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When Columbus set out to discover America, he didn’t have a map that had America on it. That was the whole point of discovering it. Centuries ago people were sailing the world with incomplete maps.
Some knew that the earth was a sphere. A globe. A ball. A round thing. Some maps were created representing the world as a sphere, without having all the information available.
This is important for people working together in uncertain and ambiguous situations.
The coin dropped when I read this story by Cynthia Kurtz where she talks about reading the book “Maps: Finding Our Place in the World
“What amazes me about these early globes is that people built a coherent representation of the world as a sphere even though they were missing part of it. They sewed together the edges of what they knew to be so as to make it into the shape they knew it had to take. This is a perfect analogue to sensemaking: we take what we know and form it into something that represents what must be.”
Aha. Sensemaking.
According to Wikipedia sensemaking is “… a collaborative process of creating shared awareness and understanding out of different individuals’ perspectives and varied interests.”
Although, the way Cythia Kurtz wrote it, sticks longer in my brain: “we take what we know and form it into something that represents what must be.”
Someone recently told me that the topic of sensemaking is a hot item. Especially due to the books by Karl Weick (affiliate link), who covers this topic at the organizational level. It is his work that is “… providing insight into factors that surface as organizations address either uncertain or ambiguous situations.”
Properties of Sensemaking.
Weick describes seven properties of sensemaking. And when I read them, I recognized every topic I have been discussing on this blog. So. Sorry for confusing you all these years. But know you know. I am talking about sensemaking. How we turn what we know into a representation of what must be to handle uncertain or ambiguous situations.
Here are Weick’s seven properties:
- Identity and identification is central – who people think they are in their context shapes what they enact and how they interpret events (…).
- Retrospection provides the opportunity for sensemaking: the point of retrospection in time affects what people notice (…), thus attention and interruptions to that attention are highly relevant to the process (…).
- People enact the environments they face in dialogues and narratives (…). As people speak, and build narrative accounts, it helps them understand what they think, organize their experiences and control and predict events (…).
- Sensemaking is a social activity in that plausible stories are preserved, retained or shared (…).
- Sensemaking is ongoing, so individuals simultaneously shape and react to the environments they face. As they project themselves onto this environment and observe the consequences they learn about their identities and the accuracy of their accounts of the world (…).
- People extract cues from the context to help them decide on what information is relevant and what explanations are acceptable (…) Extracted cues provide points of reference for linking ideas to broader networks of meaning and are ‘simple, familiar structures that are seeds from which people develop a larger sense of what may be occurring.”
- People favour plausibility over accuracy in accounts of events and contexts (…)
(source Wikipedia. Removed references for brevity.)
This links directly to the role of identity in projects, the importance of narratives, the use of social cues (flags!) and the need for context.
That makes perfectly good sense. To me.
Yes. Couldn’t resist.
That was a wordplay on “sensemaking“.
Yes.
Now I know why I am a map maker.
Image from Wikimedia.
Let me tease out a point from your early remarks about ‘the world being round’. The point to tease out is the distinction between our intuition (how we feel things are or should be) and science (or rationality – thinking things through logically based on evidence). Even today (just stand outside in the daylight) it feels like the sun goes around the earth (just watch it move across the sky), and it looks like the earth is flat (hilly but flat). But these feelings and intuitions are a manifestation of our biological wiring that has evolved in an environment that doesn’t care whether the round earth goes around the sun. It was just never important to our survival. But as our culture/technology has evolved knowing the truth about these things does impact on our survival.
