Daniel LaRusso: You look like an old friend.

The Fisherman: Your friend. Did he like to fish?

Daniel LaRusso: Yeh, he did. He was better than I ever was. Not too many bites, hunh?

The Fisherman: Not yet. You got something worth biting. Eventually, the fish will find you. You just have to be patient.

Daniel LaRusso: You’re a lot like my friend more than I thought.

Cobra Kai: Season 2 – Episode 4 “The Moment of Truth” The Fisherman

Managing Sensemaking, Mindshare, and Mindscapes

Help organizations navigate change—change resistance or change readiness.

Sensemaking, mindshare, and mindscapes embrace peer-to-peer interaction and actionable insights on innovation and business development opportunities.

What lies in the interfaces between functions, offices, or organizations.

Likewise, mindshare and mindscapes embody sharing and learning how to collaborate or partner on managing change, resistance to change, and developing change readiness.

Sensemaking, mindshare, and mindscapes are the most useful gauge of an organization’s long-term health—agility and resiliency.

How smart do we want employees or workers to become?

Inhibiting—sensemaking, mindshare, or mindscapes brings on pain points—change resistance: CYA, infighting, backstabbing, and all manner of dysfunction.

Enabling sensemaking, mindshare, and mindscapes empower inflection points—change readiness: creative and transformative shared experience.

First Steps Forward—a moment of truth

It is about a food-growing dilemma: sensemaking, mindshare, and mindscapes are often as important, if not more so than just market share, as a significant footprint in businesses or organizations.

Psychological mindedness (self-examinationself-reflectionintrospection, and insight) is the first step forward.

Toward recognizing sensemaking, mindshare, and mindscapes are crucial as key leadership capabilities for the complex and dynamic COVID-19 pandemic, and beyond the world we live in today.

Individual change is at the heart of everything that is achieved in businesses or organizations.

Once people have the motivation to do something different—the whole world can begin to change authentically.

A Cycle of Learning

Gestalt perspective tells us that people have a worldview—where somethings are in the foreground, and other things are in the background of our consciousness.

Moreover, for instance: conscious and unconscious competence and incompetence.

We do not know what we do not know, and the only way of realizing it is when we make a mistake and reflect upon it.

Or when someone is caring enough or brave enough (not suffering in a climate or culture of the emperor’s new clothes)—tells us.

From self-reflection. Or from others’ feedback. Your unconscious incompetence becomes conscious.

And you can begin the cycle of learning.

Metanoia

This COVID-19 pandemic and what we must face in our transition beyond it is calling out for metanoia.

It brings a spirit of authentic repentance and seeing in a new way; a change of heart. 

This conversion (or transition, I add), is intensified by our sense that an end is at hand. 

As Matthew Fox, spiritual theologian, an Episcopal priest and an activist for gender justice and eco-justice, tells us, in his book, The Reinvention of Work.

Metanoia, as Rupert Sheldrake, biologist, and author, in his book, The Rebirth of Nature, highlights, is the recognition that we need to change the way we live is very common. It is like waking up from a dream.

“On my way to discovering the solution of the dream all kinds of things were revealed which I was unwilling to admit even to myself.” —Sigmund Freud

An inquiry is critical because what we see and take for granted on one side, the dream solution, is not the same as what we experience on the other side, is it?

Mokita

High achieving people, in particular, frequently fail to wonder what others are seeing.

Moreover, when they recognize they do not know something, they avoid asking questions out of (misguided) fear because it will make these high-achievers incompetent or weak.

Say Tiziana Casciaro, professor of organizational behavior, University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, Amy C. Edmondson, Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management, Harvard Business School, and Sujin Jang, assistant professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD.

These atmospherics and optics are comparable to mokita.

In English translation. It is “the truth we all know but agrees not to talk about.”

It is a word that comes from a language called Kivila and fluent in Papua New Guinea.

