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Practice Change Capacity Development

Making Sense for a Sustainable Agricultural Future: An Overview of the Concept of Sensemaking

A report for the AgFutures Initiative

November 2008

Peter Howden
Department of Primary Industries, Victoria

Published by the Victorian Government Department of Primary Industries
Bendigo, November2008.

© Copyright State of Victoria, 2008

ISBN 978-1-74217-369-6

This publication is copyright. No part may be reproduced by any process except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968.

Find more information about the Department of Primary Industries on the Internet at www.dpi.vic.gov.au

Acknowledgments:

Thanks to Nicole Kennon from the Practice Change Capacity Development team for her input into this review

Disclaimer:

This publication may be of assistance to you but the State of Victoria and its employees do not guarantee that the publication is without flaw of any kind or is wholly appropriate for your particular purposes and therefore disclaims all liability for any error,loss or other consequence which may arise from you relying on any information in this publication.

Table of Contents

  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Background
  • 3. Sensemaking Situations
    • A moment in time:
    • Two weeks later:
    • At the meeting:
  • 4. What is Sensemaking?
    • The Properties of Sensemaking
      • Grounded in identity construction
      • Retrospective
      • Enactive of sensible environments
      • Social
      • Ongoing
      • Focused on and by extracted cues
      • Driven by plausibility rather than accuracy
    • Some Other Elements of Sensemaking
      • Our cognitive ‘toolbox’
      • Sensemaking, narrative and complexity
      • Cynefin and complexity
  • 5. The Short Story
  • 6. Lesson for Creative Futures
    • Some general principles to keep in mind
    • Tools for Sensemaking
      • Boundary objects
      • Narrative analysis
      • Scenarios

In Summary

Glossary

References

1. Introduction

This paper is for the AgFutures initiative (AF), which is seeking to improve understanding of how agricultural communities make sense of the change that is happening around them, and to increase the skills of, and tools available to, AF staff in delivering information resources where and howthey are most needed.

The purpose of this paper is to overview the concept of‘sensemaking’, most prominently outlined by Weick in his 1995 book Sensemaking in Organizations. The sensemaking concept, in simple terms, describes how people make sense of their experiences in the world. However, while the concept seems intuitively straight forward, O’Connell (1988) warns that sensemaking is not something that can be quickly communicated and absorbed, and that it might not resonate at all with some. But for those with patience the concept can provide powerful, rich, and useful insights.

Note that the concept investigated for this document is represented by the compound word sensemaking (as used by Weick), as distinct from the hyphenated word sense-making which canbe used interchangeably with sensemaking but is most often used to represent arange of tools or processes for making sense. Some sense-making tools will be reviewed at the end of this document.

In short, the purpose of this review is to gain a better theoretical understanding of the concept of sensemaking in order to better understand how people makesense in complex situations, and to give rigour to the future selection of sense-making tools for the AgFuturesproject.

In this paper I will introduce the concept of sensemaking and give a brief outline of the underpinning concepts. I will then summarise the lessons in the literature on sensemaking and some related concepts for the delivery of services to regional communities.

I will conclude with some recommendations for how knowledge building processes might be managed so as to optimise opportunities for sensemaking in complex change processes.

2. Background

Researchers in public management has been noting for sometime now that the management of Australia’s natural resources is becoming more complex with increasingly conflicting demands and expectations on government, industry and the community (e.g. see Petris 2005). To improve governance ofthis complex system we need to increase the ability of individuals and groups to work with ambiguity and equivocality (Wright 2005). An important part of this is how individuals and group make sense in complex decision-making environments.

Weick’s work on sensemaking considers how people responding crisis situations, for example, ‘friendly fire’ incidents1 during the Gulf War (Weick et al. 2005), a nurse’s response to a sudden deterioration in the health of a patient (Weick 1995), or fire-fighters’ reactions to a sudden escalation of fire conditions (Weick 1993). Sensemaking situations can be sudden and shocking, or they can be emergent; they can happen over a period of time, with many of the clues being subtle and not identified by many people until the evidence accumulates (in the above examples, compare a ‘friendly fire’ incident with a nurse’s accumulated evidence of a child’s declining health). Different time scales are evident in the context of AgFutures; for example, the emergence of climate change as a threat over a period of time and the (relatively) sudden financial crisis – or perhaps the outbreak of equine influenza.

Why is it important for us to understand sensemaking? Because we need to better appreciate how people make sense of complex situations;how we might manage the resources we provide them in such a way as to make them more easily accessible to communities in sensemaking situations; and, whether the processes we run to enhance the sustainability of communities are appropriately designed to support communities to make sense in complex decision-making environments.

3. Sensemaking Situations

A moment in time:

You are walking to work. It is hot; over 40oC. Aroad is on your right. To your left is parkland. Coming towards you on the footpath are several people. A man and a woman wearing business suits are chatting to one another. Another woman has purple spiked hair, black clothes, black-linedeyes and multiple piercings. A fourth person sits down on a bench seat and looks in your direction. He is wearing tracksuit pants and a singlet, has ashaved head, and is covered in tattoos. You have a radio earpiece in and the news is on. So far the reader has spoken about a car bomb in Pakistan, the rising price of food and petrol, amurder in Adelaide, a booming market for milk products to China,and Britney Spears is pregnant again.

This just some of the ‘data’ available to you at this time. Other data might include how you are feeling that day, what you have got to finish at work, the party you are going to at the weekend (or the one you made a fool of yourself at last week).

You might be largely oblivious to the traffic and the content of the park. You may barely notice the two people in suits. The purple haired woman perhaps stands out, and you may have decided that she is a Goth…probably unemployed…and thought little more of it. The tattooed man makes you a bit nervous. He looks like he might be dangerous. You move over a little bit to the left until you pass him. What was that on the radio? “Oh yes, I wonder what the situation in China means for Jason in the Dairy Team.”, and “oh dear! Isn’t it time Britney had her tubes tied…”   In the afternoon talk in the tearoom turnsto terrorism; “Hey wasn’t there another car bomb in Afghanistan?”

You have not got the time or the brain computing power to process all this data in detail. So you have to take mental ‘short-cuts’.  You will process most of this data, but only pay attention to some of it; and close attention to even less. What you paymore attention to might depend on your goals for the day, your frame of mind, or what has concerned you recently. Not all of that data will be processed ‘accurately’. But more on this later…

Two weeks later:

You are walking down the same path, this time on the way to an important meeting on a climate change project. “Gee, it’s hot again… It’s been like that for a while (it has certainly been hotter than last year)”. Some of the eucalypts in the park are looking a bit water-stressed. You notice a black Honda Accord Euro on the side of the road. You bought one just like it on the weekend. You think they look cool. You walk past the same man with the tats, but this time without noticing him. You have the radio earpiece in, but nothing catches your attention.

