Sensemaking

Sensemaking Plot Summary

Introduction

Human intelligence faces unprecedented scrutiny in today's world dominated by algorithms and data-driven technologies. Many believe our minds are inefficient, slow, and prone to biases compared to the sleek efficiency of computerized systems. The workplace mantra "I'm only human" captures this diminished view of our capabilities—as if humanity itself was inherently flawed. Meanwhile, journalists and futurists constantly remind us that robots will soon take most jobs, from factory workers to doctors, lawyers, and even caretakers. This perspective has profoundly influenced education, where humanities disciplines have declined by half since the 1960s, replaced by STEM fields deemed more practical for future employment. This cultural shift overlooks something fundamental: the unique power of human intelligence to understand context, meaning, and culture in ways algorithms simply cannot. While big data can identify correlations between variables, it cannot explain why those connections exist or what they mean within the rich fabric of human experience. The practice of sensemaking—a method grounded in the humanities—offers an alternative approach that embraces the complexity of lived experience rather than reducing it to quantifiable data points. Through phenomenology, critical thinking, and cultural engagement, sensemaking allows us to navigate ambiguity and extract profound insights from qualitative information. Far from being obsolete in a world of algorithms, these distinctly human capabilities represent our most valuable competitive advantage in addressing the complex challenges of our age.

Chapter 1: The Human Factor: Why Cultural Intelligence Matters

Cultural intelligence represents our capacity to understand both ourselves and others within the contexts that give meaning to our experiences. Unlike algorithms that can process vast amounts of data but lack interpretive ability, humans excel at extracting significance from subtle cultural cues. This uniquely human capability becomes increasingly valuable in a global environment where understanding diverse perspectives is essential for effective leadership, innovation, and problem-solving. The core of cultural intelligence lies in our ability to immerse ourselves in other worlds. When we read great literature, study historical movements, or engage with different artistic traditions, we develop the capacity to empathize with experiences distant from our own. A businessman reading Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain" gains insight into Europe's devastation during World War I; an executive studying Chinese architecture develops sensitivity to aesthetic principles that might influence consumer preferences in Asian markets. This cultural engagement is more than abstract intellectual exercise—it provides practical advantages in business and leadership contexts. Consider how Mark Fields, Ford Motor Company's CEO, needed to understand the worldview of drivers in emerging markets like China and India to effectively reimagine the luxury car experience. Traditional market research showed declining sales in their Lincoln brand, but only through deep cultural immersion could Ford understand that luxury meant something entirely different to these new consumers than it did to American drivers. While algorithmic thinking can process trillions of terabytes of information per second, only sensemaking can penetrate deeply into the meaning of that information. Humanities disciplines train our minds to recognize patterns across seemingly unrelated phenomena, to question assumptions, and to navigate complexity without reducing it to oversimplified formulas. They teach us to look beyond "what" is happening to understand "why" it matters within specific cultural contexts. The diminishment of cultural knowledge in business education and corporate leadership has created dangerous blind spots. When leaders lack cultural intelligence, they mistake numerical representations for reality and become increasingly disconnected from the human experiences that drive markets, organizations, and societies. The most successful leaders, by contrast, develop what Aristotle called phronesis—practical wisdom that synthesizes both knowledge and experience into a holistic understanding of their domain. Cultural intelligence requires commitment to continuous learning and genuine curiosity about human experience. This extends beyond the superficial engagement of a thirty-minute museum visit or background music during dinner. It demands the rigorous study of history, literature, philosophy, and art—disciplines that reveal the structures of meaning that shape human behavior across diverse contexts.

