SENSEMAKING 101
Image Credit: Erik Madigan Heck
If you stick to your work it will take care of you somehow.
Kiki Smith (1954—) is a West German-born American artist whose work has addressed the themes of sex, birth, and regeneration. Her multidisciplinary, figurative work of the late 1980s and early 1990s relates to the human condition and the natural world.
Smith produces work in bronze, wax, paper, plaster, glass, and many other media. She believes that all artistic methods are equal in value and significance and that there is no material too lowly for artistic use.
Smith uses art to make sense of her understanding of the human form and the world around her. Art transforms how she understands herself, her sense of self, her self in relation to others, and herself in relation to nature. Art plays a critical role in how she takes in information and learns.
“Follow your work as truthfully as you can, even when it brings you into ditches, rather than holding an idea of what you want it to be,” says Kiki Smith – one of the most iconic contemporary American artists – in this short video, where she sums up her important experiences as an artist.
SENSEMAKING 101
The ability to gain deeper meaning from what is expressed or experienced.
If collective mindfulness – defined as ‘the capacity of groups and individuals to be acutely aware of significant details, to notice errors in the making, and to have the shared expertise and freedom to act on what they notice’ – is as precious a resource for organizational survival as sensemaking scholars say, then how might it be cultivated? To date the answer has been to improve the quality and quantity of attention directed towards work processes and the organizational environment: deliberately refining existing categories with new information, continuously drawing out new distinctions from the stream of organizational events, and creatively reframing contextual understandings in the face of an ever-becoming world.
As artificial intelligence, predictive data, and robotics start to complete tasks that were once routine, there will be an increasing demand for higher-level thinking skills, ones in which machines don’t (yet) excel. Sensemaking skills, skills that help us create unique insights critical to decision making, are one of many qualities that make us uniquely human.
A machine has brute force. It can evaluate millions of possibilities in a second. But it doesn’t understand context. It doesn’t have a relational connection to those possibilities. If we are playing pool, the robot doesn’t know whether we are talking about swimming, financial portfolios, or billiards.
Despite the many important advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) research, it is still the case that if we ask what thinking is so that we can then understand how to nurture it, we are confronted with a scary answer: we just don’t know (yet). As we renegotiate the human/machine division of labor in the next decade, skills like sensemaking will emerge as increasingly important—and we need to invest in developing it.
How do we increase our ability to make sense of things or find deeper meaning in domains outside of the arts?
PRACTICE
Sensemaking starts with sustained attention and the ability to see reality with clarity. When it comes to making sense of our lives, many people either oversimplify or become somewhat overwhelmed by the possibilities.
We are the expert on “us.” Many might even feel they are clear on their values. When asked we’ll often choose something like health, achievement, community, or helping others. When we think of our values, we tend to think of ourselves aspirationally. (We aren’t entirely honest with ourselves all the time.) We don’t tend to think about what values we actually live.
Do we say “health” but don’t work out regularly? Do we say “helping others” but ghost them when they no longer serve us?
To know your real values, reflect on the greatest peaks and valleys of your life.
Draw a life map. Take your whole life path from birth to the present. Name the greatest peaks and valleys—those were times when you were under (positive and negative) pressure.
Observe what values showed up and why. Context is important.
Define these values for yourself, in your own words. Don’t just choose values from a list.
Ask others. Seek feedback from others about how your values manifested to them.
Define your practice(s). Define measurable working practices that allow others to experience you as a genuinely values-based individual.
Using this process, which isn’t easy, what insights did you gain about yourself? What meaning or sense do you make of your assumptions of how you show up in the world?
COMMIT
[ ] I commit myself to learning how to make sense of my values and motivations as they inform the quality of my decisions.
FURTHER READING/ WATCHING
Kiki Smith – 'I Make Things to Experience the Process' | TateShots: From her home in New York, which also serves as her studio, Kiki Smith talks about the ongoing experimentation that drives her art, from the provocative sculptures of the female body that made her a leading feminist artist in the 1980s, to her more recent work that draws inspiration from nature.
