Intro Series IX: The NEWDS Approach Part Two: Sensemaking I
This is the ninth post in an Intro Series where I introduce the key concepts and lay out the intellectual grounding of the Bigger-than perspective I’m developing in this substack. There are a number of interlocking pieces to the Bigger-than approach and I’m going over a sort of minimum viable number of pieces individually in order to be able to start to talk about the interlocking wholeness that starts to emerge from the interweaving of each piece. Here are the links to parts I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, and VIII in this series…
In this post I unpack what is meant by the term “sensemaking”, both historically within different fields, theoretical perspectives, and purposes (first section); as well as characterising the context in which it is understood within the NEWDS approach (second section), which will prepare the ground for presenting a sensemaking model for understanding civilisational-biospheric reality and changes that a colleague of mine has developed in the next post in this series. With regards to how this post itself follows up from the previous post in this series, I argue that sensemaking is optimally done in conjunction within a commitment to participating in one’s own enactive wisdom development and vice versa, as the two co-inform and regulate one another when done well.
Section One: Sensemaking Itself
In this section I’ll look at sensemaking within the framework of enactive cognition. I’ll discuss relevance realisation, the frame problem, and what relevance realisation looks like at different levels of organisation, from intra-personal to inter-personal to organisational and distributed cognition across societies and civilisations, and how this concept links the wisdom development and sensemaking processes. I’ll look at Schmachtenberger’s use of the term sensemaking in the context of making sense of what’s happening within of our civilisation as a whole, before finally exploring what sensemaking might look like as applied to bigger-than-self reality and the present day planetary context. First though, I’ll briefly discuss some theoretical perspectives on sensemaking that are commonly cited within the academic literature, which do not necessarily align with enactivist cognitive science yet inform perspectives on sensemaking nonetheless.
Theoretical Perspectives on Sensemaking
Mainstream Academic Perspectives on Sensemaking
Sensemaking is generally understood to occur in environments where there is difficulty in making sense of what is happening. In the mainstream academic context, sensemaking is understood to involve “a constant process of learning and seeking knowledge when confronted with different kinds of challenges” (Golob, 2018, p. 1). It involves making meaning out of ambiguous, complex, novel, or uncertain realities or aspects of reality. Various theoretical perspectives on sensemaking foreground different aspects of it: for example, whether primarily an individual or social/collective process, whether it is understood primarily in representational ways or not, and the timeframe within which it is bound or unbound (Golob, 2018). Golob (2018) identify 8 key characteristics of sensemaking:
Cognitive in Nature: Sensemaking is recognized as a cognitive process that involves collecting, interpreting, and organising information in order to make sense of unfamiliar or uncertain situations. It helps individuals reduce uncertainty and create a coherent mental picture of what's happening.
Social Interaction: Sensemaking is not solely an individual process. Social interactions and discussions play a crucial role, as individuals often engage with others to exchange perspectives, share information, and collectively construct meaning. This social aspect highlights that sensemaking is influenced by the context of conversations and interactions.
Retrospective Nature: Sensemaking often involves looking back on past events or actions to construct a narrative that provides a sense of continuity and causality. This retrospective element helps individuals understand how events unfolded and how they are connected.
Ambiguity and Complexity: Sensemaking is particularly relevant in situations characterised by ambiguity, complexity, and uncertainty. It's a way for individuals to cope with situations where there's no clear roadmap or well-defined answers.
Sensemaking Frameworks: People use various frameworks, mental models, and cognitive structures to make sense of situations. These frameworks can be based on personal experiences, cultural norms, social influences, research, and available information.
Influence of Culture and Identity: Culture, background, and personal identity play a significant role in shaping how individuals make sense of situations. Different people might interpret the same information differently due to their unique cultural lenses.
Organisational Context: Sensemaking is relevant within organisations as well. It involves employees interpreting organisational events and changes to understand their implications for their roles, responsibilities, and the organisation's overall direction.
Iterative Process: Sensemaking is not a one-time activity. It's often an ongoing, iterative process as new information emerges, perspectives evolve, and situations develop.
