One-line takeaway
Not all insights can be captured with numbers.
What is Sensemaking: The Power of the Humanities in the Age of the Algorithm about?
Sensemaking is a counterweight to Moneyball. It argues that understanding people requires forms of insight that cannot be reduced to numbers.
Sensemaking is practical wisdom
Madsbjerg’s five principles of sensemaking are:
- Understand cultures: To understand people, look beyond individuals to the culture and their social settings that shape their choices.
- Try to make sense of “thick data”: Supplement numbers with contextual evidence.
- Observe people in everyday settings: Human behaviour is best understood in context, not in isolation.
- Logic does not explain everything: Not every insight follows from deduction. Proper understanding of human behaviour requires judgment, interpretation, and abductive reasoning: forming the most plausible explanation from incomplete evidence.
- Data is only part of the picture: Some valuable insights come from observing the world without knowing in advance exactly what you are looking for.
Collecting facts is only part of understanding people
- Discovering a pattern across a population does not automatically explain why a particular person acts the way they do.
- For questions about human behaviour, combine quantitative evidence with observation to understand the motivations, circumstances, and constraints behind people’s actions.
To understand a culture, look for its ghosts
- Much of a culture’s meaning lies in what it has inherited: its history, conventions, and unspoken assumptions.
- Before assuming what someone’s choices, or even words such as “opportunity,” mean, ask what they mean within that person’s social and cultural inheritance. Read more.
A daily walk does more than exercise the body
- Walking can improve divergent thinking, the ability to generate multiple creative possibilities.
- So a daily walk is useful for the mind as well as the body.
- Read more: Give your ideas some legs.
