“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view. Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around it" 1
Sense-making is a new way to think about how to research complex problems. It does that by focussing on how people ‘make sense of’ concepts, communications and marketing offers of all kinds.
This infographic details six useful lessons from information designers and information psychologists on how to attract the attention of customers and stakeholders in ‘lean forward mode’:
Suzanne and I recently took part in a NewMR webinar event ‘New but not Tech’. We were talking about sense making, and about how people make sense of their experiences. Someone asked if that meant that sense making was an ethnographic technique, and I said:
“No, because in sense making what we are interested in is what is going on in people’s heads.”
With steam coming out of his ears, ethnographer Charlie Cochrane of Jump the Fence posed this question in response:
Over the last few years, I have attended many conferences and read lots of blogs from people who do not want research participants to talk. These writers and speakers (oh the irony!) say that researchers cannot ask people what they are thinking, because people don’t know what their unconscious or non-conscious minds are doing.
Since 2015, we have been developing a framework which captures the style of work we do here. I thought I would explain where this idea came from:
So many mainstream research agencies offer the same thing - quant and qual and 'actionable strategic insight'. Talk about boring. All the researchers working with Susan Bell Research are generalists, and we like conducting quant and qual research of all types and (blush ..) have the skills and strategic nous to do it, but saying 'we are good at quant and qual and strategic insight' is as exciting as a restaurant saying 'we sell food'.