Making sense of sense making
Making sense of sense making
People are always making sense of things - even things that don't make sense
“The one who knows he is confused is not that confused.” — Zhuangzi 1
In organisational life, lots of attention and emphasis traditionally gets paid to decision making and to action taking, but not so much to sense making.
That’s problematic, because in an increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world, organisations need future-fit cultures of agility, innovation, and adaptiveness where sense making, decision making, and action taking are ever more tightly coupled, rapidly and repeatedly iterated, deeply embedded, and widely distributed throughout the organisation.
At last week’s Agile to Agility conference, I highlighted the three main barriers to creating such a culture — the first and foremost of these three is the legacy axiom that senior executives means decision makers.
In a future-fit organisation, the job of senior executives is not to make decisions but to create conditions that enable and sustain iterative, adaptive, agile sense making, decision making, and action taking.
But the legacy axiom of senior executives = decision makers has become deeply ingrained in our collective consciousness over more than a century.
So much so, that if you ask anyone where decisions get made in an organisation they’ll instantly point to the top.
Equally, if you ask them where action gets taken they’ll quickly point in the other direction — towards the workers, the hands, the front line, the coalface.
But ask where the sense making takes place and you’ll usually get blank stares.
It’s a vital question to ask because doing so shines light into the dark recesses of organisational dysfunction, illuminating the fact that the best sense making happens not at the top, where decisions traditionally get made, but in the body of the organisation where the real action takes place.
There are three main reasons why the richest sense making happens in the body of the organisation:
It’s where people are in most direct contact with most customers.
It’s where people are most closely involved in day-to-day value creation and see what’s working well, what’s working less well, and what’s not working at all.
It's where the maximum diversity of people, perceptions and perspectives come together, these days from maybe five generational cohorts.
If you’ve ever wondered why organisations have so many problems with performance, engagement, wellbeing and retention, look no further than how frequently decisions fail to reflect the rich sense making happening in the body of the organisation.
This disconnect between sense making and decision making means many organisational decisions don’t make sense to the people tasked with acting on them.
When people are faced with enacting decisions that don't make sense, they have a choice of three options:
Option #1 – Just do it.
Imagine spending every working day doing things that make no sense.
You’d be hard pushed to avoid descending into a general state of apathy.
That’s neither good for organisational performance nor personal wellbeing.
Nor does it help those engagement scores so important to HR…
Option # 2 – Question the decision.
This may sound like the responsible thing to do.
But senior executives tend to be very busy people — mostly because they have all those decisions to make — and rarely welcome requests to revisit decisions they’ve already made.
The questioner is likely to be told, in more or less subtle ways, to just do it.
Experience this once or twice and you’ll likely:
Join the ranks of those who choose Option #1
Look for a new job where sharing your opinion is seen as an asset, not a liability
Indulge in what’s recently become known as “quiet quitting” — i.e. doing just enough to not get fired.
As with Option #1, performance, engagement, and wellbeing all nosedive, but Option #2 brings the added bonus of boosting attrition…
Option # 3 – Do something that does make sense instead.
This creative solution is a bit risky to take on alone.
Most people who choose it therefore get together with trusted associates at the water cooler, coffee machine, or bar after work to figure out what to do instead.
Of course, this “disobedience” mustn’t get back to the senior people who made the original decisions or there’d be trouble.
Heads might even roll.
So, senior executives plough on in blissful ignorance when organisational value is being created despite, not because of, their decisions…
When I describe the above phenomenon to people in the body of an organisation, they typically ask “Have you been talking to the people who work here?”.
When I describe the above phenomenon to senior executives, they typically say “That’s very interesting Geoff. I’m sure that must happen in some organisations. But it doesn’t happen here”.
So naturally enough, the phenomenon persists…
This dysfunctional double disconnect between sense making & decision making, and decision making & action taking emerged, evolved, and embedded itself over many decades when the world was changing much more slowly.
In that world there was time for senior executives to make decisions, communicate them, have people repair, remake, and rework the decisions locally, take effective action, generate results, and cover up their “non compliance”.
If things got really out of whack, senior executives would typicall hired a traditional finders, minders, grinders consulting firm to “help”. 2
That help meant the consulting firm invading the client organisation with a small army of junior grinders to ferret around and tap into the rich sense making already going on in the body of the organisation.
Then the senior finder running the consulting intervention would add a judicious amount of marketing spin, and present the “results” to senior executives — recommending next steps which included, surprisingly enough, further “essential” consulting work…
Meanwhile, the people who know what’s actually going on in the body of the organisation, and care most about its future, get increasingly ignored, marginalised, and alienated.
Engagement anyone?
Having witnessed this sad spectacle going on for more than 35 years, I’m no longer amazed at such deeply dysfunctional organisations limping along for so long.
But in our increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world, that’s no longer enough. The only way organisations will survive, is by creating future-fit cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness.
I described what that involves, and where to focus to make it happen, in more detail in my conference presentation.
You can watch the recording by clicking below. It includes the highly interactive Q&A dialogue that took place at the end.
The Book of Chuang Tzu, as translated by M. Palmer, et. al. (Penguin: 1996), p. 103
I described the traditional finders, minders, grinders consulting business model and its fundamental incompatibility with helping organisations create future-fit cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness in this earlier article.