So apply this to project management. In the early days almost all project involved building things; skyscrapers, trains, dams, you know. Lots of the tools a project manager has today are left over from this time, and these tools aren’t just physical tools like charts but thinking tools or ways of thinking about projects – building ways. These are the intuitions, instincts, or cognitive wiring patterns of the project manager – the want to make a list, create a WBS, PERT, or Gantt. It just seams so obvious. But, if you go out and study how projects are run today and talk to project managers as I do, you’ll see that the data tells us something different. Projects are not as we think they are. Those lists and charts are just a way of beginning things, they aren’t an end in themselves as they are reworked or worked over many times. Projects unfold, sometimes in unpredictable ways that need attention, and there is a craft to this that you won’t find in the PMBOK Guide or the latest PMI standards. It’s not a mystical craft; I don’t want to create that impression. These craft practice are hard to capture because they are so varied across disciplines and project types, but this is precisely the data we need to be collecting and capturing on our voyage of discovery of the new world of projects – where projects are more than building things.
Hey Jon, I agree.
What I find particular interesting is taking how the “intuition” is influenced/formed and injecting that with “evidence”. E.g. if the collective narrative influences what people think, explore the narrative with “evidence”. If a room influences what people are thinking, make the room suited for the required state. Stuff like that.
This topic is not much talked about in PM, that’s true. Mainly I think because it is a difficult topic to create a story around. I mean… the process and need of a WBS is a nice and neat story to tell. Logical and no nasty if-s.
Another part of this, which truly grinds on me, is how intuitions are powerfully influenced by the institutions. Make no mistake, project management bodies and those who hold the IP to the various methodologies have a vested interest in keeping the status quo and leaving evidence based practice outside the door. Such is Projectistan.
Yes. Such is Projectistan. Although I would expect that new versions of methods are fueled by researched evidence. Perhaps interesting to see how that process goes,
So I guess you are a big proponent of open source methods?
There’s a quote from T. S. Eliot I was reminded of reading your post:
“We shall not cease from exploration, and at the end of all our exploring will arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
Good stuff!
Andy
Hey Andy, love that quote. Describes the feeling perfectly
Don’t get me started. Andy, this citation is succinct and drives to the very heart of the problem. The trouble is that the direction of our exploration is not currently of our choosing. It is not in our control. We (the project management proletariat if you will) are stewarded by the powers of the professional bodies to look in some directions and not others. They achieve this by their professional awards, certifications, qualifications, book and journals they sponsor. Let us not forget that however they are dressed, the professional bodies are still corporate entities that have the power to structure the environment in such a way that will benefit their own ends. It is they who reinforce the meanings we attribute to the various aspects of projects, and those meanings serve themselves well. I’ve written a paper and talk on this topic http://www.youtube.com/user/DrJonathanWhitty
There’s an old joke of a passer-by who comes across a drunk looking for his keys beneath a street lamp one dark and dreary night. After fruitless minutes of searching the passer-by asked, where precisely did you drop them? The man pointed a little way down the darkened street. But why then are you looking here under the street lamp and not in the place you dropped them? exclaimed the helpful citizen. Because I can’t see down there can I? mumbled the drunk. The point to this is that we often only look where the lamp shines; and most importantly we must acknowledge that some entity or entities has the power to control that lamp. As I’ve mentioned, the pm professional bodies have a firm grip on this lamp and we owe it to ourselves to take it off them. This speaks to the point Bas raises about an open source body of knowledge which I have also published and spoken about. It is also my final point in the Q&A session of the talk above.
Returning to Eliot: our paths for exploration of knowledge must therefore be different and not circular. Only then will we return with new data, new meanings, new ideas, and new approaches.
[...] Bas de Baar on Sensemaking: “When Columbus set out to discover America, he didn’t have a map that had America on it. That was the whole point of discovering it.” Whoa … [...]
I love Jon’s words about craft and craft practices. Reminds me of the farmer’s markets here where the best cheeses, vegetables, and meats come from and all the small craft farms that are now thriving where once people thought they were crazy. seems to me that if you are moving in the direction of craftspeople–of people who do their work and continually learn for the deep love and satisfaction of the work itself, that’s a step in the right direction. People are drawn to people doing what they love. Professions and dIsciplines can be psychic prisons just as much as organizations can. From outside the PM world, to me, it looks like you craftspeople PMs have all the power you could ever need.