Enactive Cognitive Perspectives on Sensemaking
From the perspective of enactive cognition, sense-making has been identified as one of five intertwined ideas that are core to the enactive approach (autonomy, sense-making, emergence, embodiment, and experience; e.g., Di Paolo, Rohde, & De Jaegher, 2007). Understood as autonomous, autopoietic agents, biological organisms cannot help but engage in sense-making of both themselves and the environment: the need for sense-making is tied into their very structural organisation. Di Paolo et al. (2007) note that in the enactive approach, sense-making goes deeper than just a passive receiving of the world and deciding what actions to take in response to it. Rather, the self and world themselves are a product of enaction, through a continual active regulation of the conditions of exchange between the organism and its environment (Di Paolo et al., 2007). The enactive cognition literature tends to emphasise the following characteristics in its understanding on sensemaking - that sensemaking is in important ways:
Embodied and Embedded: As discussed throughout this series, enactive cognition emphasises that cognitive processes are not isolated in the brain but are inherently tied to the body and its interactions with the environment. Sensemaking is viewed as a situated and embodied process, where an individual's bodily interactions with the world play a central role in shaping cognition.
Dynamic Interaction: Sensemaking, understood enactively, is about the ongoing, dynamic interaction between an individual and their environment. This interaction involves a continuous loop of perception and action, where an individual's actions help shape their perception of the environment, and this in turn guides further actions.
Situational Context: Sensemaking is deeply contextual. The meaning an individual derives from their environment is co-constructed based on the specific context they are in, their past experiences, and the affordances (action possibilities) the environment offers.
Emergent Meaning: Meaning emerges through the reciprocal relationship between an individual and their environment. It's not something pre-existing that individuals discover, but rather something that arises as they engage with the world. This process of emergence is central to sensemaking. It can be understood as neither a fully subjective, nor fully objective process, but something that arises as a transjective relationship between the two (Vervaeke, 2019).
Cognitive Agency: Individuals are seen as active agents in the sensemaking process. They don't just passively perceive and interpret the world; they actively participate in shaping the meaning and understanding that emerges from their interactions.
Adaptation and Learning: Sensemaking is inherently adaptive. As individuals interact with their environment, they learn and adapt their behaviour based on the feedback they receive. This adaptation contributes to ongoing sensemaking and understanding.
Distributed and Social: Enactive cognition recognizes that sensemaking isn't limited to individual minds but can also be distributed across multiple individuals and their interactions. Social interactions and collaboration play a role in shaping shared meanings and understandings.
Affective and Emotional: Affective and emotional aspects are integral to sensemaking. Emotions and affective states influence an individual's perception, attention, and actions, thereby shaping the meaning they derive from their interactions.
Non-Cognitive Aspects: Enactive sensemaking goes beyond traditional cognitive processes and includes bodily sensations, emotional experiences, and intuitive insights as integral components of the process.
Schmachtenberger’s Holistic Systems Approach to Sensemaking
Daniel Schmachtenberger's perspective on sensemaking involves several key components that collectively form a comprehensive framework for understanding complex issues, particularly socio-ecological issues, and so informs, foreshadows, and complements the sensemaking framework we present below. The components Schmachtenberger identifies highlight the importance of holistic thinking, ethical considerations, and a long-term perspective. Schmachtenberger emphasises the need to move beyond reductionist thinking and consider the interconnectedness of various systems and factors. He advocates for a holistic understanding that takes into account the relationships, feedback loops, and interdependencies between different elements within a complex issue. This approach aims to capture the full complexity of the problem rather than oversimplifying it. Schmachtenberger advocates for the importance of longitudinal sensemaking, which involves tracing the evolution of complex issues over time and understanding their historical contexts. By analysing the underlying causes and dynamics that have led to current situations, individuals can make more informed decisions that address root causes rather than just responding to immediate symptoms.
Schmachtenberger promotes a systems-oriented approach to sensemaking. He encourages individuals to recognise the intricate web of relationships and feedback loops within complex systems. Understanding how changes in one part of the system can impact other parts is crucial for developing effective strategies and solutions. Schmachtenberger also advocates for an ethical aspect to sensemaking: that it should not be limited to objective facts and data alone. Schmachtenberger emphasises the importance of incorporating ethical considerations and human values into the sensemaking process. This means taking into account the potential impacts of decisions on individuals, communities, and the broader environment. Ethical sensemaking acknowledges the interconnectedness of human well-being and the need to prioritise positive outcomes.
Schmachtenberger also emphasises the power of narratives in shaping perception and decision-making. He highlights the role of narratives in influencing public opinion, and he encourages individuals to critically evaluate the narratives presented in media and society. By understanding the underlying narratives and their potential biases, individuals can engage in more balanced and informed sensemaking. He advocates for what he calls “responsible engagement”. That is, in a world inundated with information and technology, the importance of responsible engagement with information sources is greater than ever. This involves critically assessing the credibility and reliability of sources, avoiding echo chambers, and seeking out diverse perspectives to gain a more comprehensive understanding of complex issues. Finally, Schmachtenberger encourages a mindset of adaptive learning and openness to updating one's understanding as new information emerges. He acknowledges that complex issues are often dynamic and evolving, and individuals should be willing to adjust their sensemaking processes based on new insights and data.
