Chapter Five

The Savannah—Not the Zoo

Philosophers, as things now stand, are all too fond of offering criticism from on high instead of studying and understanding things from within.

—Edmund Husserl

Husserl, Heidegger, and the Story of the Apricot Cocktail

Legend has it that Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and their friend and colleague Raymond Aron were having drinks one day in 1933 at a café on rue Montparnasse. Raymond Aron had just come from Germany, where he had heard a lecture by the philosopher Edmund Husserl. The German philosopher, Aron explained to his friends, was looking for a way to bring the everyday richness of life back into philosophical discourse. His concept, phenomenology, was about stripping away the abstractions of intellectual discourse from objects and experiences. Husserl exhorted his students to always return their attention back “to the thing itself.” Sartre and Beauvoir immediately leaned in to learn more. Aron picked up the apricot cocktail sitting on their table and told them that phenomenology was the philosophy of something as ordinary as a cocktail. Rather than getting caught up in the categories of the mind and the role of “thinking” in existence, this new philosophy was a description of how phenomena are experienced by us in our everyday lives. Husserl encouraged his students to place what he called “brackets” around the prevailing philosophy of the day—concerns about whether or not the apricot cocktail actually existed in reality—in an effort to focus on objects as they actually appear to us.

At this point in our journey, some of you may be impatient to learn the answer to a burning fundamental question: What does sensemaking look like in its everyday application? And, the corollary question: How can I develop a personal sensemaking practice? Where does it all begin?

Not all of us can be like George Soros. And it goes without saying that sensemaking is not a “seven secrets” plan for success. Instead, my goal is to open your mind to what it takes to lay the groundwork for more astute cultural insights. There is, in fact, a tangible method that provides an organizing framework for the sensemaking tenets we have discussed so far. This method is called phenomenology, or “the science of phenomena.” Although the word rarely comes up in casual conversation (admittedly, it doesn’t roll off the tongue), the concept is the philosophical inspiration behind sensemaking.

What is a glass of wine, for example? More than one hundred years ago in Germany, Husserl, the philosopher who so intrigued Sartre, began posing seemingly basic questions like this. He argued that we must describe the wine as it presents itself to our sensory experience and not get too caught up in a philosophical hornet’s nest about whether or not the wine is “real.” In Husserl’s classes—what one of his mentees dubbed “phenomenological kindergarten”—his students learned to describe all manner of everyday life experiences: a concerto, a thunderstorm, an illness. This job of description was not haphazard, however. It was a rigorous attempt to strip objects of abstract theories or habitual assumptions. It was the phenomenologist’s job to describe things as they actually appear and not as we think they should or could appear.

His work was fresh and exciting and he attracted many followers to his lectures in the German university town of Freiburg. Eventually, in Paris, Sartre and Beauvoir would go on to meld Husserl’s early notions of phenomenology with their own unique French sensibility, and thus the existentialism movement was born.

Husserl’s most famous student, however, was Martin Heidegger. Heidegger took the work of his mentor and turned it on its head by suggesting that even the most rigorous phenomenology was still in the tradition of Descartes. In other words, it was still about an individual sitting and thinking apart from any social context.

Heidegger set out to describe the phenomenon of being itself, or our shared existence in the world. Husserl’s phenomenology focused on the meaning of the apricot cocktail as an idea coming out of Raymond Aron’s head. Heidegger’s radical new philosophy argued that the world is not characterized by the set of ideas individuals have in their heads. In fact, he concluded, there is nothing inner about our experience. His form of phenomenology directed practitioners to focus on the social structures of worlds. The cocktail, he argued, was only one piece of equipment in the underlying structure of café culture and the people inside it: the waiters, the people at tables, the bartenders. And everything in this particular world—the invisible background practices in each and every café in Paris—was a reflection of the French culture. If one wants to have any understanding of the French sensibility, the first place one should go is to the Parisian café.

Escape from the Zoo

I offer up these ideas to give you an intellectual context for phenomenology. For your own sensemaking practice, however, the most important thing to remember about phenomenology is that it calls us to return to the real world. Go back “to the thing itself.” Instead of watching the lions eating food from a bowl in a cage, go out and observe them hunting on the savannah. Escape the zoo.

Most of us are confined in our own kind of zoo. It is the airless office with glass windows high atop the bustling city. Or the conference room table covered in numerical representations of life. Or maybe it’s the corporate strategy session with its empty mantras and meaningless acronyms. Whatever our zoo, it typically keeps us from capturing real life in all its complexity.

