Intro to Sensemaking for the 2020s

It’s healthy to get back to the basics. Whether it’s the basics for health, exercise, relationships, you name it. There’s benefit in exploring the baseline aspects of living and interacting in the world. How about the basics of sensemaking? Let’s not take advantage of the value from taking a closer look at how you make sense of things. Especially in this new day and age.

I subscribe to this belief regarding modern society: it’s likely every individual is currently experiencing an increased influx of information channels. This increase is overwhelming for most individuals. If you subscribe to this belief too, then you’ll find the following terms and explanations necessary for further exploration of how to mitigate your sensemaking. Before making heads or tails of the information coming at you, you must be certain that your individual sensemaking abilities are up to par.

With that in mind, I maintain an ongoing list of key terms regarding the nuts and bolts of how to make sense of things. A handy Sensemaking 101 cheat-sheet as a reminder for establishing an effective baseline before entering the terrain of ever-expanding information. A means of maintaining mental clarity before engaging the process of discerning information and determining reliable sources.

Sensemaking

Simply put, sensemaking is the process of making sense of things. It’s how you give meaning to something, especially with new developments and experiences. You do this all the time. Sensemaking can be voluntary or involuntary. Sometimes you seek knowledge or engage in research. Sometimes sensemaking happens naturally as you pick up various stimuli from everyday information processing.

Sensemaking is your ability to take in various data and synthesize it into one picture. From here, you can assimilate information and make judgment calls when needed. How do you give meaning to the experience you have? How do you decipher the information you collect? How do others do this? How much does sensemaking differ from person to person?

There are numerous reasons why sensemaking is becoming a popular topic these days. With the advent of the internet and the increasing amount of time spent online, individuals come across information more than ever before. The need for assimilation changes with the intensity and frequency of external information. What feels like exponential increases, can bring challenges for some. Basically, every individual will feel challenged, at least to the extent that human beings have limited hardware when it comes to such high capacity levels.

Synthesis

Synthesis is the combination of ideas to form a theory or system. Through one’s cognitive development, every person has synthesized information in order to know what they know. This is deliberately done through formal education. It’s also done from simply interacting with others and your environment while gaining experiential knowledge.

Today, most human beings can opt for continued education if they choose. The internet has allowed more access to knowledge than any human being can process in a lifetime. With increased opportunity, there can be increase downside. One must consider the possibilities of information fatigue and overstimulation.

Critical Thinking

Today’s critical thinkers are exploring the space where the information ecology and attention economy merges. I suggest adhering to this standpoint: if you’re going to willingly subject yourself to the attention economy, then you must understand the nature of the information ecology. If you don’t, you’ll be unequipped to have your own sovereignty of thought and you’ll be contributing to someone else’s course of action.

In other words, you’ll be a pawn in someone else’s game (or someone else’s narrative or discussion). Today’s critical thinkers are using online connectivity to suggest the most effective ways to cut through all of the high noise, low signal online terrain. Understanding the information ecology offers clarity on how you can assert having low noise, high signal quality during both the intake and sharing of information.

It’s important to share beyond the intention of information dissemination. Critical thinkers share their thoughts and information online with intention of raising the consciousness of the discussion, and working toward solution. If you don’t formulate your opinions and perspectives with the additional strategy that someone online is going to challenge you, then you’re likely going to contribute to the problem and not the solutions. In these instances, your contributions have the likelihood of showing up as low signal, high noise to others. Increasing the risk of your contributions being construed as misinformation.

Steelmanning

A steel man argument (or steelmanning) is when you’re able to formulate the best argument for an opponent’s view. It’s to test opposing opinions from the one you hold. It’s based on the notion of wanting to circumvent the possibility of making a straw man argument (which is a well-known logical fallacy).

If you’re truly a proponent of a cause or belief, and you choose to discuss it online, then you’ll want to consider steelmanning an opposing argument before sharing. A large part of the reason why online discussions reach standstills are because neither party has looked at why someone would choose to believe the opposing theory or belief. This could be considered lazy thinking, and will show your lack of critical thinking.

Online discussions have reverted to echo chambers filled with confirmation bias and other logical fallacies. These approach usually don’t move the discussion forward. It makes each contributor feel like they are “right” or justified in their stance. In the process, there’s an unwillingness to be open to synthesizing new information or questioning one’s original stance. If you really want to test your own convictions, then steelmanning your opponent’s stance will push the discussion forward while allowing for critical thinking. It will also strengthen your own sensemaking ability.