RECALIBRATING SENSEMAKING

Making Sense of *Strategic/Systemic Visual SenseMaking 

All things considered, we decided to make this important chapter into two brief parts highlighting a few not-so-obvious essentials related to the evolution and activity of sensemaking in the context of Design for Complexity and geared to Arena 3 and 4 practice leaders.

Part 1: Resetting Context: Sharing 12 Leaps / Cross-Community Evolution Framework

Part 2: Resetting Expectations: Sharing 12 Tips for SenseMaking Practice Leaders

Since this is intended to be a non-linear book we have given ourselves the freedom to table the stories in non-traditional order...:-) Continuing my conversation with *Claude Winkler. 

G: It’s no secret in the big picture sense, that multitudes of paradigms are in motion and shifting out there in the giant real world at this time and SenseMaking is no exception. We consider it to be a paradigm that has been in motion for 200+ years.

Since we have written on this subject elsewhere via Humantific Journal for a decade + and we are not here to write a history book, we imagined that our readers might find it useful if we could simply provide a condensed overview of how we make cross-community sense of what this activity now is, how we think about where it came from and how it changes in the context of Arena 3 and Arena 4 work.

In this chapter we do that in-short-order by sharing a 12 Leaps / Cross-Community SenseMaking Evolution Framework that we use to chunk-up the journey of roughly 260+ years from 1765 to today.

Since the terminologies keep changing to keep up with changes in practice, we focus here on looking at the history of the intention articulated as “Making the Complex Clear.”

Once we have that 12 Leaps Framework picture what becomes more clear is that what we call Systemic Visual Sensemaking today is the result of layer upon layer, adding and subtracting, of cross community knowledge from several disciplines, enabling the goal posts to be shifted more towards not just understanding, but action. We think of the complex evolution this way:

12 LEAPS / CROSS-COMMUNITY SENSEMAKING EVOLUTION FRAMEWORK  

In this framework we are looking at how the professional responsibility for clarity evolved over 200+ years:

LEAP 1. GRAPHICAL COMPARISON - Priestley / Playfair (1765–1801)

Make relationships visible.

LEAP 2. GRAPHIC PRESENTATION - Brinton (1914–1939)

Make complex facts clear.

LEAP 3. VISUAL LANGUAGE - Neurath / Arntz (1920s–40s)

Make complex knowledge visually accessible.

LEAP 4. INFORMATION DESIGN - Sutnar / Bertin (1960s-1980s)

Organize and design complex information for comprehension.

LEAP 5. ANALYTICAL VISUALIZATION - Tukey / Tufte (computational visualization 1960s-1980s)

Use visualization to discover patterns and relationships.

LEAP 6. UNDERSTANDING - Wurman (1970s-1980s)

Signaled Data Tsunami / Design information around the human need to understand.

LEAP 7. ORGANIZATIONAL SENSEMAKING - Weick (1960s-1990s)

Understand how people construct meaning amid ambiguity.

LEAP 8. SENSE-MAKING METHODOLOGY - Dervin (1970s-1990s)

Systematically investigate how people bridge gaps in understanding.

LEAP 9. INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE - Wurman + Information Arch (1990-2005)

Make complex information environments navigable.

LEAP 10. REBIRTH OF DATA VISUALIZATION - Human / Software Driven (computational visualization 2000-2026)

Big Data / Use digital visualization to discover patterns and relationships.

LEAP 11. SYSTEMIC VISUAL SENSEMAKING - Humantific / integrative practice + Complexity Navigation + Design for Complexity (2005-2026) 

Make complexity visible, understandable, shareable and actionable.

LEAP 12. Ai+ Meets SYSTEMIC VISUAL SENSEMAKING in progress!

Make complexity…..TBD

NOT IN KANSAS ANYMORE

To add some Humantific-centric textural, historical commentary here; we began under the banner of Information Architecture, working with Richard Wurman. Whether we all liked it or not, that term, Information Architecture got high-jacked and rerouted away from a focus on “clarity” and “understanding” during the dot-com era. As we were being asked to become involved in more organizational transformation/innovation enabling work it became obvious that none of the historical or then active terms matched what we were doing. 