Phenomenology will not reveal the essence of something—say, a car or a restaurant—but rather the essence of our relationship to that thing. Not everything is important to us all the time. We stand in relationship to the things in our life, and phenomenology can show us which things matter most and when. In a pharmaceutical company, spreadsheets can tell you how many salespeople met their quarter goals in 2016, but phenomenology will shed light on what, exactly, makes a good salesperson. In a Fortune 500 coffee company, management science can tell us how much “premium” coffee—priced at two dollars or more a cup—the average American drinks in a day, but phenomenology will help us to understand what constitutes the experience of really good coffee. In a fashion company, market segmentation models can illustrate how, exactly, different luxury consumers spend their money, but phenomenology will reveal the experience they are seeking when they do.

Another way to consider the difference between the zoo and the savannah is through the terms “correct” and “true.” The criterion for a natural science explanation is whether or not it is correct. Does a claim correspond to observable facts? This “correctness” is independent of subjective beliefs. But, as we’ve discussed, when it comes to our shared worlds, the notion of correctness doesn’t reveal very much.

We can be correct in using biological sex: one is either a man or a woman. But being correct in this sense tells us very little about what it means to experience masculinity or femininity. What is it like to be a man or woman?

When we think in terms of human phenomena, we begin to reveal characteristics with real explanatory power. This is the kind of interpretation that makes people nod their heads in agreement and say, “That is so true.” Such a truth is not a universal law—it won’t apply to all quarks and all asteroids. But it will tell us something profound about a very specific time and place and population.

Any phenomenon or behavior—playing, partying, traveling, sports, investing, learning, entertainment, eating, beauty, or trust—can be analyzed using an interpretation that is “correct,” or one that reveals “truth.” But only via the latter kind of analysis does cultural meaning begin to manifest: a piece of fabric with three sewn colors becomes an American flag, a collection of molecules constituting gold becomes a wedding ring, and a structure made of plywood of varying lengths becomes a home.

Our experience in the world has to do with our investment in such objects and activities. Although the grapes might be exactly the same, a plastic cup of champagne at a loud party is a vastly different experience than receiving a champagne flute from a white-gloved waiter at a fine restaurant. Yes, it is correct that both may be made with grapes originating from the same field in France or that both contain identical milligrams of yeast, but one experience will leave you feeling sloppy and raucous, while the other can enchant and elevate you. The difference between the two experiences is where we find truth.

Consider the concept of time from a natural science perspective versus a phenomenological one. People say things like, “Oh, is it three o’clock already?” If you consult a clock, it is of course 3 PM at the same time every day. Through a natural science lens, time is fixed and decontextualized. A second is a second: like a string of matched pearls, each of the exact same size or duration. Looking back at your life, then, is like looking at an even set of units (minutes, years, decades) with the exact same properties. These are measurable and clear and, in principle, they can be exchanged for any other with the same outcome.

But this is not how time is experienced—not by a long shot. This natural science view of time is perfectly correct, but also perfectly superficial. In human or existential time, one second might feel longer than an hour. Waiting at the doctor’s office is experienced as slower than running to the train—even if both events take the exact same number of units. Meaning is layered into the experience of time; the same time in your life can have different shades of meaning as you grow older. If you are in a gloomy mood as you consider your past, your twenties can look like a waste, while in an upbeat moment the time you spent in college might strike you as adventurous. Your past is dependent on the context you are in now and can change color based on the way you experience life now.

Such change is not limited to individual experience—it goes for shared cultural memories, too. The significance of a certain period or figure can change when new insights about that time and person come to light. Neville Chamberlain’s decision to give certain portions of western Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany in the 1938 Munich Agreement was seen as a savvy move to appease Hitler at the time. “Peace in our time,” the crowds in Britain cried out upon his return. Today, however, we see things quite differently. Chamberlain is often viewed as the great coward of World War II: the man who fatally failed to stand up to evil. Needless to say, time changes the context in which we understand all historical events.

The same comparisons can be made for “space”: think about the room or vehicle you are in right now. The natural sciences can describe the space based on the measurements you can plug into an algorithm. The distance between you and the wall, or you and the door, the height, temperature, and so on are all real and worth describing. But a phenomenologist looks at space in a very different way. The rooms you are in have a history, a mood, and a sense of place. The distance to the wall might be 6 feet, but is it experienced as far or close? We could spend decades assembling an exhaustive list of attributes of the Piazza Navona in Rome, but no list could ever come close to capturing its history of architecture and sculpture—created by the two great archrivals of Baroque Rome, Bernini and Borromini—and what it feels like to stand amid its splendor.

All great managers and CEOs use a kind of informal phenomenology when they are attempting a major overhaul to incentivize the best people. Politicians turn to a form of phenomenology when they strategize about how to turn a proposal into a bill with a chance of becoming law. And phenomenology is the first place to go when you are interested in engaging with a sensemaking practice. Whenever I am struggling to understand something involving culture and human behavior, I eventually reframe the problem as a phenomenon. I escape the zoo and I go out and observe life on the savannah.