The events occurring in these vignettes are a bit mundane, but the purpose is to demonstrate that we are making sense of the world aroundus all of the time. Further, each person in these vignettes is seeing, hearing and making sense of different things; or importantly, making sense of the same things in different ways. Also, what you notice and what is available for you to make sense of can depend on the context you are in.

Karl Weick’s (1995) concept of sensemaking, though,is largely about more complex situations. It is about circumstances where something in the stream of information you are processing causes you to pause, is a shock, or doesnot fit with what is ‘normal’. The form and content of such shocks can affect how you make sense of them.

Let’s introduce another vignette and take this story we have developed further.

At the meeting:

You are seated around a table in the meeting for your inter-agency climate change project. Gathered around that table are all the senior managers from the various stakeholder organisations. This includes people from a number of state and local government departments and some farmer groups. The Program Leader calls for hush and thendrops a bomb shell. She announces that CSIRO scientists have just concluded that the climate has flipped out of its warming phase. While the ice caps have been melting and breaking from the poles, this has had the effect of spreading the area of ice more thinly over a wider area. This, and increased cloud coverfrom forests burning in Indonesia and Brazil,have increased the albedo (reflectiveness) of Earth and counteracted the green house conditions. The climate is about to plunge into a rapid cooling. We have been asked to conclude all current research into warming and reconfigure our program to cope with the implications of a major cooling event.

The room immediately erupts into argument. The head ofa farmer group, loudly pronounces his certainty that this is just a natural fluctuation. His family have been farming for 150 years and they have seen droughts and cold spells before; Change is normal. He has been saying this about global warming for two years (although you thought he was just starting to accept the idea of climate change).

A state government person announces his disgust. This is the third change to the project in three years and he is concerned about yet another disruption to his funding and his staff. You think he has completely overlooked the significance of the announcement.

At lunch, people converge into factions. In your group they begin discussing the weakness of the Program Manager in not standing up to the Secretary. “She is buddies with the climate scientists at CSIRO,” one says,“and must be influenced by them”. All in the group are certain that the CSIRO is wrong. “What was that about albedo? She had no data to support that claim? This must be a short downward fluctuation in a wider trend”. The group tends to believe that this is an anomaly and the better strategy is to prepare for a warming.

It will be a while before the group will regain the level of collaborative understanding that has developed over the life of the program.

Maybe this scenario does not seem sensible to you. Perhaps if I wrote this in 2000 and spoke of four commercial airliners being hijacked and the World Trade Centre towers being destroyed, you would have said the same thing.

Sensemaking situations are often ‘unimaginable’. This is why they have such an impact on people. But as we will see, sensemaking situations don’t have to involve terrorist acts or environmental catastrophesto be unimaginable. They just have to be something outside of your sense of what is real and true.

4. What is Sensemaking?

Sensemaking is about how people make ‘meaning’ out of an event, or events, in an endless stream of experiences.

Acts of sensemaking are concerned with finding small details that fit together and flesh out hunches to create meaningful worldswhere sensible decisions can be taken (Weick 1995 p. 133)

To make sense, you must structure the unknown, placing all sorts of stimuli into some from of framework so that you can ‘comprehend, explain, understand, attribute, extrapolate and predict’ (Starbuck &Milliken, in Weick 1995). In order for an event to make sense, it has to fit with the frame that is already in your head; your ‘mental model’ of the world. If it does not, if something is at variance with the ‘normal’ way of the world, the loss of sense can be puzzling or troubling (Weick 1995). You are then forced to go through a process to resolve this problematic situation, to construct a plausible story about what is happening in order to resume your normal course of action – to feel comfortable.

So, the sensemaking experience is not what happens to people, but what they do with what happens to them (Short, in Busche 2006). Events occurring around an individual combine with internal cognitive maps,biases, emotional states, and motivations that result in their moment-to-moment experience. Each person, in effect, creates their own experience.

This is the main focus of Weick’s writing on sensemaking. It is not so much about the encounter with the man with the tattoos, but about a sudden change in your world that can have a strong emotional impact on you (e.g. an announcement that the climate has flipped into a cooling). That is not to ignore the elements of sensemaking that go on all the time (Gioia and Mehra,in Weick et al. 2005). Much of our life is routine and made up of situationsthat do not demand our full attention, but these can modify our mental models subconsciouslyin intricate ways through assimilation of subtle cues over time. Change in ourmental model of the world is slow and continuous, but some situations have the potential to create profound changes. Henceforward, when I refer to sensemaking situations, I will be referring (as does Weick) to significant shocks in the everyday flow of events.

In the next section I will delve a little more deeply intothe theory of sensemaking. Should this level of detail not be of interest toyou, or should you be disinterested in the theory, I suggest you skip tochapter 5 (page 19) where I provide a summary of the theory and discuss the keylessons from this review and the implications for practice.

The Properties of Sensemaking

Weick (1995) is careful to distinguish sensemaking from concepts such as interpretation and understanding. Sensemaking he says is the process you use to reach an understanding or interpretation of an event. He sets out seven properties that set it apart from these other concepts.

Sensemaking is:

  • grounded in identity construction
  • retrospective
  • enactiveof sensible environments
  • social
  • ongoing
  • focused on and by extracted cues, and
  • driven by plausibility rather than accuracy.

Grounded inidentity construction

Depending on who I am, states Weick (1995), ‘my definitionof what is “out there” will also change’. The establishing and maintaining of identity is a core underpinning of sensemaking. The self you present to others is dependent on the situation you find yourself in and who or what you are representing. In turn that identity is shaped by the situation, and how others treat you. You can have an identity as part of an organisation, an identity in your home life, or other identities in other social situations. These identities can be substantially different and even contain contradictory elements. For example, a farmer on a government committee might appear to hold opinions that differ from those you think he would hold when he is on the farm (abit more on this in the discussion on ‘culture’ below).

When people face an unsettling sensemaking situation,this often translates into (largely subconscious) questions such as who am I, what am I doing, what matters, and why does it matter? These are not trivial questions state Weick et.al. (2005), they are about our very identity.

