“What have we been trained to trust that maybe we shouldn’t”

March 2026 brought discussions about what happens when the thinking is right but the power isn't there to act on it.

Across sessions on language, neurodiversity, finances, change, AI, facilitation, and the future, members kept returning to the same gap: between seeing clearly and being able to do something about what you see. Between knowing what's wrong with the system and having any lever to pull. Between carrying a belief forward from childhood and realizing, sometimes decades later, that it was never really yours to carry.

What surprised me most this month was how often the conversation wasn't about finding answers. It was about learning to trust the question.

In our session on power and clarity, a case study landed with unusual force: an information architect who sees that the structure is broken two weeks before launch. Product can't change scope. Engineering can't delay. Sales has already committed. And the IA is asked to write help text that explains the kludgy parts to customers.

“You are responsible for clarity, but not empowered to create it.”

… perhaps you know that feeling?

March asked us some toughies:

• what do you owe to the truth when the system isn't built to hold it?
• And what are we each carrying … in our bodies, our money stories, our assumptions about other people?
• What was handed to us so long ago we stopped noticing the weight?

Many of the discussions at the Sensemakers Club in March 2026 could be summed up in one proclamation:

The gap between seeing and doing isn't a personal failure, and it might be the most honest description of sensemaking work.

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

#1 The Stories We Carry About Money (and Everything Else)

Money surfaced as one of the more honest conversations of the month. Not because members talked about budgets or strategy, but because they talked about the invisible beliefs formed in childhood kitchens and tight Septembers and parents who fought about numbers after dinner.

What emerged wasn't a lesson about financial planning. It was a reckoning with how much of our present relationship to safety, security, and worth was written for us before we had any say.

Members traced core beliefs and noticed those same beliefs showing up in relationships, in how we handle job loss, in whether we can look at a spreadsheet without spiraling.

The conversation opened into a broader question the month kept returning to: how much of the anxiety we're carrying is actually ours, and how much was handed down?

"Even though he had a secure job, it still wasn't enough and I realized that knife had gone right into my core belief." - Overheard in Making Sense of Money

 

#2 Burnout Isn't a Stamina Problem

Burnout came up in nearly every session this month. Sometimes it was the main topic, sometimes as a quiet undertow in discussions about AI, change, career, facilitation.

What emerged across all of them was a consistent reframe:

Burnout isn't about not being tough enough. It's about depletion that accumulates past the threshold where rest can reach it.

The distinction that landed hardest was between exhaustion and burnout. The difference being not tiredness but the loss of caring, the disappearance of motivation, the moment when the things that used to pull you forward stop working.

Members talked about the grief involved in recognizing burnout and grieving the version of yourself you thought you'd be by now, grieving productivity as identity, and grieving hobbies that had quietly become obligations. And something tender came through in the noticing: that the body knows before the mind does. A funny taste. Shoulders that won't come down. The inability to finish a sentence.

"A nap won't fix burnout. The problem is that when you're burnt out, you're tired and you don't care." -Overheard in Making Sense of Neurodiversity & Neuroinclusion

 

#3 The Thinking That Doesn't Make It Out of Our Heads

Two workshops this month (one on making shitty maps, one promoting analog sketching) kept circling the same problem: that we've built tools optimized for polish, and in doing so, we've built a culture where thinking can't be shared until it looks finished.

The argument in these sessions wasn't for sloppiness. It was for lowering the barrier to externalizing thought, getting something on paper before you know what it is, so the paper can help tell you.

Members experimented with this directly, and the debrief kept returning to one observation: when you share something visibly unfinished, something shifts in the room. People lean in. They want to fix it, add to it, argue with it. Roughness isn't weakness. It turns out it might be the fastest path to real collaboration.

Related conversations in AI Field Notes and Making Sense of the Future sessions pushed this further: that the obsession with acceleration and polish might be costing us the friction that actually produces judgment.

"Polish no longer tells you anything about the quality or rigor underneath it. The result is a lot of garbage that looks great and a lot of good thinking that never makes it out of our heads." - Overheard in Shitty Maps Workshop Part 1

 

#4 Language Is Not Neutral, and Neither Is Silence

Across sessions on language, neurodiversity, other humans, and change, members returned repeatedly to the weight of words (how they arrive, how they land, how they age.)

The conversations weren't abstract. They were about navigating identity with family members in real time, about terms that shift faster than any of us can keep up, about the difference between someone who doesn't know better and someone who doesn't care.

One framework kept resurfacing: that what looks like ignorance might be unfamiliarity, and what looks like malice might be old habit.

The instinct to treat every wrong word as evidence of bad faith was examined and found wanting. But so was the opposite, the instinct to absorb everything without naming it.

What the month seemed to ask for was something harder than either: the willingness to stay curious about other people's maps of the world, even when they differ from your own. And the patience to find the right moment to say something, knowing there may never be a perfect one.

"I have gotten really good at what I call recognizing the difference between an accident and an asshole." - Overheard in Making Sense of Language

 

My next information architecture discussion is called “Incentives Shape Architecture: When does a mess become a problem worth fixing?” it’s happening April 10th at 2 PM ET for members only.We will be talking about how understanding our motivations and intentions in relationship to other people's incentives matter more than most of the lessons in information architecture work. 

— Abby Covert, Chief Sensemaker