What Is It Like to Age?

In 2015, my company partnered with the largest life insurance and annuity fund in Scandinavia. The firm was concerned because they were losing 10 percent of their customers every year. Even more troubling, most of the customers abandoning the company were older—around 55 years old. The business model of annuities is based on taking a percentage of the client’s money over many decades in exchange for an amortized payout upon retirement. It follows, then, that the oldest customers are the most lucrative because they have the most money saved in the financial products.

When we started our work together, the client told us that annuities were a “low touch” product, meaning consumers were not in contact with them every day. They felt that annuities were only really present in people’s minds twice in their lives: when they opened them up and when they were paid out. The company seemed resigned to the fact that their products were an uninteresting, albeit necessary, aspect of modern life. They were looking for a straightforward “inside the box” solution—perhaps a branding change—to help them turn their numbers around.

Our sensemaking process began with a discourse analysis of the client’s own culture. Discourse analysis, based on social science theories inspired by Heidegger, examines how people and social communities give words and concepts meaning and significance. How did the culture inside our client’s company conceive of annuities, pensions, and other financial products, and how was that communicated to their customers? Through this interrogation, two competing structures of reality were revealed:

1. The company culture was a part of the banking and financial world. In this context, logic and reason are paramount and the executives communicated with one another mainly using an assembly of acronyms. Customers were not called “people”; they were referred to as PSNs, or Personal Security Numbers. Considering this, it made sense that the executives were more sensitive to numerical representations of the PSNs than to the context of their products in real life. They spent their days looking at sales targets and percentage points with combinations of letters like PSN and CMR instead of seeing actual people in relationship to their worlds.

2. The other reality sensemaking revealed was the way the client communicated to consumers through their marketing materials. Every pension and annuity product represented aging in the same way: there were pictures of gray-haired people on a bike or walking together down a beach. The mood and underlying message of the marketing was always about freedom. It was the Scandinavian version of “heaven”: healthy, happy, stylishly gray-haired people enjoying life.

Ironically enough, this representation was just as alienating as the acronyms and financial figures. The assumptions behind all the marketing materials didn’t resonate in truthful ways with the consumers. There was no authentic engagement with the reality of aging. No mention of the boredom and the increasing fatigue, no acknowledgement of the despondency and the loneliness. Real people know that getting old is not heaven on earth. It’s a challenging experience. Why is a company that specializes in products for older people so distant from their actual reality?

Based on our understanding of the client’s culture, we went to the CEO and told him that we wanted to do a study on aging. They were dubious, but we sat with the executives around the table—essentially a group of bankers—and asked them to leave the financial world altogether. We said: Let’s talk about how we experience aging. Is aging a linear process? Is it connected to the number of years? How old is old?

Thus began a very rich conversation with the executive team. We agreed that we all experience aging in jumps rather than sequentially or linearly. Now I am getting older, I probably need to spend more time with my kids. Or Now I am getting older, I probably need to pay out the mortgage on my house. Or I have to speak more kindly to my wife because we might not have ten years left. Or I probably need to slow down at work and do something else because I love art.

And everyone around the table recalled moments when they were younger: pivotal moments when they had said, “I’m not a kid anymore. I am getting older.” These moments changed their ways of dressing, what they ate, who they were with, how they built their social network, what they read. They changed everything. We said: do you think there is an interesting connection between discovering our aging and how it relates to finances?

And then we went to the whiteboard and drew up a map. We said: your problem is that you are losing customers. But you are convinced that your product is boring and that people don’t care. What if we went out to study how people experience aging and what that means for understanding people’s conceptions of a “good life” as they get older? If we understand that, then we can design pension and annuity products around that experience.

And that is when everyone around the table agreed to frame the problem as a phenomenon: what is the experience of aging?

Now we were ready to start the ethnographic research. This is where the thick data of sensemaking is gathered. We chose people in different life stages all over Scandinavia and we spent three days with them. This included interviews, photographs, videos, observations on everything in their worlds, engaging them in journal writing, and recording all of their financial activity with a mobile app.

Because we were interested in the social structures around a person, not just individuals, we did ethnographic research on everyone in the subjects’ network. How is reality constructed? We talked to the wife or the husband, the friends, the colleagues, the employees, and the boss. We went with the subject to the bank and we sat with him or her while they did banking on their computer. We would call the pension company with him or her and record the call with the company.

With each of the subjects we studied, sensemaking is always seeking an understanding of the same thing: What is it like to be this person? How do they experience their world?