Chapter 2: Silicon Valley's Blind Spot: The Limits of Algorithmic Thinking

Silicon Valley's ideology has permeated far beyond its geographical boundaries to become a dominant worldview shaping education, business, governance, and social policy. At its core lies a profound faith in quantification and technological solutions. Companies like Facebook aim to create "the clearest model of everything there is to know in the world," while Google's mission is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." These ambitious goals reflect a belief that human experience can be fully captured through data and optimized through algorithms. This approach privileges STEM knowledge above all other forms of understanding. The assumption is that mathematical models, engineering solutions, and scientific methodologies provide superior frameworks for addressing human problems. Within this paradigm, humanities education appears increasingly irrelevant. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen articulated this view when he claimed that for people "who aren't deep into math and science and technology, it is going to get far harder to understand the world going forward." PayPal founder Peter Thiel even established a fellowship paying young entrepreneurs to bypass university education entirely. The Silicon Valley mindset particularly celebrates "disruptive innovation" that creates clean breaks with past knowledge and practices. This fundamentally contradicts the humanities tradition, which views knowledge as cumulative and interconnected rather than obsolete and replaceable. While scientific disciplines appropriately build upon new discoveries that supersede previous understanding, humanistic knowledge works differently—it recognizes how power structures and cultural contexts continuously reshape our understanding of human experience across time and space. Big data exemplifies this reductionist approach to knowledge. When Chris Anderson proclaimed "the end of theory" in his famous 2008 Wired article, he suggested that with enough data, "the numbers speak for themselves" without requiring explanatory frameworks. Yet this perspective overlooks the inherent limitations of correlation without causation. Google Flu Trends dramatically illustrated these shortcomings when it failed to predict the H1N1 pandemic in 2009 and subsequently overestimated flu outbreaks in 2012-13, revealing how data without contextual understanding produces misleading conclusions. The concept of "frictionless technology" further demonstrates Silicon Valley's limitations. The assumption that removing human reflection from technological interaction represents progress overlooks how this shapes our thinking in problematic ways. As former Google CEO Eric Schmidt suggested, "Most people don't want Google to answer their questions... they want Google to tell them what they should be doing next." This approach creates what Eli Pariser called "filter bubbles" that reinforce existing perspectives rather than challenging us to engage with different viewpoints. While technological innovation offers tremendous benefits, the cost to our intellectual life comes through diminishing the contextual understanding that humanities disciplines provide. The algorithmic worldview suggests we need not understand why patterns emerge—only that they do. This neglects the essential human capacity to navigate complexity, interpret meaning, and develop perspectives that extend beyond quantifiable data. Sensemaking offers a critical corrective to these limitations by embracing the messiness of human experience rather than attempting to bypass it.

Chapter 3: Culture Over Individuals: Understanding Shared Worlds

Modern business practices often focus on individual consumer preferences, segmenting markets into discrete demographic categories and surveying individuals about their thoughts and choices. This approach overlooks a fundamental truth: human behavior emerges primarily from social contexts rather than individual deliberation. We respond to the norms, expectations, and shared understandings of our communities, often without conscious awareness of these influences. This insight forms the foundation of sensemaking's first principle: culture over individuals. Philosopher Martin Heidegger revolutionized our understanding of human existence by arguing that we are fundamentally social beings whose choices emerge from our embeddedness in what he called "Being"—the background practices and assumptions that structure our reality. Unlike René Descartes' famous dictum "I think, therefore I am," which positioned individuals as autonomous thinking subjects, Heidegger proposed that our social contexts determine what appears meaningful or relevant to us in the first place. We cannot separate ourselves from these worlds because they constitute our very experience of reality. This distinction has profound implications for understanding consumer behavior and organizational dynamics. When companies conduct focus groups or surveys, they extract people from their natural contexts and ask them to articulate preferences they may never have consciously considered. By decontextualizing experiences, these methods miss the rich web of meaning that actually drives behavior. This explains why such research so often fails to predict how people will act in real situations. Consider Ford Motor Company's challenge in revitalizing their luxury Lincoln brand. Traditional market research showed declining sales and an aging customer base, but offered little insight into why. Using sensemaking principles, Ford discovered they were approaching luxury from an engineering-centered perspective—focused on technical features and driving performance—while their potential customers in global markets experienced cars within entirely different contexts. For these consumers, cars weren't primarily about driving but about creating spaces for self-expression, meaningful connections, or productive work amidst increasingly congested urban environments. The structure of our shared worlds shapes our reality in ways individual psychology cannot explain. Anthropologist Nicole Pollentier's experience recovering from traumatic brain injury illustrates this principle dramatically. While computational theories of mind suggest her abilities could be restored by uploading discrete information like song lyrics, her recovery actually unfolded through immersion in meaningful contexts. She regained her ability to write poetry not through conscious effort but through the sensory experience of making tamales—an activity that reconnected her to the embedded knowledge of cooking, seasonality, and sensory engagement that had structured her creative process before her injury. Philosopher Hubert Dreyfus's five-stage model of skill acquisition further illuminates how we move from rule-following novices to intuitive experts through progressive immersion in shared worlds. True mastery emerges not from accumulating more information but from developing an embodied understanding of a field—what jazz musicians call "playing what's not there" rather than following prescribed patterns. This type of expertise cannot be reduced to computational processes because it draws on tacit knowledge embedded in cultural contexts. Understanding shared worlds allows organizations to recognize that their own internal cultures often create blindness to the realities of customers and markets. By studying the assumptions underlying their decisions—"that on the basis of which beings are understood"—companies can develop more meaningful connections with consumers whose worlds may differ dramatically from their own.