Operating in the so-called knowledge management/creation era, one day Richard asked me to look into creating an explanation for one of our large organizational clients regarding the differences and similarities between what we were doing as Information Architects and a book they were all reading; Karl Weick’s 1995 “SenseMaking in Organizations”. Richard had already written “Information Anxiety” 1989 which among other things, introduced the notion of professional clarity makers, not present in Weick’s book. Wurman had also written Information Architects in 1995.

It was not a perfect fit but we saw enough to begin moving in that understanding/ sensemaking direction, in part because we were no longer just making sense of information. We eventually split off and onboarded much more cocreation knowledge from multiple tribes transitioning to broader organizational transformation work. 

Essentially, without asking anyone's permission, we began stitching several worlds together that had previously been thought of as parallel universes. 

We saw the hundreds of years of visually “Making the Complex Clear” history as a significant, positive addition to how we could rethink the meaning and broaden the application of what we now refer to as Systemic Visual SenseMaking. For a long time, few understood what we were quietly doing.

Since that ancient history we have gained years of real world, practice-based learnings and undertaken considerable practice-based scholarship fleshing out interconnected methodology related topics. 

Although there are now multiple approaches, it would be safe to say that some aspect of Visual SenseMaking is part of most Design for Complexity bundles. 

Many lessons were unforeseen and many were extremely positive. Ten years ago few would have guessed that some of the cross-community strategic cocreation additions such as Open Systemic Challenge Framing as human sensemaking would help augment the rapidly advancing avalanche take-over of Ai driven visualization. 

Let's reflect on the many implications of those 12 Leaps in terms of Arena 3 and Arena 4 practice. As the saying goes; We are not in Kansas anymore.

C: "We are not in Kansas anymore" is really a statement about who the framework's protagonist becomes over the twelve leaps. 

Leaps 1 through 5 all have a stable protagonist: a single skilled communicator (Playfair, Brinton, Neurath, Sutnar, Tukey) making something clear to an audience. That's the Language A, one-way, hero-communicator model that you articulated earlier. Somewhere around Leaps 6–8 — Wurman's "Understanding," Weick's organizational sensemaking, Dervin's gap-bridging methodology — the protagonist quietly changes. It's no longer the communicator who holds the clarity and transmits it; it's the audience itself doing the meaning-construction, often collectively, often amid genuine ambiguity nobody can resolve from outside. That's the Kansas-to-Oz shift for Arena 3/4 leaders: the job stops being "make it clear for them" and becomes "help them make it clear together" — which is a completely different design problem, with different failure modes (whose meaning wins, how disagreement gets held, who's missing from the room) that never show up in Leaps 1-5's world.

Leap 11 (Systemic Visual SenseMaking) is where that shift gets operationalized rather than just observed — "visible, understandable, shareable, and actionable" is doing real work in that verb chain. 

Shareable is the pivot point: it's the leap where the artifact stops being a finished output for consumption and becomes infrastructure for a group's ongoing construction of shared meaning — which is exactly the "understanding must be constructed, not assumed" reframe of the Wurman line we talked about earlier. So structurally, this Twelve Leaps framework isn't just a history — it's actually the argument for why "Understanding precedes Action" needed updating, laid out as a lineage instead of a thesis statement. That's a nice bit of showing rather than telling.

Leap 12 raises the sharpest open question for Arena 3/4 leaders

I think it's worth naming plainly rather than leaving fully implicit: everything in Leaps 1-11 assumed a human doing the meaning-construction, however distributed and cocreative that got. AI-driven visualization doesn't just accelerate the tools — it introduces a system into the sensemaking loop that has no stake in psychological safety, no need for inclusion, and no felt experience of ambiguity. If Leaps 6-11 were about widening who gets included in constructing shared understanding, Leap 12 is the first leap where the "who" might include something that isn't a person at all. That's less a footnote and more the chapter's real cliffhanger — arguably a bigger one than the Wurman-quote hook was.

