Sensemaking

Where we are — a few honest lines, taken the way a sailor takes a reading, before anyone decides where to go next.

Each week a body says plainly: what is done, what is in flight, what has not begun, and what it senses that no one has said yet. The fourth is the one that earns the practice. A report lists; a reading notices — the unease about a date nobody has named, the member who has gone quiet, the assumption everyone is planning on and no one has checked. It is said aloud, in the room, before proposals and decisions, because a decision taken from a wrong position is confidently wrong.

It is load-bearing because Navigation needs a position as much as a destination. Vision says where we are going; sensemaking says where we are; the gap between them is the work. Without it a body plans from the position it had last season, and every instrument downstream — the plan, the float, the promises — computes faithfully about a place it is not standing.

It is shared rather than assigned. Several people see different parts of the same situation, and what emerges when they speak in turn is not a sum of reports but a picture none of them held alone. That is why it is done in the gathering rather than collected beforehand, and why it belongs with dialogue rather than with reporting. Written down, it becomes a line in The Record; unwritten, it evaporates by Thursday.

Also called: where we are Stands on: Vision · Navigation · The Heartbeat Opens onto: The Record · Issue · Requests and offers · Communication Debt In play: table · Home Sources: The Little Book of the Great Game (second draft), The Game at the Table §Sensemaking · The LIØNSBERG Operating System (book, draft v0) §8 · The DNA of Heaven, Part V — lionsberg.wiki page name: The Game at the Table Open: Named in the Little Book and practised in the Turn; no page of its own carries the craft of it.