The twin benefits of sensemaking

1. Sensemaking as an interview method

We use sensemaking as a way of thinking about interviewing people and how they live their lives.

Interviewing based on sensemaking avoids the typical ‘question and answer’ format of qualitative research interviews, replacing it with a non-linear conversation that allows the person we are talking to to describe and define in their own words the world they are experiencing and how they navigate it.

We ask people to tell their story in their own way. This is about their lived experience. actual behaviour, in context. As well as learning about their behaviour, we learn what preceded the behaviour, including their false starts, changes of mind, and uncertainties. We listen carefully to how they tell the story – what they say, how they say it, what they emphasise and what they do not mention. We use sophisticated questioning and projective and enabling techniques to go behind and beyond the story we have been told.

2. We use sensemaking in qualitative analysis

The usual way to think about qualitative analysis is to see it as a linear process, breaking down interview content into themes and then building those back up into a story. However in practice, real insight comes from a very different process – sensemaking. This sensemaking process includes these techniques:

1. Starting at the end, or the middle
2. Zooming in and out and back again
3. Comparing, iteratively and
4. Debating and discussing

We have honed this sensemaking process over our many years as qualitative research experts, because it is where much of our insight come from.

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