Making sense when nothing is

Making sense in ambiguous situation is one of the most delicate and difficult things to do.

Lots of people tried to make sense of why life exists, why universe exists, what is our purpose in life and how we should structure our time, so that we can make a difference while we are alive. These subjects are not easy to approach. But during our day by day lives, we might run into situations that appear to be ambiguous.

How should we approach them?

How should we make sense of what is happening?

In the past few years I have seen lots of young entrepreneurs failing and even worst… their projects taking everything from them, including time, joy, families and life. When things are not working as expected, when work piles up heavily, when we stop sleeping to fit in one more hour of effort, our sense-making system fails. Eventually, everything collapses around us and things make no sense anymore.

What is sense-making system and how does it affects us?

When we have to deal with a complex situation, traditional models teaches us the simple way. First we decide then we act upon our decision. However, when dealing with a complex situation, like having a project that is late for no apparent reason, we take some actions, we try some new things and then we try to make sense of what is happening. Then we try some more things and the cycle repeats.

Sense-making is a powerful tool. We rely on it to helps us asses and analyse the results of an experiment, then we make another decision based on those results. During this process, we filter our all the signals and things that appear to be noise and have no value.

Mike is a young and talented marketing expert. He used to work in a marketing agency and he performed really well. The clients were happy with the results, he was an important piece of their business mechanism and things were going good. Then at some point, he was encouraged to start his own agency, to start his own venture.

He did just that. He started a new business, he hired some people to help him and went straight on to the “road to freedom”. Until one day… when things did not went too well with some of the clients. They were not satisfied with the results and had a lot of complains. He started to split focus, answering clients complains, creating campaigns, doing some design, writing the content, leading the team, handling the sales and chasing new customers, growing the business, handling taxes and so on. Soon after, nothing made sense anymore. He was throwing everything into that business, and the pieces kept falling apart.

How did this happen?

Sense-making is about understanding connections between various actions and events. However, making connections and identifying those cause-effect relationships that will help us make good decisions does not happen if we are not focused on them.

Mike soon found himself not being able to make sense on what is going wrong, because he could not see the connections between the quality of the work, the business relationship with clients and the team dynamics.

Karl Weick describes this as the “collapse of sense-making.” It can lead to poor decisions and wrong actions. The first thing that I did to help Mike was to make him realize that he needs to take a step back. He needed to break free of the work whirlwind and focus on making connections between facts. He needed to delegate everything and just step back, giving up control.

When we try to make sense of a complex situation, the first thing we need to do is to detach ourselves emotionally from the facts. We need to look at our projects, from a different angle, from a stranger point of view. We need to observe those connections that we missed, and focus on them. In time, things start to make sense again, we start to make better decisions, because our sense-making mechanism starts to work again.

Through this article series called “Minutes Mindset” I’m helping you build a solid mindset, writing my point of view on different subjects that we meet in our day by day life. I am a strong believer that once we can understand a subject, we can engage with the idea or refuse it all together. Both ways are helping us grow and develop our own way of seeing the world.

If you like my work, clap on it, share it with your friends and follow me.

In the end everything starts with us, with our mind, our self and even our stories. We can choose to act or Not.

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