The Sensemakers Club is a community-powered education space where curious people come to grow without performing or pretending to have it all figured out.
Are you a sensemaker?
A sensemaker is someone who helps people understand complex, messy, or ambiguous situations and turn that understanding into better decisions and action.
It’s not a job title.
It’s a role someone plays when clarity is needed. Some people make sense for a season, and some of us are professionals and hobbyists.
You might be a sensemaker if you...
- Translate between teams
- Fix structural issues no one else sees
- Clock patterns others don’t
- Care deeply about clarity and inclusion
- Question what’s next
- Maintain systems that prevent chaos
- Document what others skip
This week at the club
We are on our end of season break this week! No sessions are scheduled. Season 2 starts next week!
Browse our discussion groups or check out our full calendar.
2 PM ET AI Field Notes
Hosted by Dan Cooney & Jolène Bouchon
A collaborative space for sensemakers to share insights, experiments, and questions related to their experiences with AI, fostering skill growth and documentation of evolving patterns in the field.
3 PM ET The Analog Leap
Hosted by Kelly Hughes
A fast-moving creative exploration of analog visual making, where we'll engage with paper and pen to unlock your creativity and embrace an experimentalist attitude.
2 PM ET Making Sense of Change
Hosted by Skipper Chong Warson & Laura Chance
A curious group exploring the complexities of change and develops frameworks for effectively creating, embracing, or managing it across various scales and domains.
2 PM ET Ethics Open Mic
Hosted by Brenda Ray & Vladimira Girgignova
A thoughtful group focused on exploring the ethical implications of sensemaking work and addressing challenging questions without fear of the unknown.
1 PM ET Shitty Maps DoJoe
Taught by Joe Elmendorf
A hands-on practice session for getting reps making shitty maps alongside others — showing up, practicing, and building fluency rep by rep.
2 PM ET Systems Lab
Hosted by Holly Schroeder
A collaborative workshop for real-life problem solving — approaching challenges with curiosity to identify constraints and build practical, sustainable systems that reduce everyday friction.
2 PM ET Collaborative Sensemaking
Hosted by Matt Arnold
Explores how people make meaning together amid ambiguity and complexity, examining the trust, roles, and structures that help groups stay aligned and move forward without perfect clarity.
What’s going on?
Week of September 14, 2026
Abby Covert
Chief Sensemaker
Last week Sensemaking Through Play (Sept. 8) took a deliberately low-key, no-pressure break from an overwhelming week with a round of the drawing-and-guessing game. Productive But Stuck (Sept. 9) was a workshop on collaborative sensemaking that introduced a "collaborative operating system" for naming the trade-offs teams make between productivity, quality, consensus, and satisfaction. Making Sense of Other Humans (Sept. 10) used sociologist Erving Goffman's front stage/backstage framework to dig into why people show up so differently in a one-on-one versus a group setting. Making Sense of Money (Sept. 11) explored risk through a single prompt: if you had an extra $1,000 you couldn't spend on "stuff," where would you put it, and why?
Themes from last week:
- Naming the trade-off is half the battle.
- The masks we put on to survive the room we're in.
- Meeting ourselves with a little more grace when things are hard.
Gaps between our capability and our confidence create discomfort.
Take our FREE 24-question assessment to reveal the gaps in your unique sensemaker shape.
Request the Sensemaker Assessment