Sense Making Before Problem Solving

Working 'upstream' when digging for problems is more art than science.

For those who are unfamiliar: sense-making occupies a critical space in design and systems thinking.

It’s how we make sense of what we see, feel, hear, and experience before we start the meaning-making.

Sense-makers work “upstream” in creative problem solving to get to the root unmet need.

Complex human systems and circumstances are rarely straightforward where you can go “x” problem requires “y” solution.

✱ You need to be good at going beyond the problem into the problem space to make sense of what’s going on beyond the explicit. ✱

This is also where those juicy inobvious insights are found and where innovation happens to make something stand out from the sea of sameness.

So, when I work with founders, I often tell them what I’m not first: NOT a business coach, NOT a designer, NOT a life coach, NOT an instructional designer.

If you need to box me, I guess I’m a design sensing coach.

✱ I work with you upstream to make sense of what you believe is repeatable from your experience working with others, so that we can extract tangible solutions from it.✱

Often times, experts like to organize their knowledge by WHAT they know, jumping straight to the tools, exercises, advice or curricula.

Those are of course helpful and necessary aspects to delivering a program
➡️ but they are missing the design of the transformation itself. And possibly some gold.

Whereas an outside sense-maker / designer can start to plot the client journey alongside how you see, decide, diagnose, sequence and intervene.

It is the intertwining of these two pathways that connect the core unmet needs of their ideal client and a unique journey they want to sign up for.

🌟 And most of the juicy stuff that sets your work apart happens upstream.

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So – what’s your core thesis – and how might you design everything downstream from that?