"What happens when the system you're inside is optimizing for something different than what you actually care about?"

In April 2026 members kept running into the same friction: we are doing work that requires judgment, care, and nuance inside structures that measure none of those things. This tension was most obvious in sessions on AI and work, career transitions, knowledge management, ethics, power, values in tech, neurodiversity, and the future.

What surprised me most this month was how often the instinct wasn't to fight it, it was to go quiet and do the work anyway.

In our Incentives Shape Architecture session, a member described years of doing information architecture projects without ever asking permission. Asking permission meant explaining, and explaining meant convincing, and convincing took longer than just doing the work and showing the results. Their advice: stop naming it. Just do it.

But April kept circling back to harder questions:

• What happens when the system doesn't notice?
• When both teams can report a successful quarter, and the thing that was quietly broken stays broken?
• When is it right to go quiet and do the work anyway vs. be loud and direct in our evangelism for change?

Many of the discussions at the Sensemakers Club in April 2026 pointed toward the same realization:

Maybe the problem isn't that we can't explain the value of our work, maybe it's that the metrics were never designed to see it.

Below is a recap of the meta themes that we saw across our discussion sessions in April 2026. If you are interested in our upcoming sessions, check out our discussion group list.

#1 The Incentives Don't Match the Work

Across sessions on AI, values in tech, knowledge management, and career transitions, members wrestled with the gap between what they were being asked to optimize for and what they actually knew to be true.

A consultant's productivity dashboard rated engineers who were known to be excellent as low performers. An AI-generated tagging system that contradicted three months of careful taxonomy work was allowed to ship because it hit a conversion target. Members found themselves building dashboards they couldn't show anyone, because the data told a story that was true but not safe to share.

The problem wasn't dishonesty. The problem was that the incentive structure rewarded a different kind of seeing, and there was no column in anyone's reporting for the thing that was quietly breaking.

"I created this dashboard and I'm like, I can't show anybody this dashboard because people will make decisions based on this dashboard and it's not a useful dashboard." — Overheard in AI Field Notes

#2 The Body Keeps the Score of Mismatched Systems

The neurodiversity session in late April went somewhere unexpected. What started as a conversation about navigating change became a careful inventory of the cost of masking and the energy it takes to perform normalcy in environments that weren't built for how your brain actually works. One member described going home from an ordinary social interaction and crying simply from the sustained effort of pretending to recognize faces, follow unwritten rules, and seem fine. Several members talked about caregiving — parents with dementia, a mother-in-law newly moved in, healthcare systems requiring hours of advocacy for referrals that turned out to be wrong. What the conversation circled was the idea that burnout isn't usually caused by one hard thing. It's caused by the accumulation of small frictions that never get named as a system problem. The tools that seemed to help were small and honest: a question asked on Sunday afternoons, breakfast before 11am, a partner who fills the snack bag.

"I'm trying to figure out how to recover from burnout without professional help, because I'm going to be in the queue for a long time. The theme that keeps coming back is self-care — even if it's just little teeny tiny ways." — Overheard in Making Sense of Neurodiversity & Neuroinclusion

#3 Power Is a Verb

The Making Sense of Other Humans session on power spent real time on a deceptively simple distinction: whether you think of power as a noun (a thing you hold or don't hold) changes everything about how you experience it.

One facilitator had been going down a research rabbit hole and kept returning to the idea of potencia versus potestas: the power to act from internal capacity versus institutional authority over others. Most members had been living mostly in the second definition, experiencing power as something other people held and could revoke. What emerged in the conversation was more complicated and more useful:

• Influence moves in all directions
• Expertise is a form of power even when it goes unrecognized
• The people doing the most to keep things functioning were often the least visible in the org chart.

Members described learning, sometimes painfully, when to speak and when to ask a question instead.

"I can only do my job because catalogers did their job. Without the underlying structure, it's just a big haystack and no one will find anything." — Overheard in Incentives Shape Architecture

If April had a through-line, it was this: the structures we build are only as good as the human conditions that surround them.

Taxonomy doesn't fail because someone chose the wrong label. It fails because two teams had different incentives and no one had the authority (or the safety) to say so.

Onboarding materials don't go unread because users are lazy. They go unread because the system wasn't designed to hold the person trying to use them.

That's what we'll be sitting with in May.

My next IA discussion goes straight to the heart of what April kept circling: the people part of information architecture. On May 8th we will be discussing the human dynamics that shape structure, decisions, and outcomes more than we usually admit. Not the diagrams. Not the deliverables. The messy, political, relational reality of trying to make sense together.

If April taught us anything, it's that we already have a lot to say about that.

Join me for What Is the 'People Part' of Information Architecture? May 8th at 2 PM ET. Members Only.

-Abby Covert, Chief Sensemaker