Kiki Smith: Prints, Books and Things : Smith emerged in the early 1980s as one of a generation of artists who returned to figurative imagery after a period in which American art had leaned to the abstract and conceptual. In Smith's case the interest in the figure was literal: She is fascinated by the anatomy of the human body, which is an immediate and emotionally powerful presence in much of her work. She is equally concerned with the natural world, and animals have become increasingly important in her recent imagery. The heart of printmaking is the ability to create more than one example of an artwork, and this appeals to Smith's interest in the public dissemination of imagery and information. Her work is politically sensitized but she is also fascinated by craft and is constantly exploring and experimenting with her materials.
'It’s our intervention that causes the mayhem': Kiki Smith on work, wandering and the wonders of nature : Tapestries, photography and sculpture feature in the US artist’s first major UK show for 25 years at Modern Art Oxford
In Her Words…
“I like that feeling when you’re making art, that you’re taking the energy out of your body and putting it into a physical object. I like things that are labor-intensive : you make a little thing and another little thing and another little thing, and eventually you see a possibility.”
“One hopes that each piece contains enough space for several narratives.”
“I have to make about a million proofs of everything. I don’t know, it’s just a repetition, like a meditation. You come back to something and then you leave it, and then you come back again and you leave it, and each time it changes. And sometimes you have to wait for new information inside yourself to be able to finish something, to find out how it should go.”
“I got into animals by drawing hair follicles. I liked drawing hair, and from that, I got into feathers and fur, then into images of animals. The patterning is the same, but the proportions of the body change from one animal to the next. A lot of it is just geometry and consciousness.”
“I like Betsy Ross as a model, too, the quilting bee, sitting around with your friends making art, asking what they think, so that you get the benefit of everyone's opinions and so it's not just about you in your you-dom.”
“If you stick to your work it will take care of you somehow.”
“I trust my work. It's a collaboration with the material, and when it's viewed, it's a collaboration with the world.”
“Prior to my father's death, I was having a hard time committing to a career as an artist, but that's not because of who he was - it was because of who I am. It's true, though, that I felt I shouldn't compete with him, and that those feelings went away after he died.”
“Prints mimic what we are as humans: we are all the same and yet every one is different. I think there's spiritual power in repetition, a devotional quality, like saying rosaries.”
“The point isn't to know what you're doing. The point is to have an experience doing something.”
“I think a lot of making art is listening to yourself.”
What we don’t see on the resumes we review or the job descriptions we want is the litany of emotional entanglements we bring to our roles, uninvited, to the team and organizations we work in. Alongside technical skills, people who can master a range of subjective skills are better able to influence, deal with ambiguity, bounce back from setbacks, think creatively, and manage themselves in the presence of setbacks. In short, those who learn lead.
Observing subjective qualities in others past and present gives us a mental picture for the behaviors we want to practice. Each figure illustrates a quality researched from The Look to Craftsmen Project. When practiced as part of our day-to-day, these qualities will help us develop our mastery in our lives and work.
References:
Anderson, L. (1997) Argyris and Schön’s theory on congruence and learning [On line]. Available at http://www.scu.edu.au/schools/gcm/ar/arp/argyris.html.
Bazerman, M. and Tenbrunsel, A., (2011). Blind Spots: Why We Fail to Do What's Right and What to Do About It, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Tsoukas, Haridimos, and Robert Chia 2002 ‘On organizational becoming: Rethinking organizational change’. Organization Science 13/5: 567–582.
Weick, K. (1979). The Social Psychology of Organizing. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Weick, Karl E., Kathleen Sutcliffe, and David Obstfeld 1999 ‘Organizing for high reliability: Processes of collective mindfulness’ in Research in organizational behavior, Vol. 21. Barry M. Staw and Robert I Sutton (eds), 81–123. Stamford, CT: JAI Press.