The minute we started talking to the subjects about aging—and not financial products like annuities—the conversations were filled with emotion. Far from being a “low touch” topic, we heard intimate stories about illness, risk, and the loss of parents and children. After sorting through all of our ethnographic data—the thick data of sensemaking—a remarkable pattern started to emerge: at around the age of 55, many of our subjects described feeling a loss of control over their lives. These were mostly middle-class people with children, but the experience was similar across all geographies. Some of them described the existential crisis of watching their kids move away: “Should we find a new meaning in life?” “Should we stay in this big house?” “Do I still love my husband?”

Others experienced the feeling of aging at work when it dawned on them that they would never again be promoted. “I am never going to be the boss,” “My entire career now is just a matter of keeping up,” and “The younger people below me are moving up faster and faster and I am only sliding down.” People described being treated differently at the office—“He’s just part of the old guard”—and on the streets—“Watch out for that older lady.” One of our subjects told us that he got a letter from the life insurance company communicating that he was now 55 and it was time to think about how he wanted his annuity to be paid out. He had not heard from them in thirty years, so he couldn’t even remember which company he was with. “It was not the letter,” he told us. “It was the feeling that letter conveyed. I was no longer powerful in the workplace. And I was no longer in love with my wife and I no longer understood what life was about. That letter was a kick in my stomach. That letter told me: You. Are. Old.”

Almost every one of our subjects in this age bracket had just completed a major reorganization of their finances. They sold their house, moved to a rental, bought a boat, or set up an inheritance for their children. And all of it was done with one calculation in mind: how long am I going to live?

By studying the phenomenon of aging, the company could see that these people were wide open for business. If a financial services company called them with the right question at the right time and framed the conversation the right way, these subjects were eager for advice. Not just about annuities, but about reorganizing their life. But these were the very customers that the firm was losing. Why?

While our client was ignoring these customers—assuming that by leaving them alone they would simply keep up the habit of saving for their annuity—other financial firms like banks were stepping in. They could see that this cohort was eager for advice on the whole financial picture and they started offering packages that included annuities alongside a whole bucket of other services.

Our client told us that 95 percent of their resources in customer sales went to acquisitions. This seems like an impressive percentage point when viewed through the management science lens. After reviewing it in context, however, we discovered that the majority of these sales efforts were directed at customers just starting their first jobs around the age of 22. The firm’s 3,000-some annuities advisors were spending almost all of their time and resources on wooing these younger customers. If we know anything from studying the phenomenology of aging, it is that 22-year-olds cannot “see” death. The fact of death is irrefutable—again perfectly correct—but also perfectly irrelevant to 22-year-olds for whom parties and concerts and other fast-paced, vibrant activities take precedence. As a result, annuities held little meaning in their lives. When we analyzed the calendars of the sales force, we found that 70 percent of their meetings with potential twenty-something customers were canceled the day before. It was clearly a huge waste of resources to put in time and money trying to meet with customers who didn’t want to meet to discuss an offering that they considered irrelevant. Meanwhile, the customers open and eager for business—the older customers—were being ignored in the hopes that sheer inertia would keep them from switching up their finances.

After the patterns became clear to the firm, the business recommendations evolved organically: digitize the interface for the young people so they don’t have to take time to meet with anyone. And pour all of the time and money into the older clientele who are aging and eager to engage on the topic of financial planning.

After applying the business insights revealed by the sensemaking process, our client increased contributions to pensions and insurance premiums as well as the size of their customer engagement. Most importantly, they reduced their attrition rates—the number of older customers leaving—by 80 percent in the two years following the study. All of this was accomplished without increasing any costs in customer service.

As our client discovered, it makes great business sense to sit around and talk about the meaning of aging. What matters to your customers should matter to you.

Heidegger and Moods

What does it mean to be human? How do we experience ourselves in the world? Where does meaning come from? When we want to delve into questions this profound, the humanities are an extremely helpful guide. Most of us are probably not opening up great tomes of dense philosophical texts on any given Tuesday, but they can be an invaluable resource in the midst of reframing a problem as a phenomenon.

In the following passage, I will show you another example of phenomenology in practice. ReD recently drew upon Heidegger’s definition of moods to help us reframe a business challenge involving supermarkets. In his major work Being and Time, Heidegger defines moods as not just cognitive or psychological phenomena but as things that “assail us” in our unreflecting devotion to the world. In bad moods, for example, we can see the world as burdensome, which will affect both what we might become engaged in and how that engagement will occur. Heidegger calls this mood-mentality Befindlichkeit, literally translated as “the state in which one may be found.” In his view, moods are the phenomena through which humans get attuned to the different contexts they are thrown into. It follows, then, that a mood neither comes from the outside nor from the inside, but arises from our very existence in the world.

What does all of this have to do with the world of business—and, more specifically, increasing revenues in one of Europe’s largest supermarket chains? As you will see, Heidegger’s theories are far from esoteric. In fact, they formed the theoretical foundation of a major corporate reorganization.

