"What happens when the performance finally cracks?"

May 2026 brought discussions about what it actually costs to make things look easy.

Across sessions on facilitation, career transitions, language, change, complexity, power, AI, and the future, members kept arriving at the same moment: the one where the mask slips, the coping mechanism runs out, or the acceptance quietly turns into something more honest than agreement.

What surprised me most this month was how often that cracking wasn't the problem. It was the point.

In our Making Sense of Facilitation session, a member described the particular exhaustion of running a workshop that goes well — walking out of the room feeling energized, riding the adrenaline, and then crashing hard two days later, not quite sure what hit them. They'd been doing this for years without ever naming it. What broke open in the conversation was this: the things that cost the most are often the ones that look the most effortless. And somewhere in the gap between how much it took and how little anyone noticed, something accumulates.

That accumulation was everywhere this month.

May asked us some hard questions:

• What do we owe to a system that isn't giving back?
• When does acceptance become complicity, and when does resistance become its own kind of trap?
• If the environment is broken, at what point does trying to fix it just make you a better fixer in a broken environment?

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

Maybe the gap between who we perform ourselves to be and who we actually are isn't a professional skill — maybe it's the thing quietly costing us everything.

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

#1 The Hidden Cost of Performing Competence

One of the most consistent threads this month was the energy it takes to show up in a way the room can receive. This came up in facilitation, in IA office hours, in career transitions, and in our discussions about power and bosses — and each time, it circled the same quiet truth: performing competence costs more than actual competence does.

• Facilitators talked about training ten people in a day, reading the energy of a room, managing personalities, and still being expected to go out for drinks afterward.
• IA practitioners talked about dressing for the meeting they needed to have — choosing what to wear, whether to shave, which version of themselves would get this stakeholder across the line.
• Members who've been laid off described the paradox of selling themselves in a job market while being allergic to marketing.
• Several people who are autistic talked about masking not as a strategy but as an autopilot they didn't even know was running, right up until it stopped.

What emerged wasn't complaint. It was a kind of accounting — a moment of looking at all the invisible labor in the column and finally writing down the number.

"I spent the majority of my career not masking at all. Having no idea this was a thing people were doing. And being very disadvantaged because of it." — Overheard in What Is the 'People Part' of Information Architecture?

#2 Acceptance Isn't the Same Thing as Agreement

Across sessions on change, mindfulness, complexity, and career transitions, members kept returning to the question of what it actually means to accept something. And they kept finding that it's more complicated than it sounds.

• There's the acceptance that's just giving up.
• There's the acceptance that's strategic, going along with something long enough to change it from the inside.
• There's the acceptance that comes from burnout, where you've fought so long that you finally just stop.

And then there's a different kind, the one that several members seemed to arrive at this month — where you stop trying to make a broken environment match your expectations of it, not because you've surrendered, but because you've finally directed your energy somewhere it can actually move.

The improv analogy kept surfacing. “Yes, and.” Not because it's always the right move, but because fighting the premise of every scene is its own kind of exhaustion.

One member put it plainly: they'd spent years being the person who pointed out the domino effects, ran the risk analysis, and named the problems. They were starting to wonder whether the skill they actually needed to build was how to deliver a message — because the people who get paid the most aren't always the ones who know the most. They're the ones who've learned to say things in ways that land.

"It's not that change is coming. It's that it's coming regardless of how you like it. The question is just: what's in your toolkit for surviving it when you're not the one in charge of it?" — Overheard in Making Sense of Change

#3 The System Is Optimizing for Something. It Might Not Be You.

May brought a lot of conversations that started in specific, practical places — AI implementations, career pivots, transcript management — and kept arriving somewhere bigger. The pattern beneath all of them was a version of the same question: who is this thing designed to serve?

Members talked about:

• Algorithms that have quietly separated two people in a relationship into different realities, each convinced they're seeing the world as it is.
• Companies building AI-generated tooling, measuring productivity in lines of code, and then being confused by the quality of what they got.
• Diversity and inclusion committees staffed by the very people they're supposed to protect, doing unpaid labor for an organization that treats it as a nice-to-have.
• A doorman who got replaced by an automatic door that couldn't hail a cab — and how the company saved money without ever noticing what they lost.

What ran through all of it was a growing literacy for how systems behave when no one is tending them. Not maliciously. Just optimizing. The machines in The Matrix, one member pointed out, weren't evil. They were simply doing what they were built to do. And the hardest part of that scenario to believe isn't the pods. It's the idea that you'd know.

"The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." — Overheard in Career Transitions

#4 Roughness Is Not a Weakness

A quieter theme this month was about the value of showing unfinished thinking.

In The Analog Leap, members drew flavors, sketched perspectives, and made marks they couldn't quite explain. In the Sensemaking Lab, a member got direct feedback that the diagram she was making for herself needed to stay unshared long enough to actually do its job. In our Knowledge Management session, the conversation kept returning to whether the friction in learning something (the pause, the reconsideration, the checkpoint) was a bug or a feature.

What members kept finding was that the polished version doesn't always do what we need it to do. The rough version (the one you draw to think, not to present) is often where the real work happens. And in a moment where AI can produce something that looks finished in seconds, there's something worth protecting in the scrappy, half-baked, genuinely-in-progress thing. It turns out that roughness is a signal. It says: this is still being thought. Come help me think it.

"Some of the most important diagrams I've made lasted for approximately 45 seconds — because that was how long it took to get through that conversation." — Overheard in Sensemaking Lab

In June I'll be hosting a member-only discussion I'm calling “Discernment: The Ultimate IA Skill.” Discernment is knowing what matters, when to act, and when to wait. The goal of information architecture work is not knowledge alone, but wise judgment in context. We will explore what it means to assess and improve our own discernment in IA work.

This discussion will be Friday June 5 at 2 PM ET. Members only. Hope to see you there.

— Abby Covert, Chief Sensemaker