Sensemaking - our advanced qualitative research technique

How people make sense of confusing experiences

Our new Sensemaking Discovery technique

Many decisions that people make in life are hard. People have to reconcile different ideas or beliefs, or act without access to all the information. Our Sensemaking Discovery technique helps us understand how people put the pieces of the puzzle together when faced with these hard decisions. We have developed a qualitative research technique based on a blend of anthropology, sociology, and social psychology to understand people how and why actually behave in the real world.

It is different from 'decision-making' research

Conventional decision-making research asks people about the 'decisions' they have made - about the product or brand they chose and what criteria they used to make their decision. This research typically

Ignores everything that has led the person up this point
Assumes that once the decision is made, it is made for ever

The big decisions that people make in life are not like that.

Sensemaking explains the vegetarian experience perfectly

Take vegetarianism as an example. Becoming a vegetarian for example is a big decision that has major implications for the person's health and social relationships. It is not a choice between different food products; it's a manifestation of someone's self-identity at a stage in their life. The decision to stop eating meat is only one part of it - vegetarians, pescatarians, flexitarians and others review and revise their diet over many years as they 'make sense of' how to balance their diet, their social beliefs and their social relationships.

As a research agency, we are going out on a limb here, challenging the research industry to stop pretending that people make decisions in some kind of individualistic choice-modelling kind of way. Naturally and without intending to do so, people assign meaning to their experiences. It's an active process often involving how they feel about themselves in that moment. We often find for example, that people 'wade into' situations and then need to make sense of what is happening around them before they can do anything.

Use Sensemaking Discovery instead of 'attitudinal research'

Traditionally, researchers have tried to reach inside people's heads, to see the 'attitudes' or 'motives' which they presume to be the forces that guide behaviour. The problem is that these attitudes and motives are invisible to the human eye, and very difficult to correlate with any kind of behaviour.

Sensemaking research is a challenge to behavioural economics

Sensemaking projects are about how people actually behave in the real world not how they behave in experiments - which is where most of the behavioural economics theories originate.
Sensemaking projects are non-judgmental. We don't say that people are flawed in their thinking. We say that people think the way they do to get things done in the best possible way they can at the time. Our job is to find out how they think.

Three facts about sensemaking research

Sensemaking projects are interview-based projects.
They are ethnographic in that they seek to understand the person's world in situ
They are based on story-telling. When people want to make sense of what they are doing or bring sense to what just happened to them, they tell a story about it. So, we gain insight into how people make sense of their experiences by listening to how they talk about the actions they took.

This is fresh thinking. You will not find this kind of research anywhere else. We are always happy to challenge existing ways of doing things.

Tags: Experiences, sense-making, Decision Making, Naturalistic decision making, People-centred research, Vegetarian