Tamsen Webster explains sensegiving: how leaders, parents, coaches, and speakers help others understand what's happening around them. She breaks down two practical tools: searching the literature to find patterns and naming and framing to make sense stick.
And if you want someone or a group of someones, like a team or an organization, to do something different, then they need to think something different. And if you've got a very clear idea of what that thing is, then your job is to help them understand it. They need to make sense of it. Thankfully, there is a wonderfully accurate and descriptive academic term called sensemaking, which describes that process of people making sense of things. And when you are the person who is trying to help somebody make sense, then you have a very special name as well, which is called sensegiving. When I first ran across this term sensegiving, I realized finally here was a descriptor, a name to give to that function so many of us play over and over again in both our professional and our personal lives. When you are a leader, a teammate, a colleague, a parent, a guardian, a partner, a friend, a coach, a speaker, an author. In every single one of these roles, at some point, you are trying to help somebody else make sense of something. In my work, I particularly focus on the professional sense givers, those folks whose job is to day in, day out help other people make sense of things. And in fact, really close to my heart are these sense givers to sense givers, the folks who help other sense givers make sense of things, they can help other people make changes too. If you're in the role of helping people or helping people help other people make transformational change, you are almost certainly a sense giver and probably a professional sense giver too. So if sense giving sounds like you, where can you start looking? First, start searching for information on sense giving, sense making, and meaning making. By doing that, you'll find the original writings that people are putting out there about these topics. The more that you understand both the process of sensemaking and start to apply that to your sensegiving, the more effective whatever you're trying to make sense of will be. Understanding one of the roles that you play as sensegiving so that others can engage in more effective sensemaking is another example of the power of naming and framing. In other words, pulling something out where we We can see it, we can explore it, and we can engage in intentional curiosity about how and where to learn more. By framing what we're doing in these terms of making things make sense, it also starts to shape what you do. You're not just telling stories. You're helping people make sense of things, of changes, of the world around them, of your organization, of a particular ask you're making of them. And I'd say that's a pretty important function overall. In fact, it just kind of makes sense, doesn't it?