Retrospective

Put simply, when we read something, see something, or discuss something, we are immediately making sense of something that is past. Anything that effects memory can affect our sensemaking. Memories, for example, are affected by emotions and can be notoriously inaccurate. Tests of recall (e.g. describe the perpetrator of the crime you have just witnessed) invariably result inwildly varying accounts of an event just that has just occurred. Pasts are reconstructions (Bartlett, in Weick 1995), which means they never occurred precisely the way they are remembered. Further, how we make sense of an eventis also affected by our past experiences with similar events. Adoption attitudes, for example, may be informed by past adoption experiences or similar experiences in which the subject learned to use a complex tool (Seligman 2006).

The problem with the retrospective nature of sensemaking,says Weick (1995) is that many possible meanings need to be synthesised at thesame time, thus a hindrance to sensemaking is often confusion, not ignorance.The path from the past is not linear, even though it can appear to be so uponreflection.

Retrospection wrongly implies that errors should havebeen anticipated and that good perceptions, good analyses, and good discussionswill yield good results (Milliken, in Weick 1995).

As will be discussed later (p. 27), thisretrospective nature calls into question the usefulness of the concept ofsensemaking for assisting in futuring situations (e.g. futures scenarios).

Enactive of sensible environments

Much of Weick’s concept of sensemaking is rooted in relativistontology2 and this will be a source of discomfort for some, particularly related to the concept of ‘sensible environments’.

What Weick means by enactive of sensible environments is that people are not detached from a singular, fixed environment that can be explained by looking at its components in isolation. Instead, people are very much embedded in the environment. A person over time influences their work environment, and then is influenced by it because the environment is a source of stimuli (Seligman 2006). They act, impose categories on events and therefore create the constraints and opportunities they face by creating the worlds they are operating in.
For example, Weick (1995) suggests that rather than looking for resistance or barriers to adoption (which tends to suggest that there is one thing out there to be resisted), we should look at the sensemaking activity in the environment and the way in which individuals are interacting with the innovation. In the language of market theory, if an individual is not ‘in the market’ for aninnovation, then he/she may not even notice it (or any publicity about it), letalone develop any ‘resistance’ to it.

Social

Sensemaking is invariably influenced by others. As Allport(in Weick 1995) notes ‘…thought, feeling and behaviour of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined or implied presence of others’ (Weick’s emphasis) – “if I do this, whatwill X think?” Different communities or groups of people inhabit different ‘thought worlds’ (Novak 2007) that have their own language and meanings through which members interpret information, events or experiences. This means it is difficultfor knowledge (or sense) to be shared by simply passing on information, withoutinsight into the underlying community knowledge perspectives (Novak 2007). Thisprocess was evident in research on project networks by Howden (2007a), where DPI staff reported that project planning often proceeded with apparent agreement and understanding between different stakeholders, only for misunderstandings and disagreements (around words, concepts and meanings, and their consequent actions) to emerge when it came to implementing the project.

In sensemaking situations, an individual’s conclusion willnot reflect exactly the views of his/her group, but likely will have been influenced by it. Seligman (2006) suggests that the sensemaking concept has implications on the adoption process, including:

  • adoption being influenced by an individual’s perceptions of the adoption behaviour oftheir group
  • adoption being resisted if it is perceived to negatively affect the subject’s autonomy, status, or relationships with others intheir group, and
  • adoption behaviour of an individual in isolationbeing different from their behaviour when working in their group.

More implications of the social component of sensemaking situations are outlined in the discussion on ‘our cognitive tool-box’ below.

Ongoing

As Wright (2005) states, sensemaking never ends (orbegins). Sense is not constructed, but is always in the process of construction. We are always involved in what Weick (1995) calls ‘our own ongoing project’ (or projects) and what we see in the world are those aspects that bear on our projects. What is important about this is that when we interrupt the ongoing flow of our project and extract clues in a moment of sensemaking, we are in effect resorting to ‘absolute categories that ignore large pieces of continuity’ (Weick 1995). Wemay, in essence, be taking things out of context – most will be familiar of situations where something was taken out of context; where someone came to a conclusion without an understanding of the bigger picture.

We shouldnot simply form a hypothesis about a sensemaking situation and then decide on arational course of action. Instead, we need to recognise that;

  • every representation of a situation is an interpretation of a moment in time
  • that as we interpret andact we change the situation, and
  • that often the effects of our actions cannot bepredicted.

Focused on and by extracted cues

We notice what is novel, unusual or unexpected, behavioursthat are extreme (and sometimes negative), and stimuli that are relevant to ourgoals (Weick 1995). What we notice, theextracted clues (gross trends, major events), are the seeds from which wedevelop a larger sense of what is happening (“The Program Manager is friends with the CSIRO scientists. Her knowledge of climate change will be influenced by this. Nobody else is saying what these scientists are saying. Therefore, her conclusions about climate cooling are likely wrongly biased.”). The clues we extract and label can depend on the context in which we are in, and the context we are in (and the role we are playing)affects how we interpret the clues (“Theproject has changed several times. My staff members have been negatively affected by these changes. This new scan have a significant affect on my staff). If events are not noticed, theyare not available for sensemaking.

Two things are apparent here: noticing refers to activities of filtering, classifying, and comparing, whereas sensemaking refers to the interpretation and the activity of determining what the noticed cues mean.

A case example:

Weick (1995 p. 44), tells an intriguing story of a Hungarian army reconnaissance unit that became lost in the Alps. On the third day they made it back to camp explaining that one had found a map in his pocket. This calmed them down and allowed them to get their bearings back. The Commanding Officer then discovered, to his astonishment, that the map was of the Pyrenees, not of the Alps.

The story above demonstrates that we can acton very few clues, and interpret them very rapidly. Once a tentative explanation has taken hold in our minds, information to the contrary mayproduce only elaborations of the explanation and not corrections (Watzlawick,in Weick 1995). The way you frame the clues (in context) gives the cluesmeaning, even apparently if those clues have been interpreted ‘incorrectly’.

For facilitators of planning process, this means that itis important to ensure there is a diversity of cues on which to base any planning activity, and that the cues that inform decisions are carefully tested.

Driven by plausibility rather than accuracy

Weick (1995) suggests that the prefix sense is ‘mischievous‘. It implies that there is one thing out there to make sense of, or that ‘something out there that needs to be agreed on’.