Several English language concepts are ‘the elephant in the room,’ and ‘polite fiction,’ where everyone is aware of the truth but pretends to believe some alternative version to avoid shame, embarrassment, or conflict.

Challenging Mokita

I introduce this term because we must challenge mokita in businesses or organizations—especially in applying sensemaking, mindshare, and mindscapes. 

Moreover, mokita does not address the authentic problems or work on the needed genuine solutions in climates or cultures.

Instead, we end up working on things that will make no difference, wasting time and resources.

Businesses or organizations often spend tons of money. 

Subjecting change sponsors, change agents, and practitioners to hours of time-consuming, mind-numbing piece-meal tasks, and work products in workstreams. 

Again, it is often non-value-added (brainless— “working harder, not smarter”) capricious or erratic campaigns, programs, projects, and interventions.

That often embarks on a road trip that ends up in unforeseen circumstances. And run out of road that heads straight out over the cliff.

Thelma Dickinson:         OK, then listen, let’s not get caught.

Louise Sawyer:              What’re you talking about?

Thelma Dickinson:         Let’s keep going.

Louise Sawyer:              What do you mean?

Thelma Dickinson:         Go.

Louise Sawyer:              You sure?

Thelma Dickinson:         Yeah, yeah. Let’s.

Thelma and Louise (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer)

Sensemaking

It involves. Not only trying out new things.

But also trying to understand our impact on a system as we try to change it.

Moreover, it conveys a psychological phenomenon.

It aligns with how we make sense of our experience in the world.

Sensemaking, Gary Klein, chief scientist, and Brian Moon, a research associate at Klein Associates, does not follow the waterfall model of how data leads to understanding.

Sensemaking doesn’t always have a clear beginning and ending points. The simplified waterfall model of cognition runs counter to empirical evidence about expert decision making.

There is no single agreed definition of ‘sensemaking.’

It is “the making of senses,” said the ‘father of sensemaking,’ Karl E. Weick. 

Working with others to observe what is going on. Tapping different data sources while collecting various data springs. And keeping prior biases from interfering with our perceptions.

Creating maps and action learning

We learn about situations in this COVID-19 pandemic by acting on them and seeing what happens—working (learn by doing, ‘action learning’) to change systems to learn from them.

Sensemaking is about creating maps or stories for businesses or organizations in this COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.

It is not merely overlaying more ‘rock logic’ (adding a rock to rock) to business or organizations’ existing frameworks on a new situation.

These novel situations in this COVID-19 pandemic and beyond are very different.

Instead, businesses or organizations must let authentic maps or frameworks emerge from understanding the situation’s ‘water logic.’

Adding more water to water where this ‘new water’ (operating climate and culture) becomes part of the whole (operating infrastructures). This thinking and behavior of ‘water’ become well defined.

Not waterfall but agile change

This addition or absorption of authentic maps or frameworks corresponds to managing the playbook for genuine agile change.

New fresh strategic pathways for developing sensemaking and human-centricity are being absorbed in businesses or organizations’ climate and cultures.

Not more of the same waterfall change management—organizational change management (OCM).

The factory (revenue grab) of certifying (standardized) practitioners in snowballing marketing segmentation plots driven by all the conventional or ‘New Age’ change management certification suspects out here competing to remain genuinely relevant.

Once businesses or organizations have a healthier grasp of what genuinely is going on in their world of sensemaking?

They have a much richer idea of how to authentically engage leadership capabilities (capacities) of visioning, inventing, and relating to human-centricity.

Where leadership alignments, high-performance teams, employees, and workers are authentically exploring the broader systems in their businesses or organizations.

Leadership alignments, high-performance teams, employees, and workers create a map of the current situation, acting to change the system to learn more about it. 

Each element is often further disclosed or decoded into a set of recommended behaviors (for managing authentic human-centric change that sticks!).

Distinguishing between sensemaking and habitual modes of self-management and identifying essential sensemaking activities.

Perception of new information related to health and wellness. Development of inferences that inform the selection of actions. They are carrying out daily activities in response to further information.

