Sensemaking

Sensemaking is the process of making meaning by a group of people based on their collective experiences.

Defining Sensemaking

The following information has been contributed from Ben Weinlick and Aleeya Velji as Think Jar Collective in the Social Innovation Field Guide found here:

Social Innovation Lab Field GuideThink Jar Collective

Sense-making really just means coming together and making meaning from your experiences to figure out what is happening and why. At this stage you have talked to a bunch of people in the community, and you’ve documented your interviews.

First, on your own you’ll think about the interviews you have had and key things you have learned. Then with the rest of your lab team you’ll get together, share learning, develop insights together, find themes and begin to uncover leverage points for designing around.

For more information on leverage points, click on the link below:

pageLeverage Points

Examples and Resources

Summary Worksheets

In the links below you can find some tools to help you think through your learnings from interviews and articles. The tools can help you record some of the important things to take back to your lab and share with them.

Worksheets to summarize your interviews

Worksheets to summarize your insights from articles and media

Field Work Insights

Before you get into group sense making of interviews and articles, it can be helpful to have some categories to sort insights. You’re going to have a lot of stories and a lot of insights. The categories below can help to make sense of them. These are just examples of potential categories, and can be adapted based on the context of your challenge.

Needs	Challenges	Dig Deeper	Ideas that could help	Unexpected insights

Categorizing field work insights. Source: Social Innovation Field Guide, Ben Weinlick and Aleeya Velji

Instructions: Bucketing Field Work Insights

1) Set up Gather your team(s) of 7-9 people max and ensure each person has filled out the worksheets in the links from the previous tab with core insights from interviews and articles. Post the headings listed in the table above on a large board or butcher block paper.

2) Brainstorm Give everyone sticky notes and sharpies and a time constraint (possibly 6 mins per story share). One at a time each person shares one of their interview stories and insights from the interview. As one person shares the interview story, the other participants write down any insights that fall into the category buckets. 3) Categorize At the end of each story sharing round, participants share their sticky note insights and decide which bucket they think they should put the insight into.

4) Repeat You might do 5-6 rounds of this

Dig Deeper

After you do a sense making round, lab teams will find they have more questions, more assumptions and more uncertainty. This is good. Embrace it and identify what you need to do next to optimize your time in order to dig deeper.

Depending on how much time you have for your lab field work to dig deeper, you’ll want to identify if the lab team should go back to the same people they interviewed for another round to explore deeper, or if new areas opened up to explore further insights. Or both.

Often this is a stage where lab explorers recognize they might not have explored the challenge area theme of the lab with interviewees and missed key things.

In the next rounds lab explorers will go deeper and insights will come back richer

You can follow similar processes to bucketing insights together as a lab team after each round of field work.