Recursive Relevance Realisation and the Frame Problem
Recursive relevance realisation, a concept introduced by Vervaeke et al. (2012, 2013a, 2013b, 2019) refers to an enactive cognitive process by which cognitive agents realise what is important or relevant to pay attention to in a given moment and context. One of the functions of relevance realisation is to solve a perpetually occurring problem facing cognitive agents. This is the frame problem, and refers to the need for cognitive agents to zero in on certain frames pertaining to aspects of self and world in any given context, given that there are combinatorially explosive (i.e., functionally infinite) possible ways of perceiving and acting within reality (Andersen, Miller, & Vervaeke, 2022). It should be noted, lest this comes across as too coldly cognitive, that relevance realisation is an enactive cognitive process, and need not exclude affective components of cognition. Care is intrinsically bound up with relevance realisation: as autopoietic agents, biological organisms are deeply wired to care: first about themselves and their ongoing existence and reproduction, and then about wider circles of concern that vary according to species. The “frame problem” in real-life contexts, then, can be understood as being as much about deciding what to care about as what to include in one’s frame on a particular issue or set of phenomena.
Having said that, it is helpful to apply the frame problem in more cognitive, problem-solving kinds of tasks in order to talk more precisely about it. Vervaeke et al. (2012) suggest that cognitive systems engage in opponent processing in order to solve the frame problem, and in so doing evolve the realisation of what is relevant in a given situation. For example, there is a dynamic tension between exploring and exploiting the environment: too much exploring and a cognitive system risks never settling on any one target; too much exploitation and it might over-focus on a non-optimal target, having never discovered more optimal targets of attention. Similar tensions exist between generalisability and specificity of functional ability, and prioritisation of either a narrow or diverse set of tasks to meet the organism’s needs (Vervaeke et al., 2012). We can see these tradeoffs being made in LLMs such as ChatGPT: if the model is trained with more specificity, for example only on peer-reviewed medical research, then it will have more specificity and accuracy to answer queries related to this kind of data set and with this level of trustworthiness. However, it will lose out on generalisability, and not be able to generate recipes for baking bread, for example, which a model trained on a more general dataset would be able to do.
The importance of relevance realisation for sensemaking purposes is this: that as complex autopoietic cognitive agents, we cannot help but face the frame problem. We cannot help but face the tradeoffs and limitations in realising finite relevance in a combinatorially explosive set of possible ways to enact a world within reality. With a 4E (and particularly an extended) understanding of cognition, we can also see how culture has a huge influence on the kinds of frames that we tend to use to scaffold and shape our realisation of what is relevant out of all possible framings of reality. An indigenous tribes-person in the Amazon will have very different ways of realising relevance than a 21st Century urbanite living in London or New York. Similarly, a lawyer will have different ways of realising relevance in the world than a nurse, carpenter, or entrepreneur. Additionally, the more complex the world being framed, the greater the degrees of freedom there are in the process. That is, there are more possible things to care about and deem relevant, and so there is a greater possibility of self-deception or unwise sensemaking.
Section Two: The Context of Polycrisis, Meta-Crisis, and Bigger-than-Self Distress and Reality Distress
The biospheric-civilisational polycrisis and meta-crisis unfolding today is a hugely complex hyperobject to undertake sensemaking about and within, and furthermore, is highly consequential for the future of individuals and humanity as a whole. This context ups the stakes and changes the nature of the game for sense-making for human organisms living with this awareness today. The frame problem, in this context and as applied to the socio-ecological realities facing humanity and the more-than-human world in contemporary times, becomes central in framing actions that shape the future of humanity and the more-than-human world: how do we frame what is going on in the world today? What should we care about, pay attention to, and allocate resources towards? How should we structure our organisations and society? Many of the cultural frames that the current cohort of humans on Earth have inherited from our legacy cultures and institutions were created in a time of relative natural abundance, where planetary boundaries, resource use, climate change, plastic pollution, and other externalities were not a serious concern. These cultural habits and institutions were typically created in times of less cultural complexity and social pressure, and nevertheless have a chequered history when it comes to historical discrimination, violence, and disharmony.
