From Process to Approach
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From decision making to sensemaking
Having announced the funded organisations that are about to embark on a 10-year journey with the RFF, there’s an understandable focus on the Residents’ Group and their decisions.
We can write at length about the process– the different steps, number of people, the ‘temperature checks’ along the way (are we feeling red, amber or green?), the hours taken, the aims to keep it accessible…these are all important, but I suspect people aren’t just asking how the group chose this proposal over that proposal, they’re asking why.
So instead of the decision-making process, I’m thinking aloud here about the approach we took.
Language is important. The residents themselves have written about decisions being ‘found not made’ which hints at something slightly fuzzy going on. And by fuzzy I don’t mean not rigorous, I mean something that’s hard to describe. Wikipedia tells me that the term Fuzzy logic is ‘based on the observation that people make decisions based on imprecise and non-numerical information’.
While I was wondering how to describe how the chosen cohort emerged, I bumped into Abby Covert’s description of sensemaking and I think it’s a useful way to reflect on our approach to decision making.
Abby Covert:
Sensemaking is the deeply personal process we use to understand complex, messy, and/or ambiguous situations so we can make better decisions and take more thoughtful action…
This often looks like intuition, common sense or having good judgement.
Intuition is a direct sense of something being true, right, or off, without being able to fully explain why. It bypasses the deliberate process entirely.
Common sense is something generic enough to always apply, which information problems barely ever fit into.
Judgment is conclusory and evaluative. It arrives at a verdict and frequently places things or people into binaries of good/bad or right/wrong
My reflection:
I recognise the residents’ work being deeply personal. Everyone arrived at the proposal assessments in different ways, with different contexts and backgrounds.
We asked people to consider complex proposals that hoped to change messy systems and then take the thoughtful action of making a recommendation and giving a reason for doing so.
We sometimes talked about intuition or gut feeling or not being sure or things not being obvious, but we always aimed for people to be able to fully explain why they felt this way
And I wonder if using common sense is partly why harmful systems persist - tackling complex issues requires us to challenge the norm and question the commonly accepted ways of doing things, not to use it.
The residents had a complex collection of complex criteria to consider for each proposal. We were building consensus through conversation so those judgement binaries of good/bad or right/wrong just didn’t fit.
So yes, members of the residents’ group may indeed have intuition, common sense and good judgement but these weren’t built into our approach.
Abby Covert
In reality, sensemaking is more about pattern recognition, discernment, and timing, developed in context to your lived experience.
Pattern recognition is the ability to notice that something resembles something experienced before, or that things are arranging in a familiar or translatable way.
Discernment is knowing what matters, when to act, and when to wait. It is wise judgement in context to the circumstances.
Timing is everything in sensemaking. I wrote in Timeless Sensemaking for Modern Sensemakers [LB6] that there is not a single example in my career in which I could have sold the work I did even 6 months earlier. The timing just wasn’t right.
My reflection:
People have asked about the ‘qualifications’ for doing this work. On reflection, we were looking for, and then nurturing, good pattern recognition. What will a good proposal look like? What will it make us feel like? What language and values show up to tell us it’s on the right track? Or what tells us that, even though this is excellent work that’s needed right now, it won’t tackle the root causes and we’ll be talking about the same challenges in 10 years' time.
I feel we’ve experienced discernment and timing as a group. Knowing what matters to each other is key because our decisions are then based on much richer knowledge than as the individual. Similarly, a sense of good timing comes from a group’s collective knowledge of what has gone before.
So yes, I think it’s as important to consider the approach that surrounds a process. And having done so, I’m leaning towards describing the residents’ work as ‘sensemaking’ rather ‘decision making’.
I’m not playing with words here; I’m trying to get to the heart of what we think about when we think about participation.
Because what we end up doing together can be framed and constrained by the original invitation. There is so much more that people who have experienced a challenge can bring to reducing its impacts or likelihood of it happening again.
Making a decision is a punctuation point, albeit an important one. On the other hand, sensemaking feels like a continual process of creating a shared understanding and improving based on what we’re learning. The invitation to our residents has always intended to remove any constraints – keep working with us, stay with this endeavour, for ten years if you can. It makes sense.