Making Sense In Times of Uncertainty

In “normal times” businesses relationships are focused on helping to solve customer problems and making good decisions that are aided by expertise, experience, data and some sense of certainty of future events. Good decision-making always strives for clear questions with clear answers. But that’s not possible in the world we are experiencing today.

We are doing our best to live through a pandemic. When it suddenly feels like the universe is no longer a rational, orderly system. In this world people can lose their grounding, become anxious, and find it hard to make sense of what is happening. Instead of clear questions with clear answers we have vague questions, muddy answers and confusion.

In this highly fluid situation it is impossible to reflect upon a situation and have a full grasp of the dynamics of what is happening. We have moved from a world of decision-making to a world of sense-making — trying to make sense of the situation in real time and take action.

In organizations, the people and the systems are all being tested. Now is not the time to be wed to any one strategy but to cultivate options and alternatives. Organizational competence must be demonstrated and the repertoire of responses must be enlarged. It’s a time for improvisation. Organization leaders must create a climate in which trust, doubt, openness, candor and pride can co-exist and be rewarded. It’s is not the strategy that drives the action, but the organization’s purpose.

What we can learn from this is that in a decision making world, the over-reliance on routines and rules can become like heavy tools that weigh us down. By shifting from decision-making to sense-making, the heavy tools are dropped. The focus is on the here and now, which builds resilience through improvisation and making do. Sense making is lighter, more agile, and allows for ideas to have more free play. It can also lead to discoveries of people who have a better understanding of a situation and allows their expertise to be included and even deferred to. Work is no longer an individual construct; it must be viewed as a collective accomplishment.

But fear will swamp resourcefulness. So, communication, both talking and listening, becomes key. Interactions with team members and customers should be organized to craft a narrative: (1) Here are the facts we know; (2) here is what we think they mean; (3) this is what we think should happen (4) Now, let’s talk. If things don’t make sense, speak up. In sense-making, the known and the unknown need to move in opposite directions.