Sensemaking
While I realize “sensemaking” has a context within larger disciplines and certain reading circles, I use it here as a concept handle to talk about the framings and workflows I’ve found valuable and worth encoding. Again, while I reread and revisit these links frequently, I am not endorsing or intend to suggest that you should buy, subscribe, or log into anything; and certainly don’t make snap life decisions based on the ramblings of some yahoo who has a page titled ‘sensemaking’…. I point to them as resources and references, not explicit guides on how to life your life.
If you pause and ponder life for any amount of time, it seems inevitable that you’ll come to the conclusion that not a whole lot in our world makes sense. However, living in a fluid soup of nonsense is not a particularly useful or productive place to be; and an even worse place to start building the foundation needed to enact change and add some semblance of reason back into the world. Fortunately, there are far too many smart thinkers who have trod the ground before me so I don’t have to start from 0, I don’t much care for the ontological discussions and semantics of philosophical outlooks, and I’m whimsical enough to not mind a little mess in my day to day nonsense. But occasionally I do tend to get stuck in the mud spinning my tires trying to find a meaningful way to make forward progress. The best way I’ve found to stop that is to encode what little sense making I’ve managed to articulate here.
- Some very philosophically oriented writings on sensemaking can be found at Cynefin.io.
- Some more practically oriented framings to making sense out of life can be found at 80000hours.org.
- You can gather a pretty decent picture of the practical business jargon side of skilled sensemaking from “The Startup CTO’s Handbook” by Zach Goldberg.
- One of my favorite finds is “How to make sense of any mess” by Abby Covert. Not only do I really resonate with the atomic nature of the writing, but the approachable, practical, and publicity oriented form of her site is inspiring and put into words “how to sort yourself out” far more elegantly than I could articulate.
In a sentence, I like to think of sensemaking as the act of making explicit the set of implicit assumptions, simplifications, and reductions you applied to make sense of your problem, and how you go about communicating those findings with everyone else. To do that, I’ll start with a blanket statement that needs to be at the forefront of any adventure into interdisciplinary collaboration:
As much as I hate playing the semantics game, a shared vocabulary and context are critical to advancing anything.
Establishing that syntax requires communication at the very least, but can be rapidly accelerated with a conversation. To have a productive conversation you ought to know what it is you’d like to say, and while you can construct that knowledge in the more fleeting form of thoughts, the act of writing can more quickly accrete those thoughts, ironically in part because you’re forced to slow down and express them at the speed of your communication medium. By writing that down I’ve also taken that first step in providing the one-way dialog of my thoughts. I’ve had a lot of luck (and patience/grace from others) constructing my own system of documentation mimicking several unusual forms of notes and prominent note takers. I also don’t use computers like a sane human and I’ve got some interesting patterns that make my efforts just that tiny bit more reproducible and less redundant. That system gives my digital footprint the scaffolding form that enables me to more seamlessy accrete efforts across my subject matter in a form amenable to the defacto standards of expressing that knowledge, the scientific method and a scientific paper. I’d like to push back on that however.
While that standard is great, the execution is riddled with flaws and static documents are a critical but incredibly under powered vehicle for transferring tangible knowledge to the different actors of this wicked mess. To wit, there’s 1/3 of the wordcount equivalent of the Bible here (220,595 at last render, and an extra 381,805 words of private insanity) and most of them are my own. I’d argue virtually none of that is fit for permanent encoding in a scientific journal or the $4,000 price tag that accompanies that carving of my advanced idiocracy. It’s bad enough that it takes up your limited time/attention and the space on a hard drive.
As much as I enjoy complaining about that, It’d be stupidly fruitless of me to just bitch without offering up a solution. Again here, I don’t have to reach very far to find a better way. This Zettlekasten system on top of the publishing pathway of quarto > GitHub Pages is a true FOSS solution that produces just as shiny a document (with even more potential functionality) and none of the paywall (or readership base) that the traditional publishing pathways offer. Those trade-offs work for me; and so although I will continue to play the game set before me, expect to find a lot of overlap and redundancy between this and my published work. Although I’ve attempted not to self-plagerize, I’m sure I have.
Despite having just railed against its implementation, the scientific method is a tried and time-tested means of ensuring that the knowledge that you collect is true. After we’ve established a common means of communication, the next step is to figure out what it is you’d like to accomplish and what the limitations and constraints of that mission are. Very often, this ends up being fuzzly related to a wicked problem. It’s my opinion that the technical side of this problem is the more direct side of this equation to solve, and a solid foundation in reproducable productivity is needed to close that gap between head work and hand work. This Atlas is my effort in that direction.
Soapboxes
I’ve been trying to make sense for it a while now and I’m not pleased to report that I’m more at a loss now than I have ever been. What have I been able to determine? Also called soapboxes. My soapbox is pretty flimsy and a bit redundant but in short:
- We ought to be more ambitious about observing the world; go outside and look at the system!
- Models and Maps are two distinct tools in our toolbox and a primary means of sense making.
- We ought to be more explicit about what we are trying to model.
- We ought to be clearer about what we’re mapping.
- You don’t need to stay in your lane, but the cascading effects of your analysis and domain should.
- We ought to be more patient (with ourselves); this is a very complex system, nothing will be solved, and work is never finished.
- Working a wicked problem requires overcoming the bankrupt attention economy and explicit guardrails on the concerns of the domain and the steps of a goal.
- Your direct objective and goal is not intrinsically shared with others, vocalize it.
A note about “what language do I program in?”
I code out of necessity, not out of love, and I’ve been told my more than a few that I write awful code. If you forced me to “pick a language” I think I’d go with JavaScript, specifically the GEE flavored variation. Then it would be R. Then it would be Python. GUI driven tools are great for the one-offs or cartography, and I’ve recently made the switch to QGIS for almost everything exploratory. These days I don’t typically open an ESRI product in favor of those open source solutions (and my unwillingness to log into or subscribe to anything more than I already am). Almost everything else is markdown or a pdf in Zotero. Based on that ordering, you can probably infer how sweet I like my coffee (syntax sugar is key). However, software is simply the means of teaching those foundations and concepts; and it’s those that I hope to transfer to you. Regardless of the method, I’m Googling syntax errors in English so my real answer is “the one that works”. Where I have skill and time I’ve demonstrated how to accomplish a given task in as many different forms as possible, but if I were a real pro I would be doing this in PowerPoint using Word as my IDE. In a year this will all be outdated anyways, so again, focus on the concepts first and the vehicle second and you should be set up for success both now and 3 years from now once we’ve experienced a technical revolution or two. If you’re really interested, see my workflow for more on my setup.