Preparing
for Conversations
with Mary Lee Kennedy
Sense-Making
Mary
Lee Kennedy
Harvard Business School
and TKG Consulting LLC
Brookline, Massachusetts, US
 Biography
First and foremost
Mary Lee Kennedy is a practitioner focused on the formulation
and implementation of information and knowledge strategies that
create the greatest possible opportunity for organizational success.
Her professional experience is primarily as a leader of innovative
information and knowledge strategies in global organizations
in high-technology, industrial research, advanced materials,
energy and academia.
Mary Lee has significant
international experience with teams located in Canada, the United
States, Mexico, the United Kingdom, France and China. as director
of the Knowledge Network Group for Microsoft Corporation, Mary
Lee championed the development and implementation of global knowledge
and information strategies, technologies
and processes. This included critical contributions to the information
worker product suite (Office, SharePoint, CMS) and to Search.
Her achievements at Digital Equipment Corporation included improving
global decision-making using innovative web-based information
delivery, resulting in notable revenue gains and cost reductions
across the company. Her breakthrough work in Mexico established
a model for information services in Mexican universities.
Most recently Mary
Lee is focused on enabling the creation, use and exchange of
information and knowledge in research, course development and
teaching at Harvard Business School, and in launching TKG Consulting LLC with two partners: Craig
St. Clair and Deb Wallace. Her work at HBS is tied to her interest
in leadership development, and understanding the changing nature
of information use and knowledge exchange, particularly as it
relates to organizations and decision-making.
TKG Consulting is
a partnership that leverages the expertise of the members in
designing, developing and assisting in the implementation of
solutions in order to:
- Make sense of complex
organizations and relationships
- Align organizations
for knowledge creation, management and transfer
- Enable knowledge
sharing, capture, and learning in person-to-person and group-to-group
networks
- Design processes
and systems that access and manage large amounts of content
- Design buildable
technology solutions to support organizational capabilities.
During its first
year, TKG has built a customer-base across North America, in
Brazil, England, Australia and various countries in Europe in
the for-profit, not-for-profit, and government sectors.
Mary Lee has a Masters
degree in Library and Information Science from Louisiana State
University, U.S.A. and a Bachelors degree in Social Psychology
from the University of Alberta, Canada. She has served on several
Information School advisory committees, and is an editorial advisor
and columnist for a number of respected publications. Among other
publications, she has been published in CIO Magazine, Bloomberg
News, Gartner, Harvard Management Update, Information Week, Intranets,
KMWorld Magazine, Library Journal, Online Magazine
and PC Week. Mary Lee is a frequent speaker at information
and knowledge management conferences and workshops.
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Pre-Dialogue
Remarks
Sense-making or
sensemaking (as some write it) appears to be one of those topics
that "everyone" is talking about while there has obviously
been a lot going on in some circles for decades. As a practitioner
I have sought to understand the impact of sense-making in the
context of reducing ambiguity, i.e., increasing the ability to
take actions informed by it, that result in a greater degree
of success than is possible without it. This last part is important
- in practice there is an expectation that one has the ability
to visibly demonstrate that with an explicitly defined and applied
sense-making exercise the organization is in a more advantageous
position or when not in a competitive situation, leads to new
knowledge that is considered of value. Like so much in human
behavior - a sense-making initiative can be perceived as a "no-brainer"
or commonly expected behavior and I have also seen the opposite
- where it is overwhelming or so foreign that the organization
does not know what to do with it.
This set of introductory
remarks focuses on the questions I have (more than answers) about
formulating sense-making frameworks that adhere to the rigor
of theoretical research and the relevance of empirical studies,
that demonstrate tangible benefits (read individual and organizational
value), and that might lead to an extended dialog based on our
collective sense-making.
What is sense-making?
I tend to use two academics definitions of sense-making. I have
yet to read the work of Dervin (a critical piece) but have read
about her work through others, and have her work on backorder
so am waiting to receive the publications. The two academics
I start from are:
Karl Weick - appears
to be the foundation upon which much work on sense-making is
based or evolves from. He defines sense-making in the context
of seven properties (taken directly from pages 461-463 of his
book titled "Making Sense of the Organization):
- Social context,
i.e., the actual, implied or imagined presence of others.
