Sense Making - time to revisit?
As our lives change radically, it's time to re-boot sense-making for everyday research
A few weeks ago I wrote the phrase “sense-making” into a blog – without too much thought. To me it meant very literally making sense of research data, shaping that into a meaningful narrative that delivered on a particular brief’s objectives.
Susan Bell picked me up on the phrase – what did I mean by it? - and we engaged in a series of calls on the topic.
Sue has been working on Sense Making for a few years – delivered a talk at a 2020 QRCA Global Qual workshop; she also co-authored a paper the for the AMSRA National Conference in 2018 with Suzanne Burdon. Sue’s kindly agreed to share them if you drop her a note via LinkedIn.
Our chats made me think – we need to re-boot sense-making as a tool for modern times.
Sense Making is a discipline in itself – one that started being documented and codified in the 1970s notably by a person named K. E. Weick. It’s been looked at and approached from various perspectives – organisational psychology & decision-making and cognitive psychology for example.
Whilst I found one article on HBR about Sense Making’s application to Sales – relatively hands-on stuff – it’s mostly about “bigger topics” or events it would seem.
Wieck applied his Sense Making approach to the Bhopal disaster, for example.
Definitive definitions seem elusive – but it seems (pace Wikipedia) a common thread is “a process that allows people to understand ambiguous, equivocal or confusing issues or events.”
Seems like we have plenty of those around, right?
SENSE-MAKING FOR EVERYDAY RESEARCH
When Sue and I joined up on Zoom, we basically came at it from a pragmatic angle: could and should Sense Making be re-evaluated for application in more everyday market research goals? Even as a plug-in module.
And if so, what sort of approaches and protocols could be suggested in implementing it?
We both felt that it was time for a re-evaluation. After all, we’re living in a time of hyper-uncertainty. Covid. Lock-downs. The Ukraine War. Culture Wars. BLM. Cancel Culture. The meaning of work, the politicisation of everyday life, AI, autonomous driving….the list of “big” things goes on that many of us struggle to make sense of. And somewhere they’re in our minds, however auto-pilot we may be at any one moment.
But we’re not often asked to address these bigger questions in briefs – which are invariably very focussed, often tactical, with a clear list of knowledge needs and indicated usability of the outputs.
Are we squeezing sense into participants’ lives that have changed a lot – but that they don’t get the chance to share in their 90 minutes slot, or over the course of a highly guided, more convergent-focussed, online community?
Sue makes a point in her paper that qual research in particular can easily become reduced to a shopping list, with little room for exploration of the human side of participants, the impact of broader issues, their hopes and fears. Indeed.
But sense making is no doubt playing a role in the ongoing change in our purchasing and other lives – way beyond reactions to a cost-of-living crisis. Chat bots instead of someone to talk to. A sausage that looks like a sausage but has no meat in it. Listening to a book instead of reading squiggly letters.
So there’s lots of implicit sense-making going on – but we don’t explore it explicitly, I imagine – and there isn’t a clear protocol or framework for us.
So here’s a hands-on attempt. I’ll call it Micro-Sense Making.
MICRO-SENSE MAKING
First up: let’s take brands and frame them as not just aids for purchase and repeat-System-1-style consumption, but as “culturally charged signifiers challenging us sometimes to re-think things”.
So viewing contemporary brand activity as something that is confronting us with something new – or on a continuum of new/disruptive vs confirmatory - that we have to make sense of.
Not just Nike. Or Adidas Swimwear or Calvin Klein. Not just Bud Light. But loads of brands.
So let’s imagine that there’s a need for some sense-making in all sorts of qual briefs – exploratory, optimisation work, foundational insights, evaluative stuff.
What could it be?
I’d suggest the following: that we take pain points or delight moments as our starting point and apply a sense-making lens to them.
Storytelling is a great place to start – no fuss stuff, maybe asking people to explore their memories about something, an experience that affected them. A favourite something. The first-time moments. We all have ways of getting at that.
Or exploring the tenuous path to purchase – picking up on the highs and lows.
A NEW SENSE-MAKING APPROCH
And then exploring a bit more about how these “memory-moments” helped participants not just solve a problem, but how it made them feel – implicitly with a view to something soothing or ruffling their sense of who they are or would like to be.
Exploring details, the context, the most important triggers, and of course any changes in behaviour this lead to. Doing more or less of something. Which could be a purchasing act – or engaging in WOM, positive or negative.
My suggested starter-for-10 model of analysis would be looking to sort feedback onto a continuum of a few key dimensions relating to identity. And linking this back to a moment, then a category, and then finally a brand and its role in all this.
Micro-sense making 😉. Here’s my suggestion:
- Clarity vs confusion: to what extent a brand helped to really focus on essentials, deliver a bit of cognitive ease. Maybe some add-ons to a laddering exercise.
- Focussing on “stuff that matters” vs noise: helping me see what’s really important in my life something rather than getting distracted. A quick sort-exercise.
- Belonging vs alienating: provoking or reassuring, calming or disrupting. How does something make me feel about who I am – is a micro brand-intervention helping me relax or making me bristle somehow beyond the purely functional?
The researcher will no doubt pick up on tonality: how tone-deaf is the message, the language – and by implication the messenger? Are apparent sensibilities in tune with – or diverging from the way participants see things and themselves?
This kind of probe – and analysis – takes time, and needs to be costed for. In fieldwork terms, pre- and post- mobile ethnos might well help. It can be focussed on a few people from a larger group, or based on a pre-existing segment from a quant study.
But of course clients need to be brought on board – to sign on the line for value. So they’re looking for proof points.
SENSE-MAKING AS A VALUE ADD
Why should they care? Because if you inadvertently press the wrong “sense” buttons in any brand messaging, you alienate audiences without knowing it, taking you out of their relevant set, being pushed aside mentally. Sales go down.
I’m not one for too much academic research – Sue’s article has a list of possible papers to read if you’re interested - but research-on-research is great to build a case. If any of you have the ambition to either share thoughts or case studies you have on what is here loosely described as sense-making, please share.
And if you have the energy and budget to engage in original research, do let me know, maybe we can stitch something together that makes sense.
It’s time to start re-making sense – from a consumer-centric POV.
Curious, as ever, as to others’ views.
(Photo by Hans-Peter Gauster on Unsplash)