A lot of people have asked me recently what I mean by “sensemaking”:
Sensemaking is a cognitive process of finding, processing, and making sense of information.
I am certainly not the first to use the term “sensemaking.” Synthesis and assimilation may be good synonyms for it. In other words, it involves building upon what you previously knew by incorporating and making sense of new knowledge, so that you come away with a better understanding of some topic now that you have thought it through. There may or may not be a tangible (visible) product of your sensemaking process.
Similarly, social sensemaking is the process by which you synthesize new information through, or as a result of, social interactions or inputs. This could be synthesizing disparate pieces of information that have been shared by multiple people; or it could be synthesizing information with the help of other people. The former is what many researchers think is taking place on the web (Wikipedia is a good example); the latter is what many think is taking place in enterprises/corporations as joint decision making. Both are perfectly acceptable interpretations of social sensemaking.
I am particularly interested in how a single individual processes and makes sense of information as a result of social inputs, whether they were explicit and co-located interactions or implicit, remote, and asynchronous interactions. As individuals are increasingly active online, in social networks, forums, and user-generated content sites, the actions of other people may directly influence how the individual discovers, processes, and synthesizes information.
The individual that I’m talking about here could be a high school student, a barista, a small-town physician, the Director of Research at Google, or even the President of the United States. Because personal laptops and personal workstations are becoming so prevalent, I think it’s important to look at how that single individual operates in his/her personalized information and social environments. Do websites or web services that grant us quick and easy access to information improve our ability to do sensemaking tasks? How do our social interactions change or augment this ability? Do social web services, or web services with an underlying social/interactive nature, serve as an even better resources? And finally (for now), how does that individual decide which information and social environments in which to embed himself, to maximize the benefits and reduce the costs (noise, overhead, etc.)?
2 Comments
I’m intrigued by this term “sensemaking.” Do you have any ideas about how it relates to terms like “learning,” “knowing,” “understanding,” “cognition,” and so on? I think it has a nice intuitive (phenomenological?) appeal, but I’m wondering where it fits in theoretically.
Also, I can think of another interesting sense of “social sensemaking.” Not only could it refer to an individual using social means to make sense of something, it could also refer to a social system as the thing doing the sensemaking. E.g., a cockpit making sense of its speed, a navigation team making sense of their location and destination, the American public trying to make sense of Obama’s economic policy, etc. Do you think there is room for that sort of analysis?
I’m not sure what the specific relationship is between “sensemaking” and “understanding” or “cognition”—intuitively to me, they are related. Perhaps as I explore this concept further, I will uncover the theoretical relationship between the terms.
I also agree that “social sensemaking” could be how a social system performs sensemaking, or builds a joint understanding of some topic. In that sense, Ed Hutchins’ examples of distributed cognition in a cockpit and navy ship are excellent examples of social sensemaking, too.
I think my challenge moving forward is to perform an analysis of social sensemaking on all these different levels. For, as we know, “cognition” occurs on different levels—why wouldn’t the impact of social interactions on information assimilation?
Thanks for your great observations, Matt!