Chapter 4: Thick Data: The Power of Contextual Understanding

In January 1992, George Soros and two colleagues made the most profitable financial bet of the decade by shorting the British pound sterling. While countless financial analysts had access to the same economic data, Soros extracted unique insights by analyzing a different type of information—what we might call "thick data." Rather than focusing solely on economic indicators, Soros and his team carefully interpreted the cultural dynamics between Helmut Schlesinger, head of Germany's Bundesbank, and Norman Lamont, Britain's finance minister. They understood that wounded pride, national autonomy, and institutional history would ultimately determine the outcome of this financial conflict. Thick data captures the context and meaning behind facts—not just what happens but why it matters within particular social frameworks. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz coined the term "thick description" to distinguish between observing behavior (a twitch of the eye) and understanding its cultural significance (a wink that communicates conspiracy or flirtation). Similarly, thick data reveals what is meaningful about a culture, not just its measurable attributes. The difference between "86 percent of households drink milk weekly" (thin data) and "a Rosh Hashanah meal with apples dipped in honey" (thick data) illustrates this distinction. Our lives are dominated by thick data—the background knowledge that helps us navigate our environments with fluency. We know how paper will fall when dropped, how a room will sound when chairs are moved, and how to read subtle emotional cues in others' faces. This type of knowledge constitutes our familiarity with the world and forms the foundation of our everyday decisions. When businesses ignore this dimension of human experience, they work with fundamentally flawed models of behavior. Philosophy helps us understand different types of knowledge that inform our decisions. Objective knowledge—the domain of natural sciences—provides universal, repeatable observations about physical phenomena. Subjective knowledge encompasses our personal sensations and feelings. However, two other forms of knowledge prove crucial for sensemaking: shared knowledge about cultural experiences and sensory knowledge that manifests through bodily awareness. Soros's famous investment decisions drew upon all four types, including his reported physical reactions to market positions that signaled potential problems. Leaders today are often isolated from thick data by layers of abstraction. Executives who receive free products, travel in private vehicles, and work from secluded offices lose touch with the lived experiences of their customers. Their imaginations and intuitions starve on a diet of spreadsheets and analytics reports—thin data stripped of contextual meaning. This disconnection leaves them vulnerable when markets shift or cultural values evolve. Robert Johnson, a currency trader who worked with Soros, demonstrated the value of thick data when he sensed Finland's impending currency devaluation not through economic models but by spending a winter drinking with Finnish bankers and government officials at a Helsinki café. "I knew because I was there," he explained. "I could feel it in the room when I talked to the Finnish people... I learned it from real conversations with real feelings, not from fundamental mechanical economics." The discipline required to synthesize all forms of knowledge—objective, subjective, shared, and sensory—distinguishes master investors and leaders. They develop what economist and historian Charles Kindleberger called "pattern recognition" based on "circumstance, history, human stories." This capacity to find meaning in complexity cannot be reduced to algorithms or formulas. As economist Paul Samuelson observed, economics is "not an exact science... it's a combination of an art and elements of science." By engaging with thick data, we develop the ability to see patterns in what philosopher Isaiah Berlin described as "a vast amalgam of constantly changing, multicolored, evanescent, perpetually overlapping data." This skill combines reason, emotion, judgment, and analysis—and requires the nerve to act on insights that cannot be fully quantified or explained through conventional models.

