sense-making – The Leadership Professor

What makes leading so difficult?

The hardest part of leadership is knowing what’s really going on. We can’t bring people together to solve a problem or advance a goal if we don’t have shared understanding of what’s happening and what to do about it.

Humans have a strong need to believe that what they understand and see is exactly how the world is. That means we are often clueless about how much what looks like Truth to us is really personal interpretation of what’s going on. It’s as if we are predisposed by Mother Nature to not know how much we don’t know. Why?

Human limits: We can attend to only a limited amount of information and experiences available. And our values, education, experience, cognitive capacities, physical abilities, and developmental limitations influence what we see. We register some things, ignore others, and draw conclusions. All this occurs quickly and outside of awareness.

The result: what leaders see and think can seem more like Truth and the way the world really is than the individual creations and interpretations that they are. The tacit nature of all this can blind leaders to gaps and inaccuracies. It also leaves little incentive for them to question their interpretations or retrace any of their steps from data selection through decisions about appropriate action.

Human need for certainty: We’d never be able to act if we had to think all the time about what we are missing. The big problem is when people create explanations of what things mean and assume that others either see things the same way or, if they don’t, are wrong. Here is the basis for conflict and confusion.

From thought to action: People’s personal interpretations are prescriptions for how they and others should respond. If we see our unit’s budget problem as over-spending, we’ll cut expenses. If we see inadequate allocations, we’ll lobby for more. If we sense embezzlement, we’ll call the cops. You see the ease and the potential complications in all this. We’re often off and running before we’re even sure where we should be heading.

“We carve out order by leaving the disorderly parts out,” concluded eminent psychologist William James. How do we remind ourselves that this is what we are doing?

Successful leaders bring habits of the mind that make them deliberate information gathers who work to understand a situation from multiple perspectives. They respect the need for action, but know that the right response is better than a quick wrong response. They build relationships that enable others to feel safe disagreeing with them. They listen to what other’s tell them and work to confirm (or disconfirm) the accuracy of their perceptions. They test interpretations and experiment with solutions.

Leaders need to understand their world in order to influence it. This requires sharp sense-making skills. Sense-making on the surface seems like a cinch: you notice something, decide what to make of it, and determine what to do about it. Humans are pretty fast at this, and therein lies the problem. We tend to overlook four limiting features of the process.

1. Sense-making is always incomplete. Humans can attend to only a small portion of the information and experiences available to them. Our non-conscious is always hard at work attending to some data and screening out others. We rarely reflect on what and how much we ignore.

Stop reading for a minute and think about what’s happening around you. Are there sounds? A humming printer? Buzzing ceiling lights? Colleagues bustling in the background? What about movements? People passing your door? Traffic visible out your window? How about light? Objects in your periphery vision? What’s the comfort level of your chair? The feel of your hands resting on your desk/lap/keyboard? Is the room hot or cold? You get the point. We always know more than we know we do.

2. Sense-making is very personal. Individuals’ values, education, past experience, cognitive capacities, physical abilities, and developmental limitations influence what they see. But since sense-making occurs so quickly and tacitly, the everyday explanations leaders construct feel so obvious and real to them that they seem more like Truth and the way the world really is than the individual creations and interpretations that they are.

This can blind leaders to available alternatives, gaps in their thinking, and biases. It also leaves them feeling little incentive to question their interpretations.

3. Sense-making is interpretive. When thrown into life’s ongoing stream of experiences, people create explanations of what things mean – and often assume that others either see things the same way or, if they don’t, they are wrong.

4. Sense-making is action-oriented. People’s personal interpretations contain implicit prescriptions for how they and others should respond.

If you conclude, for example, that your unit’s budget problems result from over-spending, you’ll cut expenses. If you see the problem as inadequate allocations, you’ll lobby for more. If you bemoan inattention to revenue generation, you’ll develop new programs, services, or products. If it’s embezzlement, you’ll call the police.

You can see the ease and the potential complications in all this for leaders. They’re off and running before they’re even sure what’s most important and where they should really be heading. And they’re rarely aware that this is what they are doing. For more, check out Reframing Academic Leadership (Jossey-Bass, 2011), Chapter 2: Sense-making and the Power of Reframing.