Anecdote: Tapping into the right brain through sensemaking

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10/04/06 |

Tapping into the right brain through sensemaking

By Mark. Filed in Complexity.

In January, I described Communities of Practice as ‘the right brain of the organisation’, and Shawn recently posted about the role of sensemaking in creating new knowledge. During the recent international symposium on meaning making in organisations held at the ANU, the group I was working with identified a list of additional approaches that take a sensemaking approach and help organisations tap into their right brain capabilities. I have added to the list since the symposium, and am sure there are many more that can be added:

Narrative techniques, including story telling, business narrative and Most Significant Change
SNA sensemaking
Open Space Technology
Lessons Learning approaches including concepts such as alternative histories
Appreciative Inquiry (although is may also be not sensemaking in that the negative is effectively out of scope)
Clean Space / Socio-Drama
Prediction / Value Markets
Complex Systems Model (Ralph Stacey)
Syntegrity Protocols (Stafford Beer)
Dialogue (David Bohm)
Clean language
Delphi Techniques
Social dreaming