Chapter 5: The Art of Interpretation: Why Humans Excel at Pattern Recognition

Human intelligence demonstrates its unique power when engaging with real-world complexity rather than laboratory abstractions. This distinction mirrors the difference between observing lions being fed in a zoo and watching them hunt on the savannah. Both scenarios show lions eating, but only one reveals the rich context that gives meaning to their behavior. Similarly, phenomenology—the philosophical study of lived experience—asks us to examine human phenomena as they actually unfold in social contexts rather than as isolated variables. Edmund Husserl pioneered phenomenology by advocating a return to "the things themselves"—stripping away abstractions to describe objects and experiences as they directly appear in consciousness. His student Martin Heidegger expanded this approach by focusing on our shared existence in the world. For Heidegger, understanding required examining not just individual perceptions but the social structures that give meaning to our experiences. A cocktail, for example, gains significance only within the context of café culture, which itself reflects broader cultural practices. This phenomenological approach provides a powerful framework for addressing business challenges. When a major Scandinavian insurance company was losing valuable older customers, traditional analytics identified only that 55-year-olds were abandoning their annuity products. Applying phenomenology, researchers reframed the question from "How do we retain customers?" to "What is the experience of aging?" This shift revealed that around age 55, many people experience a profound sense of losing control—children leave home, career advancement stops, and society begins treating them differently. These existential challenges prompted customers to reorganize their finances based on new calculations about remaining lifespan. While the insurance company focused resources on acquiring young customers who found annuities irrelevant, their most valuable potential clients—older customers hungry for financial guidance—were being ignored. By understanding the phenomenon of aging rather than just tracking customer attrition data, the company reduced customer losses by 80 percent without increasing service costs. Phenomenology also helped transform a European grocery chain struggling with declining market share. Rather than segmenting customers by demographics or price sensitivity, researchers examined the experience of cooking in modern households. They discovered that shopping behaviors were driven primarily by moods—particularly the "evening rush" when tired workers needed quick dinner solutions, versus moments of "inspiration" when shoppers sought novel ingredients for special occasions. This insight led the company to redesign stores around these mood states rather than traditional product categories. Engaging with phenomena requires analytical empathy—the systematic effort to understand other worlds. Unlike everyday empathy for friends and family, this third level of empathy draws on theory, frameworks, and humanities knowledge to interpret unfamiliar cultural contexts. Researchers apply theoretical tools like semiotics (the study of signs and symbols), discourse analysis (examining how language creates meaning), and concepts from anthropology and sociology to recognize patterns in qualitative data. For example, sensemaking researchers used Marshall Sahlins's anthropological models of reciprocity to help a museum transform its transactional membership program into one based on generalized reciprocity—where members give without expectation of immediate return because they trust in a long-term relationship. This theoretical framework helped shift the institution's entire approach to donor cultivation. By studying phenomena in their full contextual richness rather than reducing them to variables, we access insights that algorithms cannot detect. Phenomenology reveals not just what people do but what their actions mean within specific cultural frameworks—and this meaning-making capacity remains uniquely human. As philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein advised: "Don't think, but look." The most profound insights emerge not from abstract theories but from careful observation of how people actually experience their worlds.

