Designing
Sensemaking Studies

Welcome to Designing Sense-Making Studies, a hands-on course inside Sense-Making Studio. This is Module 1, An Invitation to Sense-Making. If you've just opened Studio for the first time, you're in the right place. This video is about the one move everything else depends on. Before the instrument, the invitation. A sense-making study doesn't begin in software. It begins with a situation, something real, where the numbers look fine, but the reality doesn't feel fine. A service people quietly stop using. A team that agrees in meetings and stalls afterward. Hold one of those situations in mind as you watch. You'll write it down at the end. Here's the moment this course keeps returning to. A public appeals tribunal in British Columbia mailed out satisfaction surveys and got back one or two a year. They could have pushed harder, more reminders. more pressure. Instead, the chair, Emily Drowne, changed the question. She invited people to retell one specific moment, and then to say what it meant to them. Responses started arriving almost immediately, and one participant wrote something that still stops us. Wow. No one's ever wanted to know what I thought before. So before any tool, whose experience needs to be heard? Not users in general, the people whose days are actually shaped by your situation. and ask what it would take for them to really take part. Language, time, technology, risk? If a meaningful part of them can't participate, your patterns will describe access, not experience. This is why collecting responses is different from inviting stories. A response instrument controls answers. It decides in advance what can be said, and the analyst decides later what it meant. An invitation works the other way. It asks for a moment. Something that happened. and then lets the teller say what that moment meant. The interpretation stays with the person who lived it. That's not a courtesy. It's where the signal comes from. Concretely, an invitation sounds like this. Think of a specific time you dealt with our service. What happened? And then a few interpretive questions the teller answers about their own story. Event-based? Voluntary? No right answer. Notice what it doesn't ask for. A rating. Now, open SenseMaking Studio. Your account already contains a working study, a starter instrument, alongside practice material. You don't design anything in this module, and you don't publish anything. Think of Studio for now as a flight simulator. Everything is real except the passengers. Find the practice stories. They're clearly fictional, and that's the point. Open a few in the story table. For each one, read the story first, then look at how its teller interpreted it. That pairing, a story, plus its teller's own reading of it, is the unit of evidence this whole method is built on. One rule for this module, no live participants yet. When the tribunal's study went live, the chair said, I was terrified, because a real invitation changes a social contract. What's safe to say? Who is listening? What follows? Until you can honor what comes back, practice on fiction. Nothing you do in this module reaches a real person. Your first artifact is a learning contract. A short, honest page you write for yourself. Five lines. The situation I care about. Whose experience needs to be heard. What I hope to learn from this course. What I will not do yet and write this one out in full. I will not invite live participants until the course reaches live collection. And finally, how I'll know this course worked for me. Keep it under a page. You'll revise it as you go. That's expected, not failure. Your first artifact is a learning contract, a short, honest page you write for yourself, five lines, the situation I care about, whose experience needs to be heard, what I hope to learn from this course, what I will not do yet, and write this one out in full. I will not invite live participants until the course reaches live collection. And finally, how I'll know this course worked for me. Keep it under a page. You'll revise it as you go. That's expected, not failure. None of this makes a study valid or ethical by itself. Those are commitments you keep, not boxes you check. What this module gives you is the posture, begin with the situation, find whose experience matters, and turn extraction into invitation. When your contract is saved, you're done here. The rest of Module 1 continues in the app.

Module 2 of Designing Sense-Making Studies Why Sense-Making Matters In Module 1, we said a study begins with an invitation. This module answers the next question a busy leader asks, Why is this worth doing well? The short answer, because the hardest problems you face are not data problems. They're meaning problems. Organizations rarely suffer from too little data. They suffer from too little shared meaning. People can look at the very same facts and live in completely different interpretations of them. Work gets hard when those differences stay invisible. And the strategic advantage here is not certainty. It's faster learning that stays grounded in real experience. Here's what that looks like. One leadership team, one meeting, reviewing a new AI assistant. Everyone nods. The meeting ends on time. Then the retellings begin. The product lead story is progress. We're finally cutting manual work. The customer advocate's story is exposure. If this tool sounds confident but is wrong, we could harm the people we serve. The IT architect's story is integration. The model is the easy part. Identity and security are the real complexity. Same meeting. Three worlds. Nobody is lying. It is very rare that someone is lying. It is very rare that someone is simply resistant to change. They are standing inside different obligations, different risks, and different kinds of responsibility. So the leader's job is not to make everyone agree. It's to make those differences visible early, while change is still feasible. Now scale it. Ask three people to interpret their own experience, and you have three anecdotes you can argue about. Ask 30, with sliders and a triad they place themselves on, and you don't have anecdotes anymore. You have a pattern map. You can see where interpretations cluster. where they diverge, and where drift is starting, early enough to act before it becomes conflict or attrition. This is why meaning matters strategically. Meaning-based signals arrive before the dashboard moves. By the time a KPI shows a problem, the system has usually already adapted around it, often in costly, invisible ways. Confusion, workarounds, silence, a rise in small complaints, a sudden drop in initiative, those show up first, if you are set up to see them. It also takes the weight off the center. Leaders can fall into what White called the fallacy of centrality, assuming that if something mattered, they'd already know. When more people are allowed to make meaning, the organization learns faster and adapts with less rework. Across the interviews for the book, two uses came up again and again. In the first, an evaluator looks into a community to understand and serve it, an audience, a market, a neighborhood. In the second, a facilitator helps a community look into itself, usually at a moment when something isn't working and the group needs to learn. Same method, who's holding the mirror is what changes. One warning this chapter keeps returning to, the most actionable insight often hides inside apparent agreement. People say yes and mean different things. They use the same word and live in different experiences. Sense-making protects you from misdiagnosing resistance. When the real issue is competing obligations, it makes the difference visible, safely, instead of forcing it into an argument. So how is this different from the usual methods? The deepest difference is who owns the meaning. A traditional study asks for opinions which pull people toward abstraction. It averages answers which hides polarized reality. And it leaves interpretation to the analyst, which strips away context. A sense-making study asks for a lived moment, keeps the whole distribution, and lets the teller say what it meant. Interpretive authority sits with the participant. There's a mindset shift underneath all of this. Traditional logic wants clean boundaries, fixed categories, and neat themes. It treats a messy situation as a problem to be tidied. Pattern logic expects surprise, fuzzy boundaries, messy mixes, coherence that emerges rather than coherence you impose. In the sticky, non-repeatable situations leaders actually face, you don't ask what caused what. You ask what this plausibly contributed to, and what evidence would change your mind. So that's why it matters. Sense-making lets you see what's real instead of what's assumed. Surface difference safely instead of arguing about the slide deck, and learn faster than a lagging dashboard ever will, because facts don't coordinate action, meaning does. Next, in Module 3, the main approaches to sense making and what each one makes visible.