How Do People Experience Cooking?

We recently partnered with a large European grocery store brand. Like so many of the large supermarket brands today—Walmart and Tesco, to name two—this brand was in trouble. Society has been changing in its attitudes toward grocery shopping, food, and cooking, and this brand—containing a variety of different types of stores under its corporate umbrella—was struggling to understand what was happening. The firm had 40 percent market share in their regions, but they could see that share beginning to slip. It was unlikely that they would capture additional market share, especially given the shifts in the culture. Instead, they wanted to try to increase the revenue per customer, encouraging people to buy more while in their stores. They had an idea that they could achieve this goal by promoting healthier, organic products. Beyond that hypothesis, however, they didn’t really know where to begin.

Our sensemaking process started with an investigation of the supermarket’s culture. What kinds of assumptions were underlying the company’s structural understanding of the world? What does it mean to have a “supermarket-centric” point of view? The company had a tremendous amount of knowledge based on management science methodology. They knew what happened with customers when they were shopping in their stores. They knew all about revenue per visit based on sales prices, and the number of parking spots needed to reach capacity on a busy Sunday afternoon. They spoke fluently in price points and SKUs, or stock-keeping units: how many grocery items are contained in any given store. Arguably more important, the supermarket knew all about their “targeted segments.” They could offer up abstract segmentation models for all different categories of shoppers: what women between the ages of 25 and 38 usually spent in the early evening visit, for example—the segment of working moms. They also knew exactly what size their aisles needed to be and the percentage of floor space they could dedicate to organic produce to optimize spending per visit.

All of this technical knowledge gave them a useful perspective, but a very limited one. They were experts in the domain of hard data about supermarkets. But what did they really know about their shoppers’ experience? What did they know about what happened to all of that food as soon as shoppers arrived home? In the chain of meaning, the supermarket was only a means of achieving something bigger, something much richer and much more meaningful to people: cooking.

The client reframed the management science question—how do we increase the revenue per customer at all the stores in our brand architecture?—into a phenomenon: How do people experience cooking?

A generation ago, people tended to display their social currency through a big house or a fancy car or fashionable clothes. Today, all of that is changing. Sophisticated urban dwellers have much less interest in these forms of ostentatious wealth. Instead, much of today’s status—what sociologist Bourdieu referred to as “social capital”—comes from practices around food. People want to be able to talk about cooking; they want to name the local farm that raised their chickens; they want to know about methods of fermentation and baking bread; they want to be able to pair wine well with a meal.

Nowhere was this more evident than in sensemaking research with today’s urban moms. Every single mom the company observed and interviewed for the supermarket project spoke of her dream of serving up fresh, healthy dinners to a family seated around the dinner table. And yet, the study took thousands of photographs of dinner tables across all the geographies it looked at, and every single one of them was covered with objects that were not related to eating. Most of them were used for the world of work—laptops and papers and bills and homework. Even more telling, the study couldn’t find a single subject who could tell researchers what he or she planned to cook for dinner the next night. One grocery list we photographed captured this sense of unpredictability perfectly: it read “Grocery List: 1. Glue, 2. Soap, 3. Dinner.”

Sensemaking confirmed what many of us already feel in our day-to-day lives: life and work are fluid. It is almost impossible to think about meals in any rational and linear way. Few people in urban areas come home from work every day at five o’clock and sit down to eat every night at six o’clock. Even fewer people plan out all their dinners ahead of time and shop for them in itemized lists.

Though none of these pressures on modern life come as a surprise, the supermarket-centric view of the world was keeping this truth hidden from our client. There was an assumption in the supermarket’s culture that shoppers came in with a single list for all their meals—onions, garlic, chicken—and that their primary decision was whether to conduct their grocery shopping in high-cost or low-cost stores. By focusing on phenomenology and the actual experience of families and how they cook, the client was able to see past all of these assumptions. People didn’t shop in a conscious and predetermined way. They weren’t “thinking” about it. Rather, they shopped intuitively, according to moods.

One of the moods sensemaking identified was the “evening rush.” It wasn’t just that one segment or another was shopping in a frenzy after work. Everyone in the study went grocery shopping in this mood. And a certain store experience delivers on this mood: It’s five o’clock and the kids are hungry. We need to grab something fast for dinner and perhaps a few quick things for breakfast, too. In the evening rush, shoppers want a store that is easy to navigate and predictable, with quick and healthy dinner options readily apparent.

But evening rush isn’t the only mood. Sensemaking uncovered another mood of inspiration: When guests are coming for dinner, grocery shoppers love spotting an employee acting as a chef and creating samples. They want to have exciting offerings showcased and new trends prominently displayed. They want change, dynamism, a curated selection, and a compelling narrative.

