The science
Built on how people make sense of their world.
Tensense is founded on academic research into sensemaking, and into what happens to it as organisations grow layers.
From our Chief Scientific Officer
“Whether you’re managing a global portfolio or a high-stakes turnaround, the better your sensemaking, the faster you close the gap between strategy and reality.”
Sensemaking
Organising is an act of sensemaking.
The organisational theorist Karl Weick argued that an organisation is people continuously making sense of what is happening, and acting on the picture they form. He set out seven properties of how that works.
Grounded in identity
People make sense of what happens in light of who they are, and who “we” are.
Retrospective
People understand a situation by looking back at what has already happened.
Enactive
People help shape the situations they then make sense of.
Social
Understanding is built in conversation, not held in any one head.
Ongoing
It never stops. There is always a next moment to make sense of.
Focused on cues
People work from the few cues they notice, small signals of what might be going on, and fill in the rest.
Plausible, not accurate
People settle on the account that hangs together, rather than wait for every fact.
Sources: Weick (1969); Weick (1995). Full references in the whitepaper.
The proximity gap
Hierarchy filters what reaches you.
The proximity gap is the distance between what senior leaders see and what is happening on the ground. Research into organisational failure names four conditions that weaken a group’s sense of its own situation. Three come and go. One never lifts.
Novelty
Spikes when something unfamiliar arrives.
Dynamic complexity
Surges during a reorganisation or integration.
Time pressure
Collapses interpretation in a crisis.
Never lifts
Hierarchy
At work every day, in every layer.
Every layer adds distance: the more layers there are, the further senior leaders sit from day-to-day work.
Each layer reshapes what it passes on, softening some messages and spinning others. Speaking up is hardest for the person with the most uncomfortable thing to say. Studies of High Reliability Organisations, such as aircraft carriers, found that failures came not from missing data, but from early warnings lost on the way up.
Sources: Maitlis & Sonenshein (2010); Weick, Sutcliffe & Obstfeld (1999). Full references in the whitepaper.
From research to design
Five design choices, each from the research.
Tensense puts sensemaking to work, so leaders at every level can see where to engage, and on what.
Instinctive, not considered
People sense threat and opportunity before they can explain it. Tensense asks for an instinctive response: what the psychologist Daniel Kahneman called System 1, fast and intuitive thinking.
Collective, not individual
Every prompt is framed collectively, so people describe the shared experience of their local team. Responses are still individual, and reported only in aggregate.
Often enough to show a direction
A snapshot tells you where you are. Only a series tells you which way you are moving, so the pulse is short enough to run frequently.
Analysed individually and together
Every topic is scored on its own, then set against the others across lenses, to show where one supports or counteracts another. No single score can show that.
Where to look, not what you’ll find
Tensense identifies where attention is needed. The meaning is made in the conversations that follow, by the people close enough to know.
Sources: Kahneman (2011), Thinking, Fast and Slow; Chan (1998), Journal of Applied Psychology.
The 16 prompts
Sixteen prompts, the same every cycle.
Each is rated from Strongly Disagree to Strongly Agree. The set never changes, which is what makes the trend readable.
Performance Energy
“We are successful.”
Motivation
“We are provided with the right balance of challenge and support.”
Team Attributes
“We communicate effectively with each other.”
Culture Climate
“Our culture promotes creativity.”
Four of the 16, one from each lens.
Where it began: from Footdown, a leadership mentoring company, to Tensense