Module 3, Approaches to Sense-Making Sense-making comes in several schools, each with its own language and craft. This module puts the main ones side by side, but the goal is not to crown a winner. It's to help you choose or combine, based on your real design pressures, scale, sensitivity, time, and who needs to interpret. Start with a reframe. In sense-making work, your method is in a technical detail. It's a contract about meaning. It sets what counts as evidence, who gets to interpret it, and what kind of action it's meant to enable, a decision, a dialogue, an experiment, or accountability. So the question is never simply which tool. It's which approach keeps meaning intact at the scale you need. Here's why that matters. In a global study of humanitarian response, the Women's Refugee Commission found one word doing a lot of quiet damage, local. On the project plan, it looked like a clean checkbox. In the field, local behaved like weather. Contextual, shifting, sometimes contested. When a word carries different obligations depending on where you stand, measuring it without meaning doesn't clarify. It obscures. So before you choose a method, answer five meaning contract questions with your sponsors. What must become visible? A pattern you can't currently see. Who needs to interpret it? And who must not be harmed by that visibility? What nuance is non-negotiable? What would be lost if we averaged it? How fast do the learning loops need to be? And what will we actually do differently if we learn it? Answer those, and you can usually draft a minimum instrument in under an hour. Now the schools themselves. Three of them center the storyteller's own interpretation. Participatory narrative inquiry, Cynthia Kurtz's approach, has groups work with raw stories of lived experience and make sense of them together. Active sense making is the simplest repeatable loop. Invite a moment, let the author interpret it, look at patterns, and sense-making methodology. Brenda Durven's follows how a person bridges a gap and moves forward. Three more strengthen different parts of the work. Human systems dynamics, Glenda O. Young's helps people see and shift the patterns a system keeps producing. Phenomenological ethnography stays close to lived experience, capturing individual stories alongside measures. and group facilitation practices, liberating structures, agenda shift, make dialogue itself the method so a room can surface difference without it turning into a fight. Underneath the choice is a question of situation. The Kineven framework from Dave Snowden warns against treating a complex situation like a merely complicated one. In the complicated world, expertise and analysis find the right answer. In the complex world, cause and effect only make sense in hindsight. So you probe, sense the patterns, and respond, rather than planning your way to certainty, or all their differences. The schools share one loop, and this handbook uses it as the through-line because it's the simplest thing that scales. Invite a concrete moment. Let the author interpret it. Look at the patterns across many. Interpret them together. Take one safe-to-try step. Then revisit what changed. Every approach strengthens some part of that rhythm. None of them replaces it. And notice what the real difference is not. It's tempting to file all of this under qualitative versus quantitative, numbers versus narratives. That's the wrong axis. The difference that matters is where interpretation lives, how tightly meaning stays tethered to context, and how quickly an insight can turn into responsible action. Plenty of strong studies use numbers and narratives at once, which is why most strong studies are hybrids. The craft of sequencing approaches without losing the nuance you're trying to learn from and matching the instrument to the people. A triangle signifier can be powerful, but it's optional, not a default. When inclusion or felt safety is the constraint, a simpler dyad or scale often serves people better. Respect the situation and the method follows. So when you sit down to choose, don't ask which method is best. Ask what must become visible. who needs to interpret it safely, and how fast you need to learn. Let those answers pick the approach or the blend of approaches. The school is just the craft. Keeping meaning intact is the point. That's the map of approaches. Choose for meaning, for scale, for the safety you owe people, and for the learning loop the situation needs. Next, in Module 4, the platforms that carry these methods and how the platform itself shapes what people can safely say.