Think of the last time you had a conversation with a good friend. They are sharing a funny story that took place since you last met. As they paint a picture of the setting, people involved, spoken words, and various actions and reactions, consider how you grasped their experience. What did you hear, feel, and understand through your senses? Did you draw upon shared memories with your friend to give you context or draw connections? Perhaps you reflected on your own encounters in similar situations. Chances are, you quickly “got it” and laughed out loud at yet another hilarious story from your dear friend.
This interaction felt natural, seamless, and almost invisible in how you seamlessly made sense of it.
Now, envision extending this scenario to make sense of longer conversations with multiple people, some of whom are strangers to you. You might partake in conversations or ongoing discussions addressing vital community issues, such as affordable housing, diversity programs in your school district, or the state of road conditions in your city.
Sensemaking is a natural, human process of sensing, sorting, and understanding what is happening in any given interaction, situation, or condition as we experience it.
With Cortico technology you are able to dive deeper into multiple conversations and work with others, especially those who were part of the conversation or the wider community, to surface unifying themes across different discussions.
Here are the 6 big steps of the sensemaking process:
- With the Fora technology platform, communities are able to host and upload small-group, recorded conversations and create conversation collections with full transcripts.
- In the process of exercising deep listening, participants and others are able to make highlights in the conversation.
- In Fora Insights, you can create short, succinct labels called codes that describe what is happening in that highlight.
- With a variety of codes that sensemakers surface across conversations, an initial codelist is developed that will evolve over the course of the sensemaking.
- With the codelist, sensemakers listen to highlights and affix codes to highlights in a process we call tagging.
- With codes tagged across multiple highlights, themes emerge that sensemakers can then summarize into narratives, portals, and other platforms.
Read more about Sensemaking here in this blog post from our Learning & Practice team.