Sensemaker

Illuminating the Complex

SenseMaker is the pioneering software tool that we use at Narrate to conduct narrative research. Created by The Cynefin Company (when they were Cognitive Edge) the software allows us to gather and analyse responses from a large target audience quickly and efficiently, and progress directly into decision-making and action.

Over the years, I've come across many tools promising to unravel organisational complexity. Most of them fall short. But SenseMaker? It's different. It's a bit like having a torch in a dark, unfamiliar room - suddenly, you start seeing shapes, connections and possibilities you hadn't noticed before.
I've been working with SenseMaker for 15 years now, using it with clients across six continents. In that time, I've seen it uncover insights that have shaped strategy, improved employee engagement, and even influenced public policy. It's a powerful tool in the right hands.

Sensemaking: What Does Sensemaker Do?

At its core, SenseMaker is a software platform for narrative research. But that rather undersells it. It's really a way of making sense of complex situations by tapping into the experiences and perspectives of the people actually living them.

Sensemaker-featured-image
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The first thing to do is ask yourself - why are you listening? There tend to be three reasons behind
most organisational listening systems:
1. Listening to prove
2. Listening to improve or fix
3. Listening to understand or learn

Here’s How SenseMaker Works:

 We start by collecting stories. Not dry, corporate-speak responses to survey questions, but real, human experiences. We ask people to share an anecdote, a moment, something that actually happened to them related to the topic we're exploring.

 Now here's the clever bit: we then ask the storytellers themselves to interpret their own stories. They plot their experience on a series of carefully designed frameworks. This self-interpretation is crucial - it means we're capturing their perspective, not imposing our own.

 We gather hundreds, sometimes thousands, of these stories and interpretations. And that’s when the patterns start to emerge.

  Using the SenseMaker software (and sometimes supplementary data analysis and visualisation tools), we can visualise these patterns. Suddenly, we can see clusters of similar experiences, outliers that might signal emerging trends and connections we might never have spotted otherwise.

Objective (quantitative, numerical) data emerges from the subjective narratives  , giving you and your leaders a strong foundation for decision-making, including:

 What really matters to people (not just what they say matters when asked directly)

  Where the barriers to change actually lie (often not where leaders think they are)

  Why is change not happening and how might we enable it?

 What impact we’re really having (including those unintended consequences we’d rather not talk about)

 When we’ve pushed a good thing too far (yes, you can have too much customer-centricity)

Making SenseMaker Work for You

SenseMaker is a sophisticated tool. Designing a project, collecting the right kind of stories, and interpreting the results requires a fair bit of expertise.

Over the years, I've developed a structured approach that allows us to manage this complexity together. This means my clients (you) can focus on the insights and implications, rather than getting bogged down in the technical details.

I also often support other practitioners with parts of their projects - reviewing frameworks, advising on data gathering, or helping with analysis. And of course, I run large-scale projects from start to finish, with brilliant associates in specific topics and with particular skills. This breadth of experience means together we've seen SenseMaker applied in almost every context you can imagine.

Why does this matter? Well, in my experience, it gives us insights that traditional surveys or focus groups simply can't match.

More information about how SenseMaker works can be found here.

SenseMaker, Complexity and Cynefin

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SenseMaker is often mentioned in the same breath as the Cynefin framework (developed by Dave Snowden) for managing complex problems. According to this framework, the type of situation you’re in – e.g. obvious, complicated, complex or chaotic – determines the sort of approaches most likely to be effective. Understanding your context is crucial to dealing with complex issues in particular, and SenseMaker can help you build this contextual knowledge.

SenseMaker is a versatile tool that can be applied to various fields, challenges, and applications, including product and service launches, change management, organisational development, market research, and social research.

Is this a good fit for you?

Complexity training and coaching is not for everyone, it works best with open-minded, highly engaged stakeholders. We’ll need to work together, and you’ll need to take action, but together we can make a real difference.

Applications

It's particularly powerful when you're dealing with complex issues - the kind where cause and effect aren't clear, where the same action can have different results depending on the context. In other words, most of the challenges facing modern organisations.

