In today’s dynamic and uncertain environments, leaders face daily challenges that defy standard approaches and solutions. They often realize they lack the relevant knowledge and experience to address complex issues that demand quick and decisive action, or else risk serious impact on the organization.
The best solutions may be unknown and finding them isn’t an individual task. Leadership is a social process, and discovering solutions to complex challenges requires senior leadership teams to embrace collective problem-solving through sensemaking of the situation: unpacking complexities, working through polarizing dilemmas, and aligning responses and actions.
What Is Collective Sensemaking?
Sensemaking is the act of pausing to reflect on a situation or challenge and creating shared understanding amid complexity and chaos. Like leadership, sensemaking too is a social process, one which is most productive when leaders come together as a team to engage in collaborative inquiry, exploring perceptions of current reality to create situational awareness.
Building a collective understanding of the problems that need solving helps leaders generate potential solutions and decide what to do. This process requires senior leadership teams to commit to immersing themselves in facilitated, reflective dialogue.
The 3 Steps to Collective Sensemaking
Drawing on decades of experience with senior teams, we guide leaders through 3 sensemaking steps that bring clarity and purposeful action for collective problem-solving that addresses their organization’s most complex challenges. These steps are:
- Framing current reality by naming the challenges confronting the organization
- Assessing and exploring the most problematic challenges (taking a “deeper dive”)
- Generating responses, actions, and solutions from the discussion
Below, we offer questions to help structure the conversation during the first 2 steps to provoke deeper thought and richer discussions. Putting the challenges in the center of the conversation and resisting the temptation to go into solution mode is required to get the most out of the dialogue.
That gets flipped with Step 3, where the discussion moves from articulating the situation to determining what to do about it — with the goal to emerge with specific actions and commitments for collective problem-solving. Here’s a closer look at each step.
Framing Current Reality
The process of framing is designed to develop a collective understanding of the current reality, the associated challenges, and any unknowns or issues that haven’t been discussed. This can be accomplished by addressing 4 questions:
- How are today’s challenges presenting threats?
- How are today’s challenges presenting opportunities?
- How are the challenges we’re encountering familiar?
- How are we challenged in ways for which we have no prior experience?
There is no specific order for discussing these questions. A second round of questions helps the senior leadership team go deeper to articulate what’s confronting them:
- What are the sources of threats, and how might we recast them as opportunities?
- What do we need to do to bring opportunities forward?
- What do we need to do to ensure we’re capitalizing on our strengths?
- What capabilities do we need to develop to address challenges for which we have no experience?
Once the team has fully addressed these questions and created a shared understanding of their current reality, it’s time to advance the conversation to assessing the current state and determining how they can respond to the challenges.
Assessing Key Challenges
To further unpack the challenges that have been identified through framing, here are 2 approaches that can deepen the conversation:
Using our Direction – Alignment – Commitment (DAC)™ model, senior leadership teams can explore the extent to which they are making leadership happen in the context of the current state and the associated challenges. In the spirit of continuing with dialogue throughout this process, the team responds to 3 questions:
- To what extent do we have clarity of vision and agreement on the overall goals? (Direction)
- To what extent is work coordinated and integrated? (Alignment)
- To what extent do we act with mutual responsibility for the whole to make the success and wellbeing of the organization the priority? (Commitment)
By completing a DAC assessment, the team can identify areas that may be compounding the challenges and require strengthening. This dialogue produces useful insights that can be carried into the third generating step.
The second framework that can deepen conversation is polarity thinking, which helps identify whether the senior leadership team is looking at a problem to be solved or a polarity to be managed. Many of the challenges that teams are facing today have multiple solutions and defy the notion of the “one best answer.”
In such cases, the conversation needs to move from “either / or” to “both / and,” and now the team is dealing with polarities. Also described as managing a paradox, conundrum, or contradiction, a polarity is a dilemma that’s ongoing, unsolvable, and contains seemingly opposing ideas.
To explore a polarity, the team conducts a facilitated discussion with the following structure:
- Articulate the 2 “poles” that seem to be competing or at odds. For example, requiring all employees to work in the company office spaces or allowing hybrid / remote employees.
- Explore the positive outcomes and potential upsides from focusing on one pole over the other.
- Explore the negative outcomes and possible downsides of focusing on one pole over the other.
- Identify how to gain and maintain the positive results from each polarity, and the early warning signs to watch for if embarking into the downsides of each.
The exercise ultimately provides greater insights into the multiple facets of challenges as well as sets the team up for arriving at conclusions on how best to lead the organization through the complexity they’re encountering.
Generating Actions and Solutions
Some senior leadership teams may be satisfied with framing their current reality and stop there, while others may choose to invest more time assessing. Regardless of the amount of time and effort that goes into the sensemaking exercise, it’s important to save some brainpower and collective mindshare for getting tactical and generating actions to take from the session to implement collective problem-solving. This discussion takes shape in 3 steps:
- Review: Inventory the outputs from the conversations, identifying the key takeaways and insights.
- Reflect: Discuss the themes and patterns that emerge from the insights and identify what needs to happen to activate what is emerging.
- Apply: List specific decisions and actions that need to come from the sensemaking session, with owners, dates, and follow-up tactics.
Becoming a Sustainably Adaptive Organization
To anticipate and adapt to today’s leadership challenges amid disruption, organizations must build their capacity for collective problem-solving and collaborative inquiry. These are muscles that can be strengthened by routinely incorporating sensemaking practices into discussions whenever the organization encounters shifting dynamics and new challenges.
By engaging more levels of the organization in sensemaking, leaders set in motion a shared, collective view that enables the organization to continuously assess and adapt its capabilities to meet the challenges of today and the unknowns of the future.
Ready to Take the Next Step?
Our Organizational Leadership Practice partners with organizations to build leadership strategies that foster collective sensemaking — facilitating dialogue and creating shared understanding that helps senior leadership teams with collective problem-solving.