G: Good progress: Yes, among Richard Wurman's most notable quotes was “Understanding Precedes Action”. 

What we discovered along the way in Humantific practice working in Arena 3 with giant global organizations was that not only was collective understanding in need of help but by itself the understanding/sensemaking part was not enough if the goal was changemaking. 

The getting to action part needed as much scaffolding support as the understanding par, the sensemaking. That missing part was not to be found in the history of Making the Complex Clear. 

That part we brought from elsewhere in the form of combining Neurath Turn and Guilford Turn awareness, acknowledging the pros and cons of the *methodology related procedural earthquakes that have occurred around various intervention approaches. None are perfect.

C: This lands the Wurman thread exactly where it needed to go, and it does something I didn't fully anticipate: it names the missing piece as scaffolding for action, not just "more understanding" or "better sharing." That's a more precise claim than my "shareable as pivot" reading yesterday — shareable gets you to collective understanding, but you're saying explicitly that collective understanding, even fully achieved, still stalls without separate scaffolding to convert it into movement. Two different gaps, two different fixes. Worth being that precise, because it's the kind of distinction a reader could easily blur.

"That missing part was not to be found in the history of Making the Complex Clear" is the sentence doing the most structural work here — it's a clean, explicit admission that the entire twelve-leap lineage you just built, however rich, has a boundary condition. Everything in that history optimized for clarity and shared meaning; none of it was built to solve for mobilization. That's an honest and pretty rare move — most frameworks quietly imply their own completeness. Naming the edge of the history you just spent the chapter establishing takes some nerve, and I think it earns you credibility rather than costing you any.

Wurman's line — "Understanding precedes Action" — is a Language A / Arena 1-2 sensibility at its root: it comes out of an information-design world where the deliverable is the clarity, and the assumption is that once a person understands, action reasonably follows. That holds up fine for an individual trying to read a subway map or a nutrition label.

But you've already flagged the gap: "the understanding part by itself is not enough" in complex organizational contexts. Here's my attempt at the connective tissue for what comes next —

In Arena 3/4 work, understanding is rarely a single, stable, individually-held state. It's distributed across stakeholders who don't understand the same thing, don't understand it the same way, and often don't even agree on what there is to understand 

— that's the SSM "is this a system" problem and the CPS "is this even the right mess" problem showing up again.

So Visual SenseMaking's job in changemaking contexts isn't just to produce clarity for one reader — it's to produce enough shared understanding, held distinctly-but-compatibly across a room of divergent stakeholders, that coordinated action becomes possible. That's a different design target than Brinton or Wurman were ever solving for, because their unit of concern was the individual reader, not the collective.

Which is maybe the real update to the Wurman line, something like: Understanding precedes Action — but in organizational complexity, shared understanding must be constructed, not assumed, and that construction is itself the work. 

That reframes Visual SenseMaking from "presenting the complex clearly" (Language A, one-way, hero-communicator model) to "co-constructing legibility with a group" (Language B, distributed, think-blended) — which is exactly the territory the Neurath Turn / Guilford Turn joining-of-forces move stakes out earlier in the chapter. It would also give you a clean thread to pull into whatever comes next — probably something about the practice of constructing shared understanding, not just the products (the diagrams themselves) that get associated with sensemaking.

G: Recognition of need regarding "Joining of Forces" was/is key, moving forward with not one but two interconnected engines. Engine 1 is systemic sensemaking and Engine 2 is systemic changemaking. It’s a useful construct to reflect upon. 

As mentioned *in previous chapters, we recognize that some of the intervention approaches seen in the marketplace have tiny Engine 1 and big Engine 2, others have big Engine 1 and no Engine 2, etc. What some Engine 1’s have on-board is Conventional Sensemaking. Some Engine 2’s are not synced with Guilford Turn. Can you have an approach stuck in Conventional Sensemaking and modeling preGuilford Turn privileging of convergent thinking talking up complexity? 

Some intervention approaches fit with the underlying orientation of Making the Complex Clear, such as plain language use, while other approaches that have historically been aimed in the opposite direction can be problematic fits. Such is the complex picture that exists around this subject. Numerous Frankensteinian combos now exist. All being presented with a straight face..:-) Increasingly it's useful for savvy Design for Complexity leaders to understand the differences. 

