Sense-Making Needs to Be in Your Toolkit
Sense-making enables leaders and teams to understand what just happened and figure out what to do next – ideally we use this skill to process positive experiences, like when a crush visibly returns our affection or we get a job offer, and not less than awesome things, like spilling coffee on your shirt or getting covered in muddy water from a bus on the way to a job interview. In my 25 years of working with leaders on staying present, making good decisions, and coaching others, I’ve noticed how sense-making needs to be in everyone’s personal and professional toolkit.
Sense-making in the flow of work helps leaders and communities navigate chaos. It is a critical skill because, despite humanity’s quest to find life’s meaning, there’s no such thing as “figuring it out”. Life is constantly changing, so one of the best ways to navigate disruption is by recalculating what happened by acknowledging the experience and adjusting course. Just like a global positioning system (GPS).
Sense-making in the flow of work and life means processing information and feelings in split-second-moments – whether navigating a tough meeting, guiding a team of 11-year-olds who just discovered passing, or responding to your partner’s body language, we are always unconsciously choosing how we respond to experiences in real time.
Here are the three key attributes of sense-makers.
Open listening
Listening with intention means that by the end of a conversation or after hearing someone’s story, you should be a different person. Listening with so much focus means that we are changed by the experience. For most of us, this is a whole new kind of intention that combines empathy and discipline, especially when we’re tempted by opportunities to talk!
Listen with your whole body and watch for eye rolls, foot tapping, and the classic “I’m fine” face. Open listening means you’re so present that the other person feels it. If you want to test your skills, just say “tell me more” and embrace the present moment.
Agile learning
Learning happens everywhere and all the time when we reflect on our experiences. Sense-making requires agile learning, which means processing data in the moment, understanding what happened, and bridging skill and knowledge gaps really quickly (usually with bite-sized pieces of content, like a video or a question).
Great questions help us generate data and insights that help us make sense of experiences. Paraphrase what you’re hearing in the moment. If keeping notes helps you retain information, even if they’re scribbled on your lunch napkin or weird drawings like the ones below, document the insights and ideas that come up for you. Synthesize information like a chef sampling a soup until you learn everything you can in that moment.

Learning agility is the most important talent capability for organizations across all sectors. Futurist and my personal learning agility hero, Heather McGowan, argues that “we must begin with a foundation of learning agility, learning is now part of work and fueled by purpose (why) as the motivator, and the unit of value we produce is merely the byproduct or exhaust from our focus on increasing our capacity through continuous learning.”
Making sense of what’s happening in real-time requires learning agility.
Recalibration
Sometimes you need to loop back, listen again, tinker with something based on what you learned, or try something new. Instead of taking six months create the perfect product or experience or plan, create a draft, sit with it, gather some feedback and ask, “Did this work?”
Based on what you sense, recalibrate the prototype and try again.
Last week my kids’ basketball teams joined up to play a few fun outdoor games. It was the first time they hooped together – the coaches were delighted to see the ball zipping around the perimeter and great effort on defense.
Time to recalibrate!
I listened (“tell me more about how you boys are sharing the ball so well”), learned (“coach, we’ve been working on creating space all spring!”), and adjusted tactics (“okay, let’s add fast, two-clap decision making to our games”), which resulted in both smiles and a more challenging game.
Adjusting in the flow of a game, after all, just makes sense!