The single most powerful capacity of the intellect is to “make sense” of the complex world around us.
To “make sense” means that we are able to deal with a huge mass of sensory inputs and organize/ structure/ classify and prioritize those inputs so that we are able to respond in an orderly way to the world around us.
Why is ‘sense making’ such an important function?
Because ‘sense making’ gives us a way to respond to the world around us. It gives us a way to navigate Reality. It gives us, most importantly, a way to structure, and make meaning of the numerous individual ‘encounters’ of our life.
‘Sense making’ is a “reflexive activity”. This means that it integrates the ‘objective’ world outside us with the ‘subjective’ world within us.
This ‘reflexive activity’ results in a new form of knowledge within us called reflexive knowledge. Reflexive knowledge = f(objective knowledge, subjective knowledge)
Reflexive knowledge is best represented in the form of ‘sense making maps’
‘Sense making maps’ are cognitive descriptions of reality. They are ‘representations of reality’ that enable an individual to understand or organize reality in a particular way.
Clearly, there can be more than one representation of reality. Thus, there can be more than one sense-making maps of the same situation.
The test or measure of a sense-making map is its ability to be used by an individual to (i) reframe identity (ii) interpret or model a situation (iii) provide a logic or a narrative to a series of experiences, or (iv) give a new impetus or meaning to a set of behaviors.
Sense-making maps are the language of man’s engagement with reality. They can therefore be called tools for the ‘design of life’ by individuals and collectives in society.
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