Someone mistakenly attributed the term “sensemaking” to me recently, so I knew it should be the topic of my next email to you.

Karl E. Weick is most commonly credited as the "father of sensemaking." He introduced the concept to organizational studies in the late 1960s and later popularized it through his influential 1995 book Sensemaking in Organizations.

I came to the term accidentally while writing a book about information architecture that ended up being called “How to Make Sense of Any Mess” — when the term “sensemaker” became the way I referred to my readers.

Many years later I got to write a talk with Dan Klyn positing that sensemaking and placemaking are two skills areas within information architecture. In that talk we broke sensemaking down into empathizing and modeling.

So what is sensemaking?

Sensemaking is the deeply personal process we use to understand complex, messy, and/or ambiguous situations so we can make better decisions and take more thoughtful action.

This often looks like intuition, common sense or having good judgement.

• Intuition is a direct sense of something being true, right, or off, without being able to fully explain why. It bypasses the deliberate process entirely.
• Common sense is something generic enough to always apply, which information problems barely ever fit into.
• Judgment is conclusory and evaluative. It arrives at a verdict and frequently places things or people into binaries of good/bad or right/wrong.

In reality, sensemaking is more about pattern recognition, discernment, and timing, developed in context to your lived experience.

• Pattern recognition is the ability to notice that something resembles something experienced before, or that things are arranging in a familiar or translatable way.
• Discernment is knowing what matters, when to act, and when to wait. It is wise judgement in context to the circumstances.
• Timing is everything in sensemaking. I wrote in Timeless Sensemaking for Modern Sensemakers that there is not a single example in my career in which I could have sold the work I did even 6 months earlier. The timing just wasn’t right.

If you have ever wondered why a consultant can come in and say the same thing you have said for years, but be listened to — it’s because something has shifted the organization’s incentive architecture that made room for the solution you were peddling powered by good judgement.

Meanwhile a strong sensemaker has the discernment to know when to strike and when to just wait.

If you have been relying on intuition, common sense and judgement but haven’t yet invested in pattern recognition, discernment, and understanding how timing and incentives impact your ability to get good work done … I bet you are one frustrated sensemaker.

Been there, done that. Wrote a book about it.