…accuracy is meaningless when used to describe a filtered sense of the present, linked with reconstruction of the past, that has been edited in hindsight (Weick 1995 p. 57)

As noted by Seligman (2006), an individual can have anattitude toward an innovation based on very limited information and plausible beliefs. Sensemaking is about embellishment and elaboration of perhaps a single point of reference or extracted clue (Weick 1995). Preference also plays a role. Sensemaking takes a relative approach to truth and ‘people will believe what can account for sensory experience but what is also interesting, attractive, emotionally appealing, and goal relevant’(Weick 1995, citing Fiske).

People need to ‘distort and filter, to separate signalfrom noise if they are not to be overwhelmed’ (Weick 1995) by an over-abundanceof data. We get to a point in a sensemaking situation where our story is plausible enough to sit comfortably with the mental model we have of the world and then there is less need to search for more explanation. We rarely consider if the story we have in our heads is accurate (or even if it concurs with the views of others around us).

This resonates with action learning methodologies, which ‘promote dialogue, bargaining, negotiation, and persuasion that enriches the sense of what is going on’ (Sutcliffe, in Weick 1995). Over time, says Weick(1995), supporting evidence mounts and significant changes in beliefs andactions evolve. In simple terms, it is a good strategy to do to learn, even in the absence of any coherent sense ofdirection.

Some Other Elements of Sensemaking

To conclude this section it is worth elaborating a littlemore on the notion of a cognitive frame or schemata; concepts important to ‘identityconstruction’, ‘clue extraction’ and what a ‘sensible environment’ is. The theory behind these concepts goes toexplaining the origin of the mental models (Weick et al. 2005) that influence thenoticing and bracketing of incidents in the flow of events, and the biases (orlenses) through which individuals interpret the world.

It has been observed that Weick has left ‘largely untapped’ areas of cognitive psychology that could reveal more about thesources of meaning development underpinning sensemaking (O'Connell 1988). To expandon the concept of mental models I will rely largely on DiMaggio’s (1997) workon ‘Culture and Cognition’ which hasuseful parallels to the work on sensemaking.

I will also expand a little more on concepts of narrative and action which are throughout Weick’s work, but a little more clearly articulated in his later work with Sutcliffe and Obstfeld (Weick et al. 2005).I will compare this with similar work done by authors in the Cognitive Edge network and alsointroduce the Cynefin model as a useful framework for assisting decision-making in complex situations.

Our cognitive‘toolbox’

DiMaggio(1997) outlines the ‘latest’ thinking (albeit 10 years ago) in cognitive psychology that suggests that individuals process the stream of information they perceive every day through a cultural schemata or frame; a sort of cognitive ‘toolkit’ of strategies and techniques that guides decision-making. This toolkit is developed over time from training, life experiences and interaction with others. DiMaggio describes two main sorts of cognition that draw on these schemata: automatic and deliberative.

Automatic cognition

Inparallel with Weick’s description of the routine sensemaking that people do moment-to-moment (see page 5), DiMaggio describes ‘automatic cognition’ as a process that is ‘implicit, unverbalised, rapid, and automated’.This rapid processing is critical if individuals are to make any sense at allof reality in all its complexity (Schaap & van Twist 1997). It reduces complexity andorders our understanding of the social world and of ourselves, by constructing ouridentities, goals, and aspirations, and by making certain issues significant and others not. Insimple terms, we cannot think completely through every little decision momentin our lives. We need this automation just to be able to function in the complex stream of everyday events (“Do Iwalk on the right or left side of the path?”).

Importantly,this every-day, routine cognition shapes and biases our thoughts, influences how people attribute accuracy or plausibility to information. It provides ‘default’ assumptions aboutthe characteristics of, and the relationship between, objects and events (DiMaggio 1997)(tattoos, shaved heads and thuggish behaviour, for example). The schemata constrainaction by blocking out certain possibilities for action, or by preventing certain arguments from being articulated,or favourably interpreted (or even understood), in interactions with others (Emirbayer & Goodwin 1994). Hence, individuals can be cognitively closed to those aspects of reality which don’t fit in their schemata (“it’s not climate change, it is a natural fluctuation in the climate that we have been experiencing for years”), or to which has a different meaning in their schemata (Schaap & van Twist 1997).

Additionally, research into memory (e.g. Freeman, in Weick1995) has shown that recall is influenced by our cognitive frameworks. Were call schemata relevant information more easily than that which is not, and we can even falsely recall schematically embedded events that did not occur (“Wasn’t that tattooed thug staring at me?”).

Similarly, Weick (1995) describes the notion of fallacy of centrality. Because issues of identity and reputation are involved in how we interact in events, ‘experts’ can over estimate the likelihood that they would know about a phenomenon if it were taking place (“because I don’t know about climate cooling, it must not be going on”). This can discourage curiosity andelicit an antagonistic stance to anyone who suggests that something is ‘out of place’ in the normal stream of events on (see the story on BCS in Weick 1995pp. 1-4). In effect, it hinders sensemaking.

The cultural frames of individuals and groups can also contribute to the‘closedness’ of networks (Howden 2006). This occurs when individuals are excluded from an event, for example, because others fail to appreciate their contribution or consider it irrelevant. At their worst, closed networks built from strong ties create ‘echo’ (Burt 2001); dispositions and interpersonal evaluations are reinforcedand amplified into positive and negative extremes (e.g. greenies versus timber workers).This can be evident in the tendency of groups to adopt public positions more extreme than the preferences of their individual members, especially when acting with reference to a contrasting group (DiMaggio 1997).

Deliberative cognition

The other form of schematic thought outlined by DiMaggio is ‘deliberative cognition’,which parallels what Weick considers as sensemaking moments.

When sufficiently motivated, people ‘override programmed modes of thought to think critically and reflexively’, in a process that is ‘explicit, verbalized, slow, and deliberate’ (DiMaggio 1997).

Thereare three facilitating conditions that promote this form of thought.

  • Attention:People shift into deliberative modes of thought relatively easily when theirattention is attracted to a problem.
  • Motivation: People may also shift from automatic to deliberative cognition when they are strongly motivated to do so by dissatisfaction with the status quo or by the morals alience of a particular issue.
  • Schemafailure: Finally, people shift to more deliberative modes of processing when existing schemata fail to account adequately for new stimuli (DiMaggio 1997).

The notion of schemafailure parallels the idea of ‘shocks’ outlined by Weick in his chapter on ‘occasions for sensemaking’ (1995 pp. 83-105) and attention and motivation are also important in influencing what is noticed in the daily stream of events, and what is not.

What is also important to consider is that ‘deliberative’ cognition does not free sense-makers from the influence or biases of their in built cognitive frames (schemata) or other factors that impact on the sensemakingenvironment; such as the physical, social and institutional context. Also, because a sensemaking moment may be conscious and deliberative, does not mean that itis sensible to others.

