How effective is your sense-making?

Sense-making in complex business and organisational situations is critical for the purpose of deciding on a course of action to address a set of circumstances; in coming up with a strategy, in other words.

Sense-making is not often discussed (or perhaps not even that well understood) but it’s a very important ability of a team or an organisation to develop a shared understanding of both its circumstances and of itself within those circumstances.

In times of change and uncertainty, this is especially important – for individuals too.

It’s curious, is it not, how frequently smart people with the same information reach completely different conclusions?  The cause isn’t intelligence or experience: it’s how systematically they approach the stage of strategic thinking referred to as sense-making.

Of course, if the sense-making isn’t realistic, the strategy based on it won’t go well.

As Joshua Cooper Ramo wrote in The Age of the Unthinkable, “If you are not seeing things properly, you have no hope of any sort of breakthrough.”

Here are some specific aspects to think about:

• The interplay between understanding our environment and understanding ourselves, both of which can be non-trivial
• Ways of understanding complex organisational and business situations, or at least discerning clearly the extent to which that is possible
• How to convene honest conversations that will genuinely and efficiently help make sense of complex situations
• How to work effectively with weak signals from your environment – and not miss them
• How to be a skilful participant in your organisation’s sense-making processes
• How to become an evaluative observer of your sense-making – in other words, how to make sense of your sense-making

Strategic sense-making can be a critical differentiator for leaders, simply making everything downstream easier – better strategy, clearer choices, more aligned implementation.

Clearer sense-making leads to better strategy and wiser action.

For more on this, why not join one of the March 2026 online Leadership Conversations on the subject?