The frame problem, then, is not merely an academic curiosity but a matter of enormous cultural and material importance. How we frame and care for reality, society, and ourselves in relation to one another does and will have an enormous impact on what happens next, individually and especially collectively. The intersection where the frame problem interacts with both individual experience and the polycrisis and meta-crisis is the zone of bigger-than-self distress and reality distress. The existentially threatening and distressing nature of the polycrisis and meta-crisis reveal important limits to individuality and the truth that our fates are bound up together as collective humanity, and we hold that this is inherently distressing to be alert to in the times we live in. It is not only how we are realising relevance individually but collectively that impacts, for example, whether we go over planetary boundaries, whether we fall into totalitarian technological dystopias over the course of the next century, whether bigger-than-self stressors precipitate increasing conflict and war or increasing collaboration and shared problem-solving.
It seems inevitable that humanity’s collective sensemaking must go through at least one major phase shift in the next several decades - quite probably more than one. Or to frame it another way that emphasises the gravity of our predicament, we could say that if future humanity exists they will necessarily have been through major phase-shifts in their sensemaking, and recognise that the current historical moment was when those shifts were transpiring in their past. In more optimistic scenarios, we flexibly adjust our frames on reality such that we change our behaviour to meet the challenges inherent in the polycrisis and meta-crisis. In less optimistic scenarios, our frames on reality are forcibly shifted as we deal with the actualities of supply chain disruptions, extreme weather events, possible ecosystem collapses, sea level rises, increasing interpersonal conflict and systems failures. It seems likely that humanity’s response will include some ratio of optimal and sub-optimal actions and updates/ossifications to our sensemaking.
One way or another, our (humanity’s) sensemaking in the world is going to have to adjust. The more optimistic scenarios involve more of us attempting to address it in the wisest ways that we are able which begins with updating our sensemaking. From this perspective widespread distress can be seen as a symptom and/or motivator of necessary transformation and a precursor of possible phase-shift. It is naive to expect that such transformations would be only elective and joyful: rather some are likely to be painful and disaster-led. From the perspective of individuals experiencing bigger-than-self and/or reality distress, it seems that moving towards the distress is potentially painful and upsetting on multiple fronts, but this very pain is what can motivate the necessary depth and seriousness of the changes that are required for a more optimistic future.
Whether processing the pain “works” or not in the sense of leading to the external outcomes we want to see is, in a way, immaterial and overly binary in its outlook. In any case, wisdom and actions aligned with virtue are inherently worthwhile no matter what and will tend to lead to better outcomes than would otherwise occur, collectively and individually. Most probably, there is a lot of suffering coming the way of humanity and the biosphere, whatever we do, as the current ways of being on the planet are a long way from sustainable and much harm has already been done, the consequences of which are yet to unfold. The scale, depth, and extent of suffering is still very much under our influence.
This brings us to the embodied, enactive experience of being an individual in the current times, experiencing bigger-than-self or reality distress as a result of large-scale systemic malfunction. If we accept the notion that individual actions can make a difference, and that we are meaningfully and inextricably a part of a reality and culture bigger than ourselves, then we are confronted with the question of what to do with our one individual life, in our own socio-ecological niche(s). In this situation distress avoidance is maladaptive; virtue, enlivenment, transformation and continuity lie on the other side of a great deal of disruption and personal and collective distress.
If we see how current cultural paradigms and systems, collectively enacted, have in deep ways led to the current meta-crisis and polycrisis, then it does not seem a coherent-enough response to only look for and enact solutions within the current paradigms and systems. What we need is phase shift(s) into more coherent ways of being and operating in reality - but what does this look like? The question can throw us into more than a little aporia, or not-knowing. Once again, this is not merely an intellectual aporia, it is existential, often distressing, and highly materially relevant for our individual and collective futures. This is the ambiguous, new, and highly complex and consequential context into which we propose those experiencing and moving towards bigger-than-self distress and reality distress must enact our sensemaking. It seems that many people sense that collective phase shifts are necessary, or have internally divested from the current paradigm, even if they cannot articulate the alternative, or have any clues to how that might be brought about whilst finding themselves obliged to enact the problematic paradigm and behaviours. Sensemaking is necessary to bridge this aporia and find ways forward that are more coherent than our current paradigms and ways of being and doing.
The next post in the series will present a model that originates from a colleague, friend, and deep collaborator, Matthew Painton, which we are tentatively calling the Full Spectrum Model of Sensemaking. This model is specifically tailored for sensemaking in the context just articulated, of bigger-than-self reality distress and eustress. This model synthesises a lot of what has been discussed in this series so far into what we think is a highly practical tool for guiding sensemaking in these highly confusing, complex, and consequential times, transforming bigger-than-self distress into bigger-than-self eustress, wisdom, and virtuous affordances for action. Thank you for your time and attention, and hope to see you in the next post…