Further, if individuals are not attracted to a problem, orare not motivated by the ‘moral salience’ of an issue, then it may be difficult to get people involved at all in an issue, let alone to shift out of patternedways of thinking.

Sensemaking, narrative and complexity

There are similarities between Weick’s work and that by Snowd en et. al.and the Cognitive Edge group, who use the Cynefin (pronounced kun-ev'in)3 framework(see Kurtz & Snowden 2003 ; Kurtz & Snowden 2007). Browning and Boudès(2005) express surprise that these two groups of authors don’t reference each other. However, this is perhaps not so surprising as Weick’s work is from an academic tradition and is grounded in socio-psychological exploration of the process of sensemaking, whereas Snowden uses the hyphenated word ‘sense-making’ to describe a whole set of applied processes using narrative theory (e.g.‘story circles’) for working with people to make sense (Browning & Boudès2005). It is worth, however, highlighting one important area where these bodies of work overlap, that of the use of ‘narrative’ as a primary means of knowledge transfer, creation and interpretation.

Weick et. al. (2005) emphasise that a situation is talked into being through theinteractive exchanges of individuals to produce a view of the situation;including the people, their objects, their institutions and history, and their locationin time and place (think of the different stories developing in our greenhousemeeting). In the complex decision-making environments thatindividuals face, language (including metaphors and stories) is invoked as asensemaking device (Browning & Boudès 2005) and rich language (detailed,descriptive, vibrant) is a crucial resource – ‘rich language affords reflectivethought’ (Weick et al. 2005).

Several things are important in this message. The diversity of world-views available in a sensemaking situation is critical. Also, a leaderor facilitator has an important role here in contextualising, data provision, and mediating. For example: providing rich and diverse information, setting boundaries around an issue to help with focus, but also preventing it from becoming over simplified through the exclusion of dissenting voices.

There can be a danger in this process. The developing stories can act as a self-fulfilling prophecy that will result in the creation of the reality that is expected according to the cognitive frame built by participants as a narrative develops. For example: working from the premise that the climate is warming, any cooling due to increased albedo is temporary and evidence that the polar caps are melting (and not evidence of a trend towards cooling).4

There is a need to constantly monitor where the evidence for narratives is coming from and/or how it is judged.

Cynefin and complexity

Cynefin is the name of a framework that has a wide rangeof applications including knowledge management and conflict resolution. It isuseful in this context as it provides a model of the situation that is a trigger for sensemaking, as well as four more-or-less stable states through which you can move as you attempt to make sense of an event.

The model (Figure 1) has five domains. 5 The fifth domain is the centre diamond. It is the state of shock, of schemafailure, of not knowing what type of causality exists, and in which people willrevert to their mental models to make sense (e.g. the announcement that the climate has flipped into cooling).

The other domains are:

  • Chaotic:in which there is no apparent relationship between cause and effect at a systemslevel and no point in looking for right answers. There are many decisions to make and no time to think. There is high turbulence and high tension (e.g. in a sudden natural disaster).
  • Complex: in which the relationship between cause and effect can only be perceived inretrospect, but not in advance. It is the domain of complex, adaptive systems. There are many competing ideas, many unknowns (and unknown unknowns) and no right answers (e.g. in an ongoing drought, or the outbreak equine influenza).
  • Complicated: in which the relationship between cause and effect requires analysis or someother form of investigation and/or the application of expert knowledge (e.g. in a decision to upgrade a dairy or just to retire in a tough financial climate).
  • Simple: in which the relationship between cause and effect isobvious to all. There are repeating patterns and consistent events. The rightanswer exists (e.g. the need to clean up fire hazards).

Figure 1: A simplified Cynefin framework

Figure 1: A simplifiedCynefin framework

In full use, the Cynefin framework has sub-domains, and the model provides guidance as to how to respond in these types of situations. For example, in complex situations, the model advises that you don’t search for the right answer, but you encourage interaction and experimentation so that patterns emerge (think of the story ofthe reconnaissance party). In chaotic situations there is no time to plan, so the best response is to act now to try to stabilise the situation and analyse the result later. Climate change is interesting in the context of the Cynefin framework. Clearly climate change is complex, but equally you could argue that Earth’s climate is chaotic, and reducing responses to global warming to arguments about human CO2output is seriously underestimating the turbulence of the situation.

An interesting feature of the model is that the boundary between simple and chaotic is seen as a catastrophic one (the little squiggle at the bottom of Figure 1). The lesson here is not to be complacent in simple systems or mistake a complex system for simple, or the context may shift and you can flip into chaos. For facilitators of change, this may mean using processes to push people to the edge of chaos (perhaps a history trip or outcomes analysis?) in order for them to understand better the complexity ofthe situation they are in, the dangers of complacency and to discover and implement possible means to stabilise it.

At the very least, this tool provides a framework against which you can assess what Cognitive Edge calls modulators; things that influence the evolution of the system. You can then consider and prioritise the things you can change, or what you need tomonitor; bearing in mind that you will need to use different processes depending on whether the modulator sits in the simple, complicated, complex orchaotic space.

5. The Short Story

The process of sensemaking, as articulated by Weick, is complex, but could be summarised in the following dot points (with examples from our scenarios, pp. 3-4). Sensemaking is also not easy to capture indiagrammatic from, however, Figure 2 is an approximation to help guide understanding.

