Brenda Dervin - Sense-Making Theory and Practice - An Overview of User Interests in Knowledge...

KNOWLEDGE AS A VERB

My purpose in this paper is to share with the readeran approach to studying human sense makingwhich has from its inception conceptualizedknowledge and information as a verb. Thisapproach, called Sense making, has made nodistinction between knowledge and information.Instead, it has referred to the making and unmakingof sense and has defined information/knowledge asproduct of and fodder for sense making and senseunmaking.[1]

In this view, knowledge is the sense made at aparticular point in time-space by someone.

Sometimes, it gets shared and codified; sometimes anumber of people agree upon it; sometimes it entersinto a formalized discourse and gets published;sometimes it gets tested in other times and spacesand takes on the status of facts. Sometimes, it isfleeting and unexpressed. Sometimes it is hiddenand suppressed. Sometimes, it gets imprimaturedand becomes unjust law; sometimes it takes on thestatus of dogma. Sometimes it requiresreconceptualizing a world. Sometimes it involvescontest and resistance. Sometimes it involvesdanger and death.[2]

In this view, sense making and sense unmaking is amandate of the human condition. Humans, Sensemaking assumes, live in a world of gaps: a realitythat changes across time and space and is at least inpart “gappy” at a given time-space; a humansociety filled with difference manifested inmadness, culture, personality, inventiveness,tentativeness and capriciousness; a self that issometimes centered, sometimes muddled, andalways becoming. In this view, the sense makingand sense unmaking that is knowledge is a verb,always an activity, embedded in time and space,moving from a history toward a horizon, made atthe juncture between self and culture, society,organization.

Since 1972, my primary project, both academic andpractical, has involved the development of thisverbing approach to studying human sense making.This project now involves contributions from some100-plus academics and practitioners globally andis generally labeled with the term Sense making,capitalized to distinguish the approach from thephenomenon it studies. The purpose of the project,in the broadest sense, from its inception has been tomake possible better design of practices andsystems for communicating, whether in person ormediated, whether by voice or pen or computer.

Journal of Knowledge Management Volume 2 Number 2 December 199836

Sense-making theory and practice:an overview of user interests inknowledge seeking and useBrenda Dervin, Professor of Communications, Ohio State University

The Sense-making approach to studying andunderstanding users and designing systems to servetheir needs is reviewed. The approach, developed tofocus on user sense making and sense unmaking inthe fields of communication and library andinformation science, is reviewed in terms of itsimplications for knowledge management. Primaryemphasis is placed on moving conceptualizations ofusers, information and reality from the noun-basedknowledge-as-map frameworks of the past to verb-based frameworks emphasizing diversity, complexityand sense-making potentials. Knowledge managementis described as a field on the precipice of chaos,reaching for a means of emphasizing diversity,complexity and people over centrality, simplicity andtechnology. Sense making, as an approach, isdescribed as a methodology disciplining the cacophonyof diversity and complexity without homogenizing it.Knowledge is reconceptualized from noun to verb.

From the inception then, Sense making has beenabout knowledge management, albeit by anothername.

Sense making, the approach, has developed overthese 25-plus years within the bounds of particulardiscourse communities. These include primarily thefield of library and information science (whereapplications have focussed on the study ofinformation needs and seeking and on the matchbetween systems and users); the variouscommunication fields (where applications havefocused on interpersonal, mass and cyberspacedcommunication in service, media, medical andother settings); and education (where applicationshave focused on user-centered pedagogy).

KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT: ON THEPRECIPICE OF CHAOS

My assignment is to translate or map in some waythe implications of my work for this relatively newfield called “knowledge management,” a fieldwhose discourse community has little overlap withthose within which Sense making has developed. Ingetting up to speed on knowledge management, Iquickly learned that whatever it is, it is “hot.” Asearch of the Social Science, Arts and Humanities,and Science Citation Indexes yielded more than 100references in the first six months of 1998. Variousauthors have described the growth in superlatives,noting for example the leap from beginningmentions in the mid-1980s to a plethora ofmentions, conferences and books in the late 1990s.[3]

What I want to share with you about Sense makingas an approach and about understandings of sensemaking, the phenomenon, that have emerged usingthe approach rests in good part of my interiordialogue with knowledge management. Since oneof the findings of Sense making is thatcommunication (i.e. knowledge management) worksbetter when speakers are mandated to anchorthemselves in their histories and their frameworks,it is important for me to start with my “reading” ofknowledge management. The picture that hasemerged for me