The War on Sensemaking, Daniel Schmachtenberger

Truth, the provider of meaning and orientation, is also a narrative. We are very well informed, yet somehow we cannot orient ourselves. The informatization of reality leads to its atomization — separated spheres of what is thought to be true.

Third person sensemaking might be the hardest - it’s a shared journey on which we all have to build an information ecology and a culture that can hold the weirdness, contradiction and complexity of the world we’ve created.

“A man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with 2 watches is never sure.”

Ancient societies followed a single narrative. Modern societies are cacophonies of competing narratives. Without trust, more data doesn’t make us more informed but more confused.

We are living through an epidemic of mistrust, particularly here in the United States. Trust in social media and traditional media is at an all-time low. Trust in the U.S. federal government to handle problems is at a near-record low. Trust in the U.S.’s major institutions is within 2 percentage points of the all-time low. The consequences are prof... See more

The online world and its explosion of narratives, data and tribalism presents us with a unique evolutionary problem. The environment we evolved in wasn’t carefully designed to capture our attention, hijack our biases and stoke our outrage. A physical forest doesn’t bombard us with an overwhelming amount of information and narrative warfare every mi... See more

Sensemaking is about becoming adept at navigating the world’s complexity with growing mental complexity.