At Leadership Choices, we believe that the ability to make good choices in the face of complexity is going hand in hand with developing sensemaking skills. Making sense describes the capacity of leaders to process what is going on and to react adequately to the complex and entangled challenges at hand. We believe that sensemaking is the best approach to operate in the VUCA phenomena in a complex world, where standard operating procedures won’t work.

In our work with organizations, we use an array of methods, tools, and resources that will improve your ability to deal with uncertainty and navigate complexity. Most prominently, the Cynefin® framework with its distinction between obvious, complicated, complex, and chaotic situations has proven time and again over the last two decades to be crucial in helping people in a wide variety of industries and functions to understand the nature of their challenges. We use Cynefin as a realtime support framework, that helps figure out decision-making, organizational approaches and the right action depending on context and complexity.

In diving further into the complex domains of organizational life, the SenseMaker© software helps our clients tap into the distributed intelligence of the workplace, collecting micro-narratives. With this, we capture what is going on in an organization by collecting stories of employees about their experiences in the company. Rather than condensing the findings into simplistic static graphs and numbers, we work together with the leaders in an interactive way and search for trends, patterns, and interdependencies in the data. You can see some sample datasets below. With this, we are supporting the organization in making sense of its internal dynamic and help leaders to find the next steps in nudging the system towards the right direction.