Chapter 6: Creativity as Receptivity: Breaking the Manufacturing Mindset

Creativity emerges not through manufacturing ideas but through receptivity to insights that arise from immersion in our worlds. The language we use reveals this truth: we say "it came to me" or "it dawned on me"—not "I made an idea" or "I took an idea." Great creative breakthroughs, from T.S. Eliot's revolutionary poetry to Henry Ford's vision for affordable automobiles, demonstrate how sensitivity to cultural shifts allows us to perceive possibilities invisible to others. This receptive state—what I call "grace"—characterizes genuine creativity across all domains. Martin Heidegger captured this phenomenon with the Greek term phainesthai—a verb in the "middle voice" that is neither entirely active nor passive. Creative insights are revealed through us, not by us. When we use the wrong model for creativity—treating it as something we can will into existence through rigid processes—we value the wrong things and lose our natural sensitivity to meaning in qualitative information. The popular "design thinking" approach exemplifies this misunderstanding by promoting innovation without social context, celebrating ignorance as an advantage, and reducing human experience to "pain points" that can be eliminated through better design. Genuine creative processes look quite different from these formulaic approaches. When asked how they achieve insights, master practitioners describe states of receptivity rather than methodical production. One sensemaker immerses herself in a phenomenon, then deliberately walks away, allowing unconscious processing before capturing insights that emerge spontaneously. Another describes creativity as emerging through emotional distress that eventually gives way to clarity. A third finds insights arriving after running—when her mind has been completely emptied. All experience creative breakthroughs as something happening through them rather than something they deliberately manufacture. This phenomenon appears consistently across diverse fields. Einstein wondered why his best ideas came while shaving; Agatha Christie discovered plot solutions while examining hat shops; novelist Graham Greene noted that "the words come as though from the air" after periods of apparent sterility. Ford CEO Mark Fields explained, "I drive people crazy, but I need to feel it. Leadership is what happens when management models and linear thinking ends." Even George Soros described his investment approach as "assuming the market felt the same way as I did" by "subordinating my own emotions to those of the market." Philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce distinguished between three types of reasoning: deduction (applying general rules to specific cases), induction (inferring general rules from specific observations), and abduction (generating new hypotheses to explain observations). Only abduction—what Peirce called "an act of insight, although of extremely fallible insight"—can incorporate genuinely new knowledge. While deduction and induction work within existing frameworks, abductive reasoning sees new connections between previously unrelated elements. Psychologist William James explained that creative genius depends not on superior cognitive processes but on the objects of attention—what master practitioners choose to focus on based on their accumulated knowledge and experience. Daniel Kahneman's work confirms that what appears as intuitive "fast thinking" actually draws upon rich background knowledge and pattern recognition developed through years of immersion in a domain. Architect Bjarke Ingels exemplifies this receptive approach to creativity. Unlike architects who impose signature styles regardless of context, Ingels immerses himself in each site's unique cultural, environmental, and social circumstances. When designing a museum for Swiss watchmaker Audemars Piguet, Ingels found his creative breakthrough not through abstract sketching but by observing a watchmaker's hands manipulating a mainspring. This encounter revealed the perfect metaphor for the museum: a spiral structure reflecting how watchmaking extracts maximum performance from minimal materials. True creativity requires allowing possibilities to emerge rather than forcing solutions through predetermined methods. As Ingels describes it, the moment of insight—the "click"—feels like disparate elements suddenly aligning in perfect order: "It works on all levels and this new idea... it's almost like all these types of data meet in a shape. Or in a construct. It's an inarguable truth." This is grace—the state where our receptivity allows us to perceive what had previously remained invisible.

