We can’t make meaning without first making some sense

Plenty of things don’t make sense in our life, in the world. So it’s not until we get some perspective to look back that we are more able to make sense of it. And then... then we put meaning to it.

‘This happened... and NOW I understand why or what it was all about.'

We can muck about, procrastinating, avoiding action yet still try to make sense of things. But it kind of doesn’t work that way.

The sooner you can get on the other side of something, the better.

Decide. Do. Deliver. Get something done.

You’ll make more sense once you're on the other side of it. And then you can work out what it all means. 

7 hours of meetings and no time for work

This is a reality, stuck in meetings each day, trying to do the work, but being locked in back-to-back meetings giving you no time to actually do the work.

Is this your world too?

While we need meetings to collaborate, communicate, co-design and co-create, most organisations still haven’t worked out how to support their leaders to run meetings in ways that are more productive, creative, effective and collaborative.

These are the four outcomes good sensemaking + facilitation delivers in meetings:

🌕 productive

🌕 creative

🌕 effective

🌕 collaborative.

At your next meeting, ask or enquire: What sensemaking techniques are we using today, to help us understand each other and help us make these important decisions?

If you get blank faces as a response, or ’the PowerPoint deck’, or ‘Karen is taking minutes’ … these all get the ’no/wrong’ buzzer from me. Bzzzzt!

With 7 hours of meetings, the meetings aren’t working. They’re not making sense; likely going around in circles; and lacking focus, leadership and outcomes.

You need just one sensemaker in the room to completely change how a meeting works.

Are you the one? 

Could you do it in reverse

I collected the mail from my mailbox yesterday at 11am and saw the postal delivery worker, the ‘postie’, finishing delivering mail to other letterboxes.

Usually she delivers the mail to our area at about 3pm.

‘Hi!’ I said. ‘Hey you seem a bit earlier, a different time today?’

‘Yes', she said, 'I thought I’d do my round in reverse today; you know, keep it fresh.

She went on...'It’s easy to become a machine, doing the same thing, same way, same route, riding up streets the same direction, the same order and same views. But wow, this has really snapped me out of things today; I’ve had to think and not just go by habit.'

She delivered the mail and a great insight.

What’s the current way you do something? And how could you reverse it? Even a small part of it? Go try.

Creativity and novel thinking data suggests this helps us see new things, make new connections, make sense in other ways.

Most of all, it changes our locked-in perspective.

Are we on the same page yet

Getting on the same page is a collaborative and strategic need we have and yet it can take such an effort for us to get there.

Perhaps some transparency might help. That word 'transparency' ... meaning 'easy to be seen'.

How transparent is your thinking? How well can you see what you're thinking so you can communicate it, share it and transfer it to others?

It can take us so long to get our heads around what we’re thinking, let alone understand what others are thinking! In the meantime, thoughts seem opaque, cloudy and thick - rather than transparent, clear and understandable.

And there's no need to over simplify, just to understand. We can tend to resort to lazy methods like lists and clumps of unsorted information, expecting others to do the connecting of themes, the joining of dots and the revealing of patterns.

But oh, that keeps us on different pages.

We can do better.

Today’s cray-cray world of information, ideas, happenings and data needs us to be able to:

🎫 get to grips with information quickly,

🎫 get ourselves (as a group) on the same page, and then

🎫 decide ... so we can get on with it. This is sensemaking.

Making sense of the strategy

It is one thing to get the leadership team, board and executive together to plan and identify and prepare a strategy.

Then comes the work of trying to embed the strategy - or in other words... make people follow it.

Getting people to buy in to new directions, new ideas and changes in strategy requires sense making. We can’t just pump out some ‘comms and marketing’ in an effort to ‘sell’ the message, create the urgency and ‘cascade it’ down throughout the organisation. These too often vanilla flavored communications have motherhood statements, cliches and corny ‘Ra Ra’ slogans. (I know; I used to write them in my previous roles in leadership communications!)

But they're tired and dated in our world of clever internet memes that burst forth every day!

As you plan for next year and decide when and how your senior leaders are getting together to do the all-important strategic work, be sure to include in that planning how you’ll make sense of it for people.

Sensemaking Your Strategy is a thing. Don’t leave it to cliched comms and marketing.

Put a sensemaking filter over the strategy so it makes sense to the people you expect to bring it to life.