Training Exercises for Improving Sensemaking Skills

This book deals with the process of improving our sensemaking capabilities into how to: scan environments actively to gather data that is relevant to pressing issues; interpret usefully what we see - including recognizing and framing problems/opportunities and skills in transforming data into information; make effective decisions - including creating useful rules for deciding how to decide, and how to talk with ourselves and others to receive and offer useful information, make wise choices, and implement decisions well; and evaluate well what we have done and what has occurred. These four topics are the activities of sensemaking - an ongoing conversation with yourself and others about what is really happening and why it is occurring. Sensemaking involves placing stimuli into some kind of framework that is understandable to ourselves. Usually sensemaking is done automatically - unconsciously - without thinking actively about the usefulness or accuracy of our frames, or the process being used in our framing. However, sensemaking can be done consciously, that is, using controlled thinking instead of the usual automatic thinking processes. The contributions in this volume offer skill-building case exercises that are written to help you improve your sensemaking abilities.