Figure 2: A diagrammatic representation of the notion of sensemaking

Figure 2: A diagrammatic representation of the notion of sensemaking

  • The genesis of sensemaking is in disruptive ambiguity: Something in the constant and complex flow of events draws (or demands) your attention. It appears not tofit within the ‘normal’ scheme of things.
  • It begins in acts of noticing (1) and bracketing or labelling (2): You extract cues (largelysubconsciously) from the environment and ‘label’ them based on the clues available in your cognitive frame (your world-view) – including (3) past experiences with similar events (e.g. “it’s not climate change. It’s a normal fluctuation. I’ve experienced lots of droughts in my time as a farmer!” etc.). Ineffect, you create your own world of explanation and any challenges that emergefrom it.
  • Identity (4) is a critical component of sensemaking (“I am a climate change expert, how can I not know about this!”). Who you are, what role you are playing (employee, parent, sibling, friend, team mate), or what group you are with, can affect how you make sense of a situation. These different worlds-views can be contradictory.
  • The cues could come to you as a sudden shock, or evidence could accumulate over a period of time until you reach a level of discomfort that compels you to act.
  • People face ‘evolving disorder’ (Weick et al.2005) as they act (5) to make sense, drawing on their memory, cognitive frame and the people around them for clues (e.g. the lunch time ‘gossip’ at our climate program meeting). Talk and action are intertwined. Acting (talking) changes the sense you are making of the event and the direction of the outcome of the action (e.g. someone introduced the ideathat the Program Leader was influenced by friends at the CSIRO – which was‘sensible’ to others in the group).
  • Sensemaking is retrospective. The events youmake sense of have occurred in the past. Hence, anything that effects recall,affects your ability to make sense – and memory is notoriously inaccurate (“Wasn’t that car bomb in Afghanistan?”).
  • Things that impact on your ability to make sense can cause an emotional response and you will seek a rapid, plausible answer to set things back in place (“We can’t be wrong. It must just be a short downward trend.”). Plausible does not necessarily mean ‘correct’. Heightened emotions can restrict your ability to extract clues from what is going on and therefore reduce your ability to make sense.
  • The sensemaking process can lead to (6) significant changes in beliefs and action, or it might just lead to lead to a plausible reframing of a story so thatit fits with your mental model of the world. Alternately it might be business as usual – ‘that makes sense!

Importantly also:

  • If something does not attract your attention oris not unsatisfactory or morally salient to you it will likely not be noticed by you (be available for sensemaking). So the notion of resistance to change ’is not relevant if an individual has not even ‘noticed’ the change.

Of course, the description above can give the illusion that this is a linear process. It is not. Individuals rapidly shift aroundthese processes in interaction with responses from others and the environment.

Taken together, these properties suggest that increased skill at sensemaking should occur when people are socialized to make do, beresilient, treat constraints as self-imposed, strive for plausibility, keep showing up, use retrospect to get a sense of direction, and articulate descriptions that energize. These are micro-level actions. They are smallactions, but they are small actions with large consequences (Weick et al. 2005p. 419).

6. Lesson for Creative Futures

This work suggests that there is a lot of need forprocesses that support the construction of sense in the context of complex,unfamiliar and ill-defined problems. You cannot make sense for people, nor direct them on how to make sense of an issue. However, you can help create an environment where people can more easily extract the rich knowledge resources they need for sensemaking.

In this section I will outline some general messages that could underpin the design of any community sensemaking process, as well as some suggested tools or approaches that might help build a sensemaking experience.

Some general principles to keep inmind

Variety

Weick (1995) invokes Ashby’s (1956) ‘law of requisite variety’ to argue that complex environments must be matched with equally complex processing mechanisms (Browning & Boudès 2005).  Thus, asWeick (1995) observes, groups with access to varied images and vivid words will have a more adaptive approach to their sensemaking than those with a limited vocabulary. Thus we should not be building processes aimed at bringing together different perspectives into a unified view. Rather we should develop processesthat support the co-existence of different perspectives.

The greater the variety of beliefs in a repertoire, themore fully should any situation be seen, the more solutions should be identified, and the more likely it should be that someone knows a great deal about what is happening (Weick 1995 p.87).

Conflict

Any conflict that emerges between individuals in this process should not be simply treated as a threat, but considered also as an opportunity (Howden 2006). Flora andFlora (1993) advocate the notion of ‘constructive controversy’. Controversy, they suggest, is ‘the opposite of conflict, not the opposite of absence of disagreement.’ They warn that the absence of any disagreement between individuals is as dangerous as is the presence of conflict. It might indicate the suppression of dissenting views or the dominance of one world-view over others. Constructive controversy requires the creation of‘symbolic diversity’ (Flora & Flora 1993) which includes focussing on processes and the depersonalisation of politics, and encouraging the acceptance of controversy such that network members feel they can oppose another’s pointof view without risking social relationships or the respect of others.

Of course, networks with deeply rooted divisions may not respond to efforts to encourage ‘symbolic diversity’, but the key lesson is tonot attempt to immediately stifle any conflict, but to first identify the similarities and differences between world-views and then attempt to steer itinto a more productive direction.

Emotion

It is important to remember that interruptions in a normal flow of events typically induce an emotional response (shock, fear, anger etc.),‘which then paves the way for emotion to influence sensemaking’ (Weick 1995).Such interruptions not only produce emotion, they can use up attention, narrow perception and heighten habitual responding. This has the potential to escalatecognitive inefficiency. The subsequent loss of cues makes sensemaking harder,which can increase the emotional response, which leads to even more cue loss and even less sensemaking (Weick 1995).

Snyder and White (in Weick 1995) argue that recall and retrospect tend to be congruent with mood and that people remember events that have the same emotional tone as what they currently feel. There are important implications in Weick’s (1995) observations that making sense of a situationmay mean drawing on evidence from past experiences that feel the same. Thus we may be using a feeling-based memory to solve a current cognitive puzzle (mating two very different forms of evidence).

For a facilitator, this means that careful reflection isessential on what evidence is being used in sensemaking processes that elicit high emotions; are individuals making judgements based on an emotional response (using cues from similar situations in the past)?

Networks

Networks and networking can be a benefit and a liabilityin sensemaking. As I have already noted, different communities of individuals share different ‘thought-worlds’, that influence how different groups interpret a situation (see page 9, & Howden 2006). Knowledge does not travel easily between different groups because the cost of reconciling the different perspectives is high. Too often collaborative processes continue with an assumption that the individuals involved have the same understanding of an issue and the concepts and language involved.

Importantly, even strongly linked networks can be a hindrance to sensemaking if the density of connections leads to a fallacy of centrality – “if it is not known to our group, it can’t be important”.

Novak (2007) suggests that enabling communities to developa ‘shared semantic context’, requires both perspectivemaking andperspective taking. Individuals need to know ‘what and how others know’ and then relating it, one’s own terms, to your own knowledge. Novak (2007) suggests some practical solutions for this, including the need to develop a method for capturing and visualising the implicit knowledge of individuals and groups and the discovery of relationships between them, and fostering the willingness of different communities to make their knowledge available to members of other communities.

In one (perhaps extreme) case from the United States (see Jacksteit & Kaufmann 1999), a process was used to establish enough alignment between the views of pro-life and pro-choice groups to enable them towork together to solve a community issue. Important in this process is the needto test assumptions (perspective taking) about what constitutes the world-views(or thought –worlds) of the different participant groups – so often a barrierto collaboration.