Using the work of anthropologist Clifford Geertz, sensemaking revealed that the supermarket was actually a kind of stage setting or scenography for the cultural narrative of cooking. Instead of a system of optimization—food as fuel—the supermarket needed to communicate different atmospheres in service of this theater. In the morning, the smell of fresh bread and coffee brewing entices shoppers, the music invigorates people on their way to work, and the lighting is bright and energizing. In the evening, however, the story shifts. People want savory smells and warm, dim light. Extra staff provide quicker checkouts. Cleaners come in before the evening rush so everything feels inviting and cozy; breakfast goods are whisked away and replaced with displays of fresh flowers to decorate the dinner table.

Once the store became a stage setting for the theater of food, new business ideas emerged. In an effort to make each store feel local and relevant, the client started to explore technology-enabled relationships between the store managers and regular customers. Imagine a busy mom with three kids in the car who receives a text message on her phone at 4:30 PM: “Hi, I’m Frank. I’m the store manager from your local market and I know you come here five times a week. We just got a batch of really wonderful salmon in from Canada. Would you like me to reserve one for you along with everything you need to complete our in-store recipe? I will have it ready for you to pick up at our drive-thru window.”

In 2016, our client is using these sensemaking insights to open three pilot stores focused entirely around the concept of “evening rush,” and they plan to open up forty more in 2017. They are also completely reorganizing their approach to digital technology with new loyalty programs and online food platforms. The biggest change in the company, however, is in their approach to shoppers’ moods. Instead of segmenting their stores and brands using price point models like “high-end” and “low-end,” they are now consolidating brands and closing down stores that target similar shopper moods. This strategic discussion around moods is leading the way the company positions itself in the market in 2017 and beyond.

It’s not about measuring and tracking the number of purchases or the types of people who walk through the door. When we reframe the phenomenon as the experience of cooking rather than grocery shopping, we understand how decisions are shaped by the context we are in. Grocery stores can offer shoppers the experience they are seeking, regardless of segment or size.

These stories serve as an illustration of my own relationship to sensemaking and the way we use it within ReD Associates. Though the process is vastly different for everyone, all sensemaking requires its practitioners to bring something of themselves to the work. It is an engagement that demands every part of us—emotions, intellects, and spirits. Considering that, it is worth taking a moment to say a few words about empathy in its relationship to sensemaking.

When I say “empathy,” I mean our emotional and intellectual skill of understanding another’s worldview or cultural perspective. When we read a great play by Shakespeare or listen to a Beethoven symphony or sort through field notes in an anthropological study, we are not always familiar with the worlds we are encountering. This is why the empathy we use in sensemaking—what I will refer to as the third level of empathy—is different from the everyday empathy we experience for our friends or family. This third level of empathy requires a more analytical framework that is greatly aided by engagement with the realm of the humanities.

The Three Levels of Empathy

According to philosophers in the Heideggerian tradition, our most basic form of empathy—the first level of empathy—is below the threshold of our awareness. This is the kind of empathy we rarely ever talk about. We adjust to each other like Alice Munro’s “spores”; we become more and more enmeshed in our immediate surroundings. As a non-native English speaker, I experience this type of empathic engagement with language. When I make mistakes—for instance, when I use a word in a wrong way or context—someone will often use that same word in the right way soon after to help acclimate me to the appropriate usage. I see this same empathic alignment in each and every company or organization I visit. There are always particular styles and codes that anyone entering the organization is socialized into. For example, in a fashion company I visited, employees were wearing black—a safe, basic wardrobe—but they chose pieces with signature details to communicate their edginess: not too safe. In marketing-driven organizations, on the other hand, the suits are more fitted and the language is more vague.

Some people say this first level of empathy speaks to our existence as social animals, while others call these shared worlds our “structures,” or the norms and values through which we structure our reality. Sociologists and anthropologists have studied these structures for more than a century and debated whether they are fixed and eternal, or constantly changing. What really matters for the purposes of our sensemaking journey is that this type of empathy is rarely ever noticed or remarked upon.

The second level of empathy is often triggered when we notice something is amiss. If a friend is exhibiting an unusual affect, such as sullen speech, we start to wonder what is going on with her. What is on her mind? Is she sad? Is it something we said? The intrigue over da Vinci’s painting Mona Lisa is a famous example of this second level of empathy in action. What is she thinking behind that half smile? Is she feeling mischievous or circumspect? We can never quite synthesize the facial cues and the context. Try though we might, we feel we can never really get inside her head. First-level empathy moves up to second-level empathy.