A map—of a shifting world; testing this map with others through data collection, action, and conversation; and then refining, or abandoning, the map depending on how credible it is.

Mindshare

“Before you can have a share of market, you must have a share of mind.”
 — Linda Wolf, former Chairman, and CEO Leo Burnett Worldwide

It is a share of mind, or mindshare, as I promote throughout our culture in Insights Without Borders. And in the collaboration or partnering work, we are doing with businesses or organizations.

Mindshare is the creative commerce and collective (and contextual) intelligence, the creation of consciousness. The authentic appreciation for diversity and inclusion.

What lies in the interfaces between leadership alignments, functions, offices, and organizations. Including in high-performance teams, employees, and workers.

Mindfulness

Our mindfulness—is about creating ideas: beliefs, dreams, impressions, thoughts, and behaviors that drive innovative solutions.

Mindfulness helps us by preparing our states of awareness or developing ‘conscious preparedness.’ And moving into a trust.

As we change, the world around us in this COVID-19 pandemic, our businesses or organizations, and our leadership teams, employees, and workers—are changing.

Developing mindfulness helps us become aware of habitual ways we are structuring our businesses or organizations through automatic behavioral, emotional, psychological activities and actions.

And then, de-automate.

Contextual Intelligence

Mindshare recognizes that businesses or organizations. Their climate and culture—are living organisms. 

There is power in combining—authentic shared experiences, collaborative innovation, communal (contextual) intelligence, and even the creation of collective consciousness.

Exciting opportunities emerge for opening new ecosystems of intellectual, behavioral, and emotional capital, thought equity, and place for the commerce of both the heart and the mind.

Moreover, fostering economic activity depends on employee or worker’s creativity as a leading source of value and a primary cause of a transaction.

In this way, mindshare often reveals creativity, optimal designs, innovations, transitions, transformations, and breakthroughs in businesses or organizations.

What Happens Without Mindshare?

  • Infighting, backstabbing, and all manner of dysfunction
  • Failure of nerve
  • Generative inheritance of learned helplessness
  • Organizational culture not coming from a genuine, thoughtful process
  • Excessive specialization in the creed—Trust your Neighbor, but Brand your Stock

Designing a thoughtful office culture, Barry S. Saltzman, partner at DailyVest, tells us. 

It is one of the essential frameworks to devise when building up or revamping a company.

The right tone and environment, he adds, can improve employee productivity and happiness tenfold. The wrong one, he highlights, can sabotage your goals.

Your company, he tells executives, reflects your mission and your passion for it. 

Their distinctive signature.

Let that be a starting point that unifies your team, and extend the perks and shared goals from there.

A cohesive office culture starts at the top and is building with intention.

Design creates culture. Culture shapes values. Values determine the future. — Robert L. Peters, Graphic Designer

Mindscapes

“I got vision and the rest of the world wears bifocals. — Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), 20th Century Fox.

Like a landscape, a mindscape lays out the variety of thinking and behaving presently in a social community.

It is the sociology of thinking and behaving or the socio-mental explanation of why our thinking is like or different from the way other people think around us in an organization.

We are all products of distinct social communities that effect, but more importantly, constrain the way we interact with our world.

We experience our world personally through our senses and impersonally through mental membership in the social communities we belong to.

It is not isolated people who think in organizations but individuals in groups with a particular style of thought, say, Eviatar Zerubavel, professor of sociology, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.

These particular styles of thought. Welcome (or not) the interfaces between functions, offices, or organizations. The psychological relationships (and dynamic nuances of human behavior) between people.

And the shared meanings constructed by these people in their interactions with one another.

Social Mindscapes are what we do or do not ‘share in common.’

They are the ‘thought communities’ or communities of practice groups to which we belong or do not belong to, inside, and outside an organization.

“The big print giveth and the small print taketh away.” — Tom Waits, The Early Years: The Lyrics, 1971 – 1983”