Leaders

Without repeating the work I have previously done on leadershipin network governance (see Howden 2006 ; Howden 2007b), it is worth noting some key features of the role of a leader in a sensemaking situation. They are essentially the same.

Leaders here cannot be leaders in the sense of directing change, but must balance the needs of individuals in the group with the requirement to meet network goals.Those facilitating

processes to makes sense in complex decision–making environments require a number of skills to deal with the ‘evolutionary nature of network relationships’: diplomacy, to foresee potential conflicts when theyarise in the shifting patterns of relationships; a high tolerance for uncertainty to deal with the ambiguous nature of the relationships between elements of the network; and, an ability to stand back to find patterns and meanings in what will oftenbe a chaotic set of relationships (Jackson & Stainsbury 2000).

Busche (2006) warns that those who try to build cultures ofcollaboration can tend to hold themselves responsible for others’ experiences, ‘they will try to “fix” itwhen others are having “bad” ones’. This he says can create a transactional imbalance; asort of parent-child relationship. The person being ‘fixed’ may then eitherfeel violated and defensiveand maybe less active in participation over time, or they can become morereliant on the leader and co-dependent (Busche 2006).

As Weick (1995) points out though, a leader is a sense-giver. They do not tell it ‘as it is’; but as it ‘might be’. Weick advises leaders to cultivate four abilities that advance sensemaking capacities. Theseare: improvisation, wisdom, respectful interaction and communication.

  • Improvisation means developing individual and group intuition with the aim of becoming creative under pressure by surfacing, testing and restructuring understandingto bring order out of chaos.
  • Wise people acknowledge the in evitable ambiguity and inherent uncertainty in their livesand realise that absolute knowledge is unattainable and that full understanding of phenomena or an external environment is not possible. Paradoxically then,wisdom improves confidence and increases doubt, resulting in greater learning and improved decision-making.
  • Respectful interaction has three imperatives: trust, honesty and self-respect. If trust, honesty and self-respect collapse it can affectthe social element of sensemaking and in turn the decision-making capability ofindividuals.
  • Communication through conversation and storytelling should be seen as a creative practice through which reality is experienced andindividuals test and modify their mental models, rather than a tool used for simply representing and transmitting people’s understanding or knowledge. (summarised from Wright 2005 p. 91)

Framing and Power

Battles over the framing of issues are common in public policy. For example; whether the exclusion of cattle from alpine pastures is an issue of conservation (protecting the environment) or heritage (protecting thelivelihoods of mountain cattlemen) (Howden 2006). The image of the ‘Man from Snowy River’is a powerful cultural image evoked to support the latter view.

As noted above, a diversity of images can benefit sensemaking situations by increasing the options available to a community and improvingtheir ability to respond adaptively to emerging situations. Equally though,power can manifest in group processes through acts that shape what people accept, take for granted, and reject.

People who are powerful, rich, and advantaged seem tohave unequal access to roles and positions that give them an unequally strong position to influence the construction of social reality (Mills, in Weick etal. 2005)

Facilitating processes that might be emotive or controversial may mean managing competing framing of a problem and ensuring that group rules inhibit the domination of one way of seeing the world over another.

Experiential learning

Although the concept is not used explicitly by Weick, practitioners will feel that many of the concepts and tools outlined here are consistent with those used under the banner of experiential learning. The ‘acting by doing’ theme is clear throughout the literature, and experiential learning equips a participant with an ability to give and receive feedback, which ensures sustained learning (DuToit 2007).

Importantly though, the retrospective nature of sensemaking can affect how people experience change. Citing some work based onan idea by Mark Twain, Cunningham (2007) notes:

…if a cat jumps on a hot stove it will never do it again.The problem is that it also won’t jump on a cold one – and that may not be a good idea as it limits the cat’s range of options. (p. 4)

Generalising from experience and developing personal theories based on a reflection on one’s experience can lead to poor and limited learning (Cunningham 2007).

Two lessons from this are:

  • that people may be reluctant to experiment with processes they have had a bad experience with in the past, and
  • if you create a process that a participant ultimately judges as a ‘bad’ experience, you will limit their ability to participate effectively in such events in the future.

Tools for Sensemaking

Boundary objects

A general theme throughout this work is that a diversity of inputs (people, ideas, information) can improve a sensemaking situation.Importantly also, though, is some point of focus around which different world views can be brought together, ‘without requiring the establishment of one shared perspective’. Novak (2007) calls such ‘points of focus’ boundary objects.

Boundary objects to Novak are objects or processes that connectdifferent perspectives of a variety of stakeholders on a given problem or adomain of knowledge, ‘without requiring the establishment of one shared perspective’ (Novak 2007). Novak is perhaps spruiking for a particular piece ofsoftware (Knowledge Explorer), but the general principle of providing a means to make visible the implicit world-views of individual community members is sound.

It is beyond the scope of this review to investigate therange of tools available for visualising the different thought-worlds of participants in a decision-making process. Simple processes like mind-mappingare available and there are likely appropriate processes in the knowledge of Practice Change staff (or at least knowledge of where to find these processes).

It might be useful for AgFutures to trial a process for creating boundary objects.

Narrative analysis

Cognitive Edge base much of their work on the use of ‘narrative fragments’ and put them through a process to draw meaning from them. 6 The process is based on the use of distributed cognition (the wisdom of crowds) and putting decision makers in direct contact with raw data. The method includes processes such as anecdote circles, participative observation or naïveinterviewing to gather narrative fragments and then analyse them for common experiences and moderating factors (modulators) which may indicate important themes or drivers of change.

The general principle of narrative (anecdote) analysis, or narrative capture processes is a very promising tool in the context of providing a means for communities to negotiate different world views and work through a complex situation to improve the resilience of a community. Photoelicitation and other similar techniques can also be used to gather andarticulate anecdotes. Narratives can provide ‘a common language through whichthe ambiguities and equivocalities of everyday life are shared and collectivelymade sense of’ (Wright 2005).

In particular, the process might be useful forconstructing a ‘history trip’ to provide context to any planning process and ensure there is more alignment in understanding of the important drivers ofchange. Or it might be used to identify and reach a broad agreement on themajor factors that influence the resilience of a community; which then might beanalysed with the Cynefin framework to identify priorities for action.

The potentialbenefits of such a process are.

  • The output can be analysed in real time using a collaborative process with participants.
  • The processes need not be long and involved.
  • You can capture and include data over a long period of time to look for patterns of change.
  • It is a very involving process for participants and can help them make sense.
  • It can be used as a process of ‘sense taking’ where participants can get abetter understanding of other world-views.