If we want to engage in a process of understanding, we move to the third level of empathy, or analytical empathy. This deeper and more systematic empathy is supported by theory, frameworks, and an engagement with the humanities. This is sensemaking: the type of empathy Mark Fields uses to understand the next generation of Ford drivers. This is also what a historian does when she sets out to study, say, the American Civil War: She systematically assembles sources and evidence from that time—pictures, scrapbooks, tools, and news in order to get a picture of what happened. But the research materials are only the beginning. She will need to establish a context based on other scholars’ work. She must also validate and critique the importance of the data, and place the data in a theoretical framework that explains the time period. The power structures, gender roles, aesthetics, technology, and information systems are all topics historians have created in order to analyze the data. Without this framework, her data would be merely reportage or journalism. Theory ultimately reveals the insights.

Fortunately for us, theories abound in the humanities and social sciences. There are frameworks for understanding everything from sexuality to family to power to social roles, to the role of art and music and stories in society. Once our thick data of ethnographic field notes, photographs, journals, and interviews is collected and sorted, our job is to identify the salient patterns occurring across all of the data. Good theory provides a structure for recognizing these patterns and, ultimately, one or two theories snap this raw data into focus. This is where we achieve insights with explanatory power: a more profound understanding of the phenomenon.

The following are just a few examples of what this process looks like in practice. These “sensemaking apps” offer a quick understanding of how the humanities and social science theories can be applied to real situations. After we have reframed a problem into a phenomenon, this process of analytical empathy brings us to a greater understanding of what we are encountering.

Six Sensemaking Apps

1. Signs and Symbols

THE THEORY:

Semiotics—the study of signs and symbols in social life—has always been a very important part of understanding human behavior. But symbols do not always represent the same thing to everyone, which is why researchers divide the symbol into two parts: the symbol itself and the meaning of the symbol. The correlation between the two is often random. A rose (the symbol) can signify love (the symbol’s meaning) to one person and death to another. Individuals assign meaning to the symbol according to their personal backgrounds and situations.

THE THEORY IN PRACTICE:

An iconic French fashion company wanted to explore the types of symbols that illustrate success to today’s high-end female fashion consumer. Our client was working with an assumption that their customers wanted to see images of women “having it all.” These symbols showed women achieving career success alongside a family with children. Young children and glamorous careers were featured side by side in the lavishly produced commercials and short movies.

In a sensemaking study that observed these women in cities as varied as Hong Kong, L.A., Shanghai, Paris, New York City, New Delhi, and Chennai, we could see that these symbols of “having it all” were not resonating with consumers. Yes, they formed a part of the women’s reality, but they did not fully explain why these particular women were engaged with and inspired by high-end fashion. Instead, the study revealed a completely different set of signs and symbols—many of them taken from the past and in reference to more “romantic” periods. These symbols—handwritten letters, silk dressing gowns, oyster shells, strings of pearls—were poetic and aesthetic. They communicated a desire for more enchantment in life. Fashion, for these women, was less about achieving life balance and much more about infusing modern life with moments of seduction and magic.

2. Mental Models

THE THEORY:

Political theorists Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe rooted their ideas of mental models around discourse theory. This is an analytical tool for examining the context in which words are used and the different ways they acquire their meaning. The word freedom, for example, can mean completely different things to different politicians. For a socialist, freedom means equal opportunity for everyone, with a close relationship to the idea of solidarity; while for the conservative, freedom means individuality, opportunities for the individual, and an association with inequality.

THE THEORY IN PRACTICE:

We worked with Coca-Cola to help them understand the market for bottled tea products in China. To the corporate culture of Coke, based in Atlanta in the southern United States, the word tea means a refreshing sweet drink that goes well with BBQ. For this culture, tea is all about additions: adding sugar and caffeine for a late-afternoon kick.

Through the theoretical lens of discourse analysis and mental models, however, Coke discovered that tea is about subtractions in the Chinese culture. Tea—like meditation—is a tool in Chinese culture for revealing the true self. The experience of it should take away irritants and distractions like noise, pollution, and stress. When Coke originally entered the market with their fruit-flavored sugar kicks, the Chinese culture didn’t respond. It wasn’t until Coke incorporated this fundamentally different understanding of the “tea experience” that their bottled tea products gained significant market share in China.

3. Niklas Luhmann’s Theories around Social Systems

THE THEORY:

Niklas Luhmann, a German sociologist and one of the most important social theorists of the twentieth century, proposed that all professional cultures are built up around binary codes. For lawyers, it is important whether an action is legal or illegal. Economists are interested in whether the company earns a profit or not. Journalists want to know whether there is or isn’t a story. These cultural codes are one of the reasons why professional worlds often misunderstand each other. Engineers think that designers are artistic and unsystematic, and designers think that engineers are rigid and introverted.

