Leap with Active Sensemaking

Why Active Sensemaking

Leap into Active Sensemaking with the Sensemaking Semester is an immersive workshop designed to deepen your understanding of complexity in today's dynamic world. Led by academic pioneers Glenda Eoyang and CarrieLynn D. Reinhard and supported by Organization Development practitioner Barrett Horne and Spryng.io founder Ajay Reddy, this workshop offers a blend of theoretical insights and practical applications, equipping you with the tools to navigate and make sense of complex environments effectively.

Effectively engaging with human systems and communities requires understanding numerous interconnected elements: social and cultural beliefs, personal experiences and behaviors, and situational affordances and constraints all impact what any person, let alone a collective, will do at any time. The interconnectedness of human systems and ecologies also recognizes that changes in one element produce changes across the entire ecology. Trying to account for and understand these elements, especially from an outsider's perspective, often results in incomplete information and ideas that result in a community engagement that is hard to explain and predict.

Rather than relying on this outsider perspective, an active sensemaking approach seeks to understand communities by locating the patterns of insider perspectives through gathering narratives. People's stories contain their beliefs, feelings, and explanations for what they experience. Active Sensemaking with the Spryng.io platform helps locate patterns in these stories to shape our understanding of events, communities, systems, and overall human ecologies. Focusing on people’s sensemaking can generate sustainable community engagement, leading to transformative change for everyone involved in that ecology.

What Is Sensemaking?

Sensemaking is the process of understanding the meaning of a system's complexities and uncertainties. It involves interpreting information, identifying patterns, and constructing mental models to comprehend the world.

Everyone engages in - sensemaking every day of their lives. This sensemaking may be automatic, where people draw upon experience to make sense of, cope, and deal with a situation, perhaps without spending too much time considering what they are doing. This sensemaking can also be where innovation comes in, as people encounter situations requiring more attention, thought, and feeling to deal with what is before them. Either way, such sensemaking can be captured as the stories about what has happened, is happening, or even could happen.

Narratives of sensemaking are captured on an individual level and then reflected on at a community level to understand patterns of thoughts, feelings, and actions that matter most to that group with shared interests, identities, and goals. As sustainable, transformative change occurs at the community level, Active Sensemaking seeks to measure an individual’s decision-making and action-taking within specific contexts to understand the larger systems and ecologies of human experience.

Sustainable Change in Complex Systems

The 21st Century continuously demonstrates the interconnectedness of human life and community. From the impacts of climate change to social media, daily life and events are replete with examples of how complex human systems and ecologies are. Anyone seeking a profound and fundamental change in the nature of structure of those systems and ecologies needs to incorporate a human-centered focus on change for any transformation to endure.

Sustainability extends beyond traditional concerns of climate and ecology. Ensuring a system's long-term well-being--environmental, technological, social, or economic--- requires considering the balance between present needs and future generations. Such consideration with a human system or ecology requires focusing on the needs, behaviors, and experiences of humans and communities within multiple interconnected networks. Human-centered approaches aim to design solutions or interventions prioritizing human well-being and perspectives to produce change.

An Active Sensemaking approach to understanding communities is a generative approach that aids in the understanding and creation of new ideas, possibilities, or solutions within a system or ecology. The approach involves the community in any generated change, which may be gradual or disruptive, and may impact various aspects of that system or ecology. The result is a transformation of the very nature and structures of that system or ecology that is sustainable as it emerges from working with the community to produce a shift in the behaviors, values, or structures of that community.

The 21st Century showcases the complex nature of humans, communities, and human ecologies. The Spryng.io platform, Active Sensemaking, can help any community understand this complexity, thereby providing the means to generate sustainable, transformative change.

Who Should Attend?

This workshop is ideal for professionals, researchers, evaluators, organization development consultants, and anyone keen on mastering Active Sensemaking--a methodology that powerfully leverages natural human sensemaking.

Gain new insights, enhance your skills, and join a unique community dedicated to confidently navigating complexity.