- Personal identity,
i.e. ,a person's sense of who he or she is in a given setting:
what threats to this sense of self the setting contains: and
what is available to enhance.
- Retrospect, i.e.,
the perceived world is actually a past world in the sense that
things are visualized and seen before they are conceptualized.
- Salient clues,
i.e., the resourcefulness with which people elaborate tiny indicators
into full-blown stories, typically a self-fulfilling prophecy
or application of the documentary method (he sees this as key
to what sense-making is all about)
- Ongoing projects,
i.e., sense-making is constrained by the speed with which events
flow into the past and events become outdated.
- Plausibility, i.e.,
coherence, how events hang together.
- Enactment, i.e.,
action to gain some sense of what one is up against by asking
questions, making declarations, through prototypes, through probes
to see how something reacts.
He outlines a process
that can be displayed in at least two ways:
- People concerned
with identity in the social context of other actors engage in
ongoing events from which they extract cues and make plausible
sense retrospectively while enacting more or less order into
the ongoing events.
- People enact a
"recipe" "How can I know what I think or feel
until I see what I say and do?"
Of interest to me
as a practitioner is his statement that sense-making rarely occurs
as a passive diagnosis but is usually an attempt to understand
a developing situation in which the observer affects the trajectory
of that development. As a practitioner this becomes critical
in understanding which "tools" will best enable the
observer to act with the highest chance of a positive outcome?
Further questions much closer to my own area of expertise are
centered on understanding the settings in which sense-making
is enabled through the availability of information and knowledge
networks; and more specifically what are the characteristics
of those information and knowledge networks? (of course I think
this is a very complex question)
Lastly, for this
exercise, Weick distinguishes sense-making from decision-making
(an important distinction). Sense-making is the frame within
which decisions are made.
For Weick, it appears
it all comes down to the individual's ability to make sense.
However, I have more to read so leave this open to discussion.
Chun Wei Choo has
looked at sense-making in the context of his explorations on
"knowing organizations". He sees sense-making as part
of three broad activities that are interrelated, and which are
done well in "knowing organizations". So rather than
it being only an individual action, Chun Wei Choo's work looks
it in the context of what organizations and individuals do. The
three broad interrelated activities are sense-making, knowledge-creating,
and decision-making.
Sense-making is
related to the management of ambiguity; knowledge-creating is
related to the management of learning, and decision-making is
related to the management of uncertainty. Each one of these form
three points on the triangle (the apexes) and the gap between
sensing and knowing, sensing and doing, and knowing and doing
is addressed through other sets of activities. At the individual
level, he distinguishes between sensing (noticing potentially
important messages in the environment) and making sense (constructing
meaning from what has been sensed) as critical to organizations
today. His book, "The Knowing Organization", presents
a review of many studies on organizational sense making (March
and Olsen, Starbuck and Milleken, Thomas, Clark and Gioia, and
of course Weick and Dervin).
Choo discusses Dervin's
work (which is both theoretical and empirically based) as a model
analyzing information seeking and use in terms of a triangle
of "situation-gap-use" reflected in three questions:
- What in your situation
is stopping you from moving forward?
- What questions
or confusions do you have?
- What kind of help
do you hope to get?
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Cases
Where Sense-Making Makes Sense
So what are some
of the 21st century problems in my field of expertise (information
and knowledge management, organizational learning) where I see
a place for increased focus on sense-making (which I am using
as "sensing" and "making sense" given that
as a practitioner if we don't' make sense no one is going to
do anything with it necessarily)?
A while ago I did
a study on the use of IT and the practices of information and
knowledge sharing in clinician decision-making. It was an exploratory
study that highlighted an incredible trained and innate capability
of the clinicians to sense their way through patient care and
at the same time being accountable to significant levels of rules
(organizational, professional, industry) in every patient engagement.