THE THEORY IN PRACTICE:

We partnered with a group that included health care workers and their managers. The managers, from their bureaucratic world, viewed success as achieving care “at-cost” as opposed to “not at-cost.” The health care workers, on the other hand, were concerned with “good care” versus “bad care.” The disconnect between these two binary codes explained much of the conflict that existed in the human system.

Before we could build any bridges between these two worlds, first we all had to understand and acknowledge the binary code of the culture—cost versus care—that was creating a fundamental misunderstanding.

4. Erving Goffman’s Theories of Stage-Managed Impressions

THE THEORY:

In Erving Goffman’s seminal study of cultural anthropology, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956), he outlined how individuals manage impressions in social interactions. He framed these interactions around theatrical encounters, naming the space in which we give our public performances the “front region,” and the space where we knowingly contradict that performance the “back region.” He argued that the success of performances in the front region depended on the privacy and respite of the back region.

THE THEORY IN PRACTICE:

In a sensemaking study with an appliance manufacturer, we noted two trends occurring in homes in North Texas and in the New York tri-state area. First, we found an increase in open-plan designs, with fewer walls and barriers and increasing flow between spaces in the house. At the same time, however, we observed an increase in investment in master bedroom suites and other private spaces, such as garages and pantries.

Drawing upon Erving Goffman’s theories around public and private spaces in the theater of life, we were able to understand why these two trends were happening at the same time. As homes were becoming more public and accessible to visitors, people felt compelled to invest more in their private spaces. The appliances manufacturer, particularly interested in trends in laundry room spaces, was able to use this understanding to engage designers, architects, developers, and homeowners in a more meaningful way.

5. Theories of Reciprocity

THE THEORY:

In 1972, anthropologist Marshall Sahlins developed his three models of giving: negative reciprocity, balanced reciprocity, and generalized reciprocity. Sahlins defined negative reciprocity as a model in which people give in order to get more in return; balanced reciprocity as a model in which people give in order to get the same amount back; and generalized reciprocity as a model in which people give without any expectation of immediate payback because they trust that they will get more over time.

THE THEORY IN PRACTICE:

We worked with a major American museum to improve their membership program. They had large numbers of visitors and high interest, but they were struggling to transform these visitors into committed members. Even more important to the museum’s funding, they wanted to convert visitors into donors at high levels of giving. Sahlins’s theories of reciprocity—in particular his theory of generalized reciprocity—gave some clarity to the phenomenon.

A sensemaking study showed us that members viewed their relationship to the museum as primarily transactional. They often said, “Membership pays for itself,” a view that was enforced by the way the museum rewarded its members with coupons and apparel. This transactional model did not foster a spirit of generosity. We worked with the client to shift their membership model from negative reciprocity into generalized reciprocity, or a reciprocity of trust. They encouraged members to think about giving to the museum as a gesture of altruism or an investment in a relationship to arts and culture. It also gave our client a strategic goal for their membership drive today and into the future: make membership an investment in a relationship, not a transaction.

6. Wittgenstein’s Theories of Language

THE THEORY:

In his writing, Ludwig Wittgenstein argued that most of our language is not in words: the point is observation, not verbalization. When we see two mason workers building a brick wall, for example, almost everything they do is nonverbal. We won’t understand anything about them if we fixate on their language. “Don’t think, but look,” Wittgenstein exhorted readers.

THE THEORY IN PRACTICE:

We worked on a study to investigate why people were burning the Danish embassies in the Arab world. It would have been easy to walk into the study holding tight to our own cultural ideas about what was occurring and to fixate on our understanding of the language around these events. For example, we might have quickly assumed that these were senseless acts of violence conducted by “Islamic terrorists.”

Instead, we started with observation. We focused on the nonverbal communication that formed the structures of reality in the communities we visited in the Middle East. After immersion into the worlds of these communities, we started to see the frustration due to economic stagnation. Their belief in the Koran led them to believe that their society and culture would prosper and thrive. Instead, looking around, they saw only poverty and decline. The difference between these two visions formed the culture clash that was playing out all over the region—including in the embassy burnings.

Instead of rushing to the predetermined assumption first, we started with an attempt at understanding. This allowed us to suggest more effective choices later on in the process.

These examples of theory in practice serve as an illustration of how sensemaking actually works in real situations. Needless to say, the more one has empathically engaged with great books, art, theory, and music, the more one has to draw from in moments of pattern recognition. I have outlined just a few of the theories that have brought insights to the fore in my own work. Sensemaking, however, is ultimately an entirely personal practice. The more you dig into the vast wealth of art and theory available to you, the more you can crack mysteries at the heart of culture.

How do we remain open to these mysteries without getting seduced into solving them too soon? How do we reason through a problem involving human behavior that has no hypothesis and no clear knowns? This is the culmination of sensemaking: creativity that comes through us, as opposed to from us.