primary interpreter, is not responsible for providing value as defined by an external party. The manager, as the primary interpreter, is definitely responsible for provision of an external party’s version of value.

The more accurate way to point out this difference is as a matter of roles. The artist (a creator) their self makes all the decisions and decision criteria about whether any derived meaning is “useful”; the manager (a provider) uses both criteria and decisions from another authority aside from the self (a requestor). In real life, the same person can have all the roles, but that does not erase the differences. It just means that the roles, sticking to their respective responsibilities, are likely interacting and thereby influencing each other.

The importance of emphasizing the role is that it is the carrier of the motivation, priority, and preference that is applied to interpreting conditions for meaning — for making sense.

The only thing that makes a role required — and thereby its way of interpreting conditions — is an accepted need for a certain type of competency or compliance.

Step Five

Speaking in the abstract: a “desire” is just as easily the source of a “need” as might be a “requirement”. The importance of that difference is that a desire is an optional element of a future state while a requirement is not an optional element.

But whereas responsibility can pursue requirement OR desire, our usual experience of accountability revolves almost entirely around the not optional.

The dots to connect here are this:

• a way of interpreting conditions implies a role,
• *and a role implies an accountability.

That short set of connections is pretty ordinary and highly prevalent. Yet it applies to (and may be imposed on) only some kinds of making sense, in some situations. There is NOT only one kind of situation that defines “making sense”.

Step Six

Culture is the primary human-centric mode of interpreting uncertain or complex conditions for meaning.

Culture is itself a system of influences created by preferred interactions that are themselves reinforced by actively promoting some values above others.

(“Value” is always the significance of a distinction identified in a given context.)

All cultures therefore are based on the identification of acknowledged values.

The affect of culture is to effect virtual order that is addressed, in each moment, as the default state of conditions.

The virtual aspect of that order does not cause chaos or complexity to turn anything actual into something else. Instead, it resolves chaos or complexity by navigating them. For the person involved, the experience of the navigation becomes the acknowledged reality.

That seems inherently beneficial, as it prevents uncertainty from usually provoking functional paralysis. But what kind of drawback or harm might also be inherent in it?

Deciding what is a drawback is also well known to be a matter of priorities and preferences.

If a virtual order is accepted as the grounds for activity, and the activity then causes harm, then of course we will be likely to say that the harmful outcome stemmed from the gap between the virtual and a presumed actual order of existing conditions. Preventing or remediating harm is a powerful motive for challenging the virtual order’s “validity” and “desirability” as a resource or opportunity for activity.

Science has been the predominant mode of challenge and validation. Making sense scientifically has been the obvious and parallel alternative to culture. But the essence of science is not the desired or protected outcomes; its essence is its manner of investigation and interpretation.

Meanwhile, we know historically and empirically that outcomes of science can clearly influence culture, but also that culture most definitely can and does influence science.

Net: there is no special reason to conceptually quarantine “making sense” to the domain of science.

Step Seven

There is nothing about the label “sense-making” that changes that fact. The label does not replace “culture” as the indicator of a domain of experience and investigation into discoverable order in human or social contexts. Nor does it replace existing scientific methods with something not already being done.

What it does do is refer to human cognition as a driver of activity, specifically including considerations of technique involved in being a driver. (How can people deal with perceived complexity or uncertainty in a situation like XYZ?)

And in use, it respects that not all modes of making sense (cognitive techniques) are advisable or even tolerable in all circumstances.

The mapping of appropriate techniques to circumstances points mostly at the matter of who is defining requirements. And as certain endeavors evolve, they may identify and adopt requirements that call out for attempting, and adopting, techniques that would be new within their domain.

Sports adopted statistics; arts adopted technology; religion adopted architecture very very long ago; philosophy adopted linguistics; medicine adopted sociology; and so on.

Step Eight

To the extent that “sense-making” is an ambitious concept, it shares a certain usage vulnerability with other terms dedicated to “problem solving” such as service management and design thinking and Agile.

The vulnerability is in having the label hyperextended beyond both its original local value and its sustainable consistency. Except as parts of particular lexicons, those example terms bore no requirement or responsibility to fill a gap; their hyperextension was unnecessary.

However, their ability to bring attention to similarities of values and knowledge already existing (found or emerging) across domains had the potential, like marketing, to broaden perspectives and generate new credible localized approaches in, for example, both development and management. To be helpful, those terms did not need to dictate; they could already cultivate.

Sense-making need not be ambitious nor get hyperextended.

However, productivity is most often the reason why pressure exists on efforts of Making Sense. Said a little differently, pressures to “perform” lead to a primary interest on problem-solving, and people with that responsibility are going to gravitate quickly to things that look like performance enhancers in that case. Problems are the main practical reason why ideas in one domain urgently cross over into other domains.

A “problem” is a characterization of the experience of circumstances, not an exclusive truth. All problems are, by definition, a desired future value for which the approach to progress is not yet adequately specified.

“High Performance” is an ambition that fuels adherence to the “One Best Way” disposition on problem solving, but increasingly we learn that “best” is a function of real-time uncertainties and complexities, putting ever more emphasis on a level of awareness and hubris required specifically in the moment or given case.

Especially in making sense of ambiguous circumstances, what we don’t want is a technical specification before we get a grasp of applicable portable principles.

Usually, what makes the principles portable is communication that translates well. The forms of the communication allow one domain to interpret the example of another domain and recognize meaningful parallels. This is more often achieved by models and their parent frameworks than by specifications. But even if we see and obtain “new” models, the reason that they work is not new, and they should be inspected closely just to become sure about how, if at all, they are new.

More importantly, and in summary: acknowledging the motive for deciding an approach to making sense should include acknowledging the wide range of ways that meaning is established. Making sense is not new, it is not restricted to problem solving, and the evolution of its practice is not a matter of scientific breakthroughs as much as it is of broadening the grasp of existing knowledge. It is mostly about learning.