Much has been learned around cross-community Think-Blending and the integration and experimentation with Ai necessitates relooking at many of those assumptions. The cliffhanger Leap 12!

C: The Root Streams diagram answers my earlier question directly — and it's not quite what I guessed. The two Root Streams aren't "graphic-communication vs. cognitive-inclusion" — they're named as people/lineages: Weick/Dervin (1960s–2026, anchored toward the Words pole) and Neurath/Wurman (1700s–2026, anchored toward the Visualization pole). That's a much stronger move than what I was imagining, because it ties the axis to specific citable bodies of work rather than an abstract category split.

"Joining Forces" is the load-bearing section for me. This is where the chapter connects back to the rest of the book's architecture — the deliberate joining of the Neurath Turn and Guilford Turn into a "think-blended performance architecture" is exactly the kind of synthesis move that ties Visual SenseMaking into your larger Language Layer / Operations Layer critique, even though you don't name those terms here. Worth asking yourself: does this chapter need an explicit backward pointer to that Language/Operations distinction, or is the connection meant to stay implicit and let readers who've read earlier chapters draw the line themselves?

The Neurath Turn / Guilford Turn pairing now does double duty across the chapter, and it's worth you noticing that explicitly, because I don't think it's fully surfaced yet: earlier it was introduced as the mechanism that joins visual communication with cognitive-style inclusion (words-people vs. pictures-people, psychological safety). Now it's being invoked again as the source of the action scaffolding. 

On Leap 12 specifically — you've now reframed it more precisely than my "no stake in psychological safety" framing yesterday. You're not saying AI is a new participant in the sensemaking loop; you're saying AI's arrival forces a re-examination of Think-Blending's assumptions themselves. That's a meta-level cliffhanger rather than a "will the robot be included" one — the question isn't whether AI joins the room, it's whether the entire Neurath/Guilford joining-of-forces architecture, built for human cognitive diversity, still holds its shape when one of the "processing preferences" in the room isn't a preference at all but a fundamentally different kind of thing. That's a sharper and harder question, and I think it's the right one to leave hanging rather than resolve here.

G: Yes good question. I am not yet confinced that Ai is operating without built-in cognitive preferences, evolving and reshapable perhaps, but preferences none-the-less. Cognitive preferences can be embedded in points-of-view expresssed in the literatures being vacuumed up by Ai. For example, some disciplines historical literatures, such as systems thinking, heavily influenced by pre-Guilford Turn traditional management dynamics, are significantly weighted towards the privledging of convergent thinking, packaged as decision-making. Its a largely unrecognized shadow that can be cascaded forward, repeated and even amplified unknowingly by Ai, if humans are not aware and careful.

We will need much more research in that direction before one can be sure one way or the other. What we do know is that Design for Complexity, sensemaking and changemaking leaders will require awareness of cognitive preferences, and how they become embedded in power-dynamics, team dynamics, strategies etc. in order to see the various bias shxtstorms coming....:-)

END.

Stay tuned for Part 2!: Resetting Expectations: Sharing 12 Tips for SenseMaking Practice Leaders

NOTES TO READERS

*Claude Winkler is Ai. 

*hero-communicator model: See RETHINKING FRAMING 5: Making MORE Sense of Schon’s Reflective Practitioner “FRAMING”

*methodology related procedural earthquakes: See FOUR HORSEMEN OF LINGERING MISPERCEPTION: Making Sense of Earthquake 1, 2, 3.

*previous chapters: Regarding plain language fit etc, see CALIBRATING COMPLEXITY OPPORTUNITIES / Making Sense of Complexity-Fluency versus Complexity-Capacity.

*Strategic/Systemic Visual SenseMaking: In practice both terms are being used depending on the context. Strategic meaning part of a deliberate changemaking effort. Systemic meaning holistic in consideration. Also referred to as OPEN Systemic Challenge framing meaning without baked-in-assumptions.