As an extremely
complex environment (complex not complicated given the eco-system
in today's healthcare industry and the very nature of human beings)
it seems to me that this arena is one of those high stakes environments
where a studied approach to sense-making is occurring. Like other
high stakes environments the visible difference has the potential
to be significant. Are there better sensing and sense-making
behaviors and methods for high stakes environments? How do roles,
organizational structures, information and knowledge sharing
practices contribute? Has a distinction been made between high
stakes environments and other environments?
For instance studies
in high-stakes environments such as nuclear energy, financial
services, healthcare patient diagnosis and treatment, and the
defense industry have looked at the basic principles of knowledge
management and much work has looked at them with the distinction
of high stakes - what have they taught us that we can use/or
refute the work of sense-making (just to be clear - I personally
don't think sense-making is equal to knowledge management - but
I do think effective knowledge creation and information use is
dependent on sensing and making sense).
I also don't want
to leave the impression that high stakes equals greater degrees
of complexity but I wonder if this is so? If it is - what does
this mean for sensing and sense-making? If it isn't - what does
it mean?
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Knowledge
Creation and Learning
At Harvard Business
School we are embedding our work into the core processes of the
school - research and course development, teaching, and lifelong
learning. Our work is really one that looks at individuals as
they create sensing and sense-making capabilities, and at the
organization whose very essence is about knowledge creation,
our interest being in understanding and enriching the relationship
between knowledge creation and sense-making.
We have much to
do, but the role of sense-making (if it is not passive observation
but rather action based by individuals) is key in contributing
to the capability of individuals to act within a given situation,
and the organizations capability to create a knowledge creating
environment. By extension then I wonder what has been learnt
in other knowledge creating organizations about sensing and making
sense and whether there are learnings to leverage in both the
creation of individual capabilities and in the creation of organizational
capabilities.
Within the fluid
nature of today's global world, what are the cultural factors
that distinguish different capabilities in sensing and sense-making?
Are they significant? If so, how? If not, why? A little further
out in the questioning is the distinction between innovation
and knowledge creation. Logically it would appear to me that
sensing will impact knowledge creation which would then impact
innovation - innovation being the final product or service (at
least in the business world innovation usually has a commercial
connotation. I might have a novel thought or create a novel method
but it is only innovative once it is acted upon in some commercial
sense).
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Information
Work
On a very broad
level sensing and making sense has been significantly impacted
(in my novice perspective) by the Internet and the ubiquitous
availability of information through many, many devices (the phone,
the laptop, the Blackberry, the mobile phone, now even digital
call-outs with text-messaging in coffee houses, on planes, in
cars, etc.).
While this is something
that I think flows under the two topics I mentioned above, with
the ever changing situation in which we find ourselves today
and the increased awareness of (and sometimes lack of awareness
of) what is happening at any given point in time, what happens
to the human capability to sense and make sense?
When I was at Microsoft
we were doing some very interesting work around multitasking
and communication patterns. There is some interesting work being
discussed on continuous partial attention (see see link to blog
by Linda Stone below. It is different than multi-tasking. At
the broadest level there is a significant difference and perhaps
one that will impact how we sense and make sense and how organizations
enable sensing and making sense. Dave Snowden has an interesting
blog exchange on Sept. 30, 2006 with Verna Allee on sensemaking
and the essence of it in terms of the ability to see patterns
- he and Verna Allee indicate that the key qualifier in pattern
extraction is whether it is something that unskilled people can
learn, comprehend and even replicate with just few hours of learning.
Is this something to consider with peer networks in continuous
partial attention environments and what does pattern extraction
shift do to the ability of individuals and organizations to act
over an extended period of time?
So, there are lots
of questions. For me it's a beginning. Feel free to respond to
any part or all of it. I'm looking to engage us in the discussion
of actual practice that demonstrates a proof point in the work
of the theorists or that counters it - and I am interested in
the theoretical side that might help to understand what is observed
in practice - as well as specifically looking at practices that
related to the three topic areas above. I'm looking forward to
our discussions.
Links
(reading you might want to do some time)
Chun Wei Choo's Site
Dave Snowden's Blog
Linda
Stone's blog on Continuous Partial Attention
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