Scenarios

Given the retrospective nature of sensemaking and the prospective nature of creating future scenarios, notionally the two conceptsare not compatible. Some disagree. For example, Wright (citing Gioia et. al.2005) sees making sense of the future as a task that requires an ability to envision the future as if it had already occurred.

Scenarios are not predictions, nor are they forecasts(Wright 2005). Scenario processes are designed to help participants improvetheir skills in ‘thinking on their feet’ in response to unexpected events by developing plausible descriptions of a variety of possible future states (Kennon2008).7 The participant group can then consider how it may reposition itself to deal with the challenges and opportunities inherent in the potential new environments.

Wright (2005) suggests that you can construct scenarios where participants can ‘imaginatively locate themselves in the future’ and make the ‘unexpected expectable’ through a set of narratives that incorporate uncertainty into their construction. To do this the focus of scenarios needs to change from that of individual and group decision-making to sensemaking in which individuals must improve their capacity to assimilate divergent, and often contradictory,messages into a coherent narrative form. Scenarios, argues Wright (2005) are an additional strategic tool in which you can explore often unspoken assumptions about the future, and test how self-image and identity constructions (world-views) would be challenged within each scenario.

Weick (1995) notes that it is easier to make sense of events when they are placed in the past, even if the events have not yet occurred. However, he also notes some research that suggests futuring effortscannot proceed without a common understanding of the past. Boland (in Weick1995) conducted experiments in which participants had to imagine the future oftheir firm. The activity uncovered disagreements about the meaning of past events that people did not realise impeded their current decision-making.

In Summary

The concept of sensemaking reveals that people make sense of the world in what can be very different ways, depending on their mental models of the world, the cognitive resources available to them (such as information and people), and the social context they are in.

It is not just a matter of changing their minds to help them become more resilient. World-views are deeply held and built-up through cognitivedata gathered over a long period of time. This is normal. People need stableworld-views in order to act day-to-day in a continuous stream of complex events.A variety of ways of seeing the world is a benefit to a community because it increases the tools that can be used to ameliorate complex problems, or to be resilientin the face of complex change. The important thing is to establish enough agreement about relevant elements of the past and possible collaborative futures in order for communities to work together to develop their capacity to adapt.

Importantly, the social, contextual and psychological influences on sensemaking also affect how individuals in communities perceive the value of services we provide them. How we provide those resources, the form they take,and the processes we use to extend them can either contribute to the ability of communities to make sense, or it can hinder or bias it. Equally as likely,those resources might be totally irrelevant in the minds of sense-makers.

The role of DPI then is to support a dynamic active-learning environment in which individuals can develop their own ability to make sense ofthe challenges they face. Such actions include:

  • Energising sensemaking through the provision ofrich, unbiased data.
  • Creating a space in which all participants feel safe to tell their stories.
  • Being attentive in situations of high emotion and checking that it is not unduly influencing decisions.
  • Encouraging respectful disagreement (controversy) as creative and not destructive.
  • Developing the ability of individuals to accept ambiguity and the limitations of available evidence (including their ownknowledge).
  • Providing glimpses of the chaotic space by providing ‘what-if’ scenarios or empowering those with radical world-views to speak up.
  • Constantly monitoring and carefully surfacing and testing the evidence used for decisions.

Some processes were suggested that can assist in providing a safe and energising space where individuals in a community can make sense:

  • Create a boundary object (or objects); something that connects the different perspectives of a variety of stakeholders on a given problem or a domain of knowledge without requiring the establishment of one shared perspective. This might be a mind map, a mural, or perhaps a software program for collecting and comparing stories.
  • Develop a process to capture and analyse the different stories (narratives) that individuals have on the given problem or domain of knowledge. Encourage the story tellers to participate in the collecting and analysing of narratives. Use these stories to improve thecollective understanding of the past and present context.
  • Utilise scenarios or other futuring tools to elaborate and test different views of the future of communities, being careful that individuals are starting from comparable views of the past.

The processes outlined above require active facilitation,not passive management of a process

Remember, doing all these small things is not a cure for complexity. It is about small but meaningful steps in the right direction and building the skills communities have for responding to change.

Glossary

Ontology

Ontology is the study of beingor existence and its basic categories and relationships. Ontology providescriteria for distinguishing various types of objects (concrete and abstract, existent and non-existent, real and ideal, independent and dependent) and theirties (relations, dependences and predication).

Thethree ‘best known’ ontological positions are subjectivism, objectivism and, relativism.

Subjectivism: The subjectivist ontology is a philosophical world-view that gives primacy to subjective experience as fundamental. In an extreme form, it may hold that the nature andexistence of every object depends solely on someone's subjective awareness ofit.

Objectivism: The objectivist (orrealist) ontology holds that reality exists independent from consciousness;that individual persons are in contact with this reality through sensory perception; that human beings can gain objective knowledge from perception through the process of concept formation. Cognitive, aesthetic and ethical values are independent of human thinking.

Relativism: The idea that some elements or aspects of experience or culture are relative to (dependant on)other elements or aspects.

Some relativists claim that humans can understand and evaluate beliefs and behaviours only in terms of their historical or cultural context. There aremany forms of relativism which vary in their degree of controversy. The term often refers to truth relativism,which is the doctrine that there are no absolute truths, i.e., that truth isalways relative to some particular frame of reference.

Positivism

Positivism places science in a privileged position and assumes the possibility of a scientific understanding of human and social behaviour; assumes the separation of knowledge and power; and assumes the possibility of objectivity and impartiality when it comes to understating phenomena in the world (see objectivism).

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Footnote

1 Friendly fire is a term coined by the United States military for situations where allied forces accidentally attack troops on their own side in the confusion of war.

2 See Glossary, page 31.

3 A Welsh word commonly translated into English as 'habitat' or 'place' (although this doesnot convey the full meaning). A fuller translation would convey the sense that we all have multiple pasts of which we are only partly aware: cultural, religious, geographic, tribal etc. (ref. Wikipedia)

4 Note: this ’climate cooling’ example is just for illustration and is not a reflection of the author’s beliefs.

5 The explanations for these domains is synthesised from material provided in the Cognitive Edge accreditation course (http://www.cognitive-edge.com) and some from Wikipedia.

6 Cognitive Edge is developing Sensemaker TM software which can provide visualisation and statistical analysis of the narrative data.

7 See also PCCD Booklet No.7 – ‘Scenario Planning – What does your future hold?’