Chapter 7: Masters of Perspective: Developing a North Star

Modern complexity often makes us feel incapable of seeing the big picture, prompting us to outsource decision-making to algorithms and big data analysis. Yet the world is no more complex than when previous generations navigated world wars, space travel, and agricultural revolutions. The difference lies in our obsession with organizing reality as an assembly of discrete facts rather than developing a coherent perspective that determines what truly matters amidst apparent chaos. Sensemaking teaches us to navigate by the North Star of perspective rather than relying solely on the GPS of algorithmic thinking. The U.S. Naval Academy's recent decision to reintroduce celestial navigation—after previously replacing it with GPS training—illustrates this principle. As expert navigator Frank Reed explained, "Every navigator should use all the available information." Navigation isn't about blindly following satellites but interpreting multiple data sources to determine position and direction. Similarly, leadership requires synthesizing diverse information types to develop a meaningful perspective rather than reacting to isolated data points. Master practitioners across fields demonstrate this interpretive ability. Negotiation expert Sheila Heen reads complex social dynamics in real-time during her workshops, assessing organizational hierarchies, individual personalities, and group moods simultaneously. When confronted with a defensive executive during a feedback session, she made split-second calculations about how to create a learning moment without causing public humiliation. Her skill comes not from memorizing formulas but from crossing "over the river" where "the material is at my fingertips" and her focus shifts entirely to reading human signals. European Commissioner for Competition Margrethe Vestager approaches regulatory decisions with similar nuance. When investigating Italian state support for steel producer Ilva, she recognized that merely enforcing competition rules without understanding regional economic contexts could devastate communities. "If you close down a plant with fifteen thousand people, you impact the whole area," she explained. "It's dangerous to just enforce rules without an understanding of consequences and opportunities." Vestager deliberately fights against bureaucratic isolation, rearranging her office to eliminate the "gulf of veneer" that separates decision-makers from those affected by their choices. FBI hostage negotiator Chris Voss employed perspective-taking when orchestrating journalist Jill Carroll's release from Iraqi kidnappers in 2006. Rather than focusing on American reactions to the kidnapping, Voss decoded the cultural messages in the captors' videos and crafted responses addressing their actual audience: undecided viewers in the Middle East. By coaching Carroll's father to acknowledge the kidnappers' culture—stating "Jill Carroll is not your enemy" and emphasizing her reporting on Iraqi suffering—Voss transformed the relationship from manipulation to collaboration. As Carroll later revealed, when her kidnappers saw her father's message, they declared him "an honorable man," creating a cultural shield that facilitated her eventual release. These masters develop what might be called connoisseurship—the ability to navigate expertly through increasingly refined categories of knowledge. Just as French chefs distinguish nine stages of cooking meat where Americans recognize only five, experienced practitioners develop nuanced recognition of patterns within their domains. This aesthetic judgment represents the culmination of sensemaking: the capacity not just to process information but to interpret its meaning within specific contexts. Winemaker Cathy Corison exemplifies this perspective-driven approach. While data-driven consultants reduce wine to chemical compounds that can be optimized for critic ratings, Corison's forty years of experience allow her to understand the "alchemy" that transcends measurable properties. She describes her vines as "old and wise" rather than analyzing their pH levels, recognizing that "ripeness happens at different numbers every year" and cannot be reduced to formulas. This perspective—grounded in what philosopher Martin Heidegger called Sorge, or care—enables her to make wines that "speak of time and place" regardless of market trends. The development of perspective requires what Isaiah Berlin called "moral courage"—the willingness to interpret reality rather than merely measuring it. Without care—genuine investment in the meaning of our endeavors—we see only isolated data points instead of coherent patterns. With perspective, we distinguish between what is merely "correct" (corresponding to measurable facts) and what is "true" (revealing meaningful patterns within human experience). This distinction represents the essence of human intelligence that algorithms, despite their computational power, cannot replicate.

Summary

The fundamental insight emerging from this exploration is that human intelligence offers irreplaceable value precisely because of its ability to interpret meaning within context. While algorithms excel at identifying correlations within massive datasets, they fundamentally lack the capacity to understand why these patterns matter or what they signify within the rich complexity of lived experience. The practice of sensemaking—with its emphasis on thick data, cultural understanding, receptive creativity, and developed perspective—represents not an outdated approach but our most sophisticated tool for navigating an increasingly interconnected world. The dichotomy between human and algorithmic intelligence ultimately resolves into a question of care. Machines can process information with remarkable speed and accuracy, but they cannot give a damn about what that information means. As we witnessed with the evolution of dementia care, the most efficient solutions often emerge not from standardization but from deep understanding of particular contexts and individual needs. This represents the true frontier of human advantage: our ability to interpret significance, develop aesthetic judgments, and maintain ethical commitments in the face of complexity. By engaging with the humanities as a training ground for these distinctly human capacities, we develop not just intellectual sophistication but practical wisdom—the ability to determine what truly matters amid the endless stream of information that characterizes modern life.

About Author

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Christian Madsbjerg

Christian Madsbjerg is a founder of ReD Associates and the Director of its New York office. ReD is a strategy consulting company based in the human sciences and employs anthropologists, sociologists, art historians, and philosophers. Christian studied philosophy and political science in Copenhagen and London. He lives in New York City.

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