Development for Leaders
Series II
1-Minute Daily
Day 16
SENSE-MAKING
I first ran into sensemaking from an article I found authored by Kurtz and Snowden in concert with an IBM relationship:
“The new dynamics of strategy: Sense-making in a complex and complicated world.”
The article is available online so I won’t quote from it, but suffice it to say, that how we make sense of ours and others meaning making is an important addition to developmentalism, IMHO.
“Sensemaking or sense-making is the process by which people give meaning to their collective experiences. It has been defined as “the ongoing retrospective development of plausible images that rationalize what people are doing” (Weick, Sutcliffe, & Obstfeld, 2005, p. 409).” Wikipedia
You can understand that none of us can separate our own meaning making systems from the collective sensemaking that surrounds us. Therefore, making sense of the collective and those conditions that are being made sense in and about, is key.
Snowden, et al. Identified a framework in 1999 called cynefin (pronounced kuh nevin).
Cynefin offers five decision-making contexts or “domains” — obvious (known until 2014 as simple),[6] complicated, complex, chaotic, and disorder — that help managers to identify how they perceive situations and make sense of their own and other people’s behaviour.[a] The framework draws on research into systems theory, complexity theory, network theory, and learning theories.[7]
While Cynefin is a decision making framework, it’s extraordinarily useful in nuancing CAPABILITY as perspective, language, task performance, subjectivity, ego position, talent and affect as we observe ourselves and others moving in and out and among these frameworks.
Mike R Jay, Developmentalist
Written by the founder Mike R. Jay, Developmentalist,
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Mike R. Jay is a developmentalist utilizing consulting, coaching, mentoring, and trusted advice emergent from dynamic inquiry as a means to cue, scaffold, support, lift, and protect; offering inspiration to aspiring leaders who are interested in humaning where being, doing, having, becoming, contributing, protecting, and letting go help people have generative lives.
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