Personal Strategy community: talks about Environment

How do you make sense of what goes on around you?

Our community meetup last week offered a richness of approaches to this question about the Environment area of the Sense & Change model for Personal Strategy.

In this article, my aim is to share with you some of the resources and ideas that we exchanged around the question, along with some of my own thoughts.

I hope that what comes next piques your interest and that you’ll join the Personal Strategy community soon. Follow the updates here to get notified about our next gatherings.

Frames and framing

• We look at the world through our personal frames. What happens when you find information that doesn’t match with your current frames? Where is the inflection point when you adjust your frames?
• A detailed model of making sense of things could be:

Sensegiving — initial reaction to new information

Sensemaking — preserving the initial frame

or Sensebreaking — reframing the initial frame

and Sensesharing — consolidating the path to action with the new frame

• Similarly, if we associate frames with cognitive schemas:

Assimilation is a process of adaptation by which new knowledge is taken into the pre-existing schema.

Accommodation is a process of adaptation by which the pre-existing schema is altered in order to fit in the new knowledge. (source)

• If we associate frames to mindsets, there are some interesting studies about mindset shifts that we could use: Mindset Shift Report
• From a neuroscientific perspective, the various reactions to new information can be associated with System 1 and System 2 thinking popularized by Kahneman

Looking inward to look outward

• Part of the answer to making sense of what’s going on around you is about acknowledging your own filters, biases, emotions, perceptions and lenses
• There might be different connection types and channels that you use to stay connected with the different wider contexts that you are part of. How are you connected with your family? With your neighborhood? With what goes on in the world?
• Deciding to make time for introspection. What helps you look inward?

Probing the world

• If you look at the whole world as a complex adaptive system and you use the Cynefin framework, then how do you probe the world?
• How often am I shocked? Litmus test of my own sense making of the Environment
• Learning is everywhere. Learn from people that you wouldn’t imagine. Immerse yourself in the world. The Gurukula holistic learning model

Social interactions

• Communities can be sources of reinforcement learning
• Also, learning new information about what’s going on through discussing with trusted people around you
• An alternative would be sharing your perspective with other people and check if you get reactions like “that doesn’t make sense to me”
• Realizing that each of us has different ways of making sense of our environment and cherishing this different-ness

Remembering the insights about the world

• We tend to forget a lot of things that we learned. We tend to not use the older info anymore. Half-life of knowledge
• How do you make use of tools to not rely only on your memory? e.g. taking notes, setting up a personal information system (will cover this in a future gathering) — Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety: “Only variety absorbs variety”.

Next time we’ll explore together the Radar area of the Sense & Change model, along with the question of ”How do you make sense of the main things that you pay attention to?”

Enjoy the journey,
Bülent

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