Karl Weick, the organisational theorist who gave sensemaking its current meaning, described it as 'the ongoing retrospective development of plausible images that rationalise what people are doing.' That definition is accurate and important. It is also almost entirely absent from how organisations think about their decision-making infrastructure.

Sensemaking is what happens in every organisation, all the time, whether it is designed for or not. When built well — from a rich range of perspectives, in relation to each other, with their epistemic ground preserved — the actions that follow are coherent, durable, and widely owned. When built poorly — from a narrow slice, without reasoning — the actions that follow are brittle.

What collaboration produces and what it does not

Collaboration tools coordinate people working toward a shared goal. A Slack channel where a team discusses a strategic question produces a record of what people were willing to say on a particular day. A shared document produces a layered text with tracked changes. Neither produces a map of what the team collectively understands.

Collaboration produces outputs. Collective sensemaking produces the understanding that makes outputs worth having.

What collective sensemaking produces

Three things distinguish it from collaboration, discussion, or knowledge management:

Characterised contributions. Every perspective carries its epistemic ground — the type of knowledge behind it, the worldview it comes from. You know not just what people think but from where they are thinking.

Connected reasoning. Perspectives are mapped in relation to each other — where they build on, challenge, or reframe. The connections are as informative as the contributions.

Living understanding. The map grows as understanding develops. A SparkMap does not expire at the end of a session or freeze into a document. Signals that are emergent at the start can be tracked as they mature.

What makes it different from knowledge management

Knowledge management stores what has already been understood. Collective sensemaking builds what is not yet understood. Knowledge management is retrospective, capturing and organising what exists. Collective sensemaking is generative, producing understanding that did not exist before the deliberation.

Why platforms matter

Collective sensemaking happens in organisations without platforms — in hallway conversations, in good facilitated workshops, in informal networks. The problem is that it happens accidentally, at small scale, and leaves no record that compounds over time. A platform makes it structured, scalable, and persistent. The understanding built in one deliberation seeds the next, and the organisation's collective knowledge grows rather than resetting.