SenseMaker isn't a magic wand. It won't give you simple, linear answers to complex problems. But it will give you a much richer understanding of what's actually going on in your organisation or community. And from that understanding, you can start to see where you might nudge things in a better direction.

SenseMaker can help you to:

 Quickly gather and integrate the perspectives of multiple respondents

  Find innovative responses to intractable problems

  Ensure you’ve identified the real issues behind a problem before committing resources

  Uncover the trends, patterns, and emerging themes within your collected narratives, revealing the underlying dynamics behind a given situation

  Understand the possibilities for change in a complex system

  Build a more coherent community or team

  Align interdisciplinary teams

  Assess initial socio-cultural conditions for a project

  Address critiques of leadership or organisational culture

  Set new organisational directions

  Conduct product planning and marketing

  Improve customer or brand experience

  Survey the perceptions of external stakeholders

  Develop the capacity to share knowledge from earlier initiatives and projects

  Monitor and evaluate developmental programmes.

  Detect emerging trends early

  Highlight the sensitive issues that no-one talks about.

Making Sense of Complexity:

As Narrate and now as Tony Quinlan, I have over 15 years of experience, conducting numerous narrative research projects using SenseMaker across the private, public, and NGO sectors in multiple countries and languages. I’m among the world leaders in using this innovative technology, helping organisations to understand their customer voice, improve employee experiences, and the capabilities to implement truly meaningful change.

So, if you're grappling with a complex challenge, if you feel like you're missing part of the picture, or if you simply want to understand your organisation or community better, SenseMaker might be worth exploring. It's not about getting all the answers - it's about asking better questions and seeing the patterns that matter.

And isn't that what making sense of complexity is all about?

Explore how we might work together

Book a meeting with Tony

If you have a difficult problem in your organisation, then book in a 15-minute exploratory meeting with me.

To change your organisation you need action, not just theory. My approach is evidence-based, and scientific, and helps your team to go from frustration to focus, and from inaction to impact.

  Deal with complex problem

  Translate theory into understanding

  Approach problem based on science

What Next?

To discover the benefits of SenseMaker and narrative research, or to find out more about our services, please contact Narrate today and schedule a discussion.

Countries
Topics
What Tony has done

Pakistan

Bangladesh

United Kingdom

Kyrgyzstan

Georgia

Belarus

Serbia

Italy

Bosnia-Herzegovina

Montenegro

Libya

Egypt

Netherlands

Saudi Arabia

Jordan

Portugal

Rwanda

Ethiopia

Spain

Democratic Republic of Congo

Afghanistan

Germany

Yemen

USA

Honduras

Colombia

Israel

Uganda

France

Yemen

Laos

Canada

Moldova

UAE

Customer loyalty

Security and stabilisation

Employee engagement and culture change

Poverty reduction

Salesforce improvement

Gender attitudes

Counter-radicalisation

Customer needs

Cultural assessment

Government engagement and mandate

Building sustainable livelihoods

Attitudes to minorities

Organisational innovation

Economic empowerment and improvement

Health service improvement

Understanding employee resistance to change

Exploring human rights implementation

Monitoring organisational change

Improving leadership skills

Enhancing existing training programmes

 

Research into initial crisis conditions

Full project to explore multiple stakeholder/department needs in single project

Results presentation

Designed research for local/client data gathering

Data gathering

Training and mentoring of client staff

Ran workshops to design interventions with multiple stakeholders

Monitored effects while client programmes were running

Enhancing media campaigns through local content gathering

Analysis of previously collected data

Participative analysis workshops

Designed frameworks for narrative (SenseMaker®) research

Review of client/colleague-designed frameworks

Our experience

Sectors we have worked in

Development Sector

We have a substantial portfolio of experience in conducting narrative-based research, monitoring and evaluation for development interventions globally.

Corporate Sector

Narrate has worked with a wide variety of commercial organisations around the world, from social enterprise startups to multi-national Silicon Valley tech companies. 

Government Sector

Since 2005, Narrate has worked with various governments and government agencies across the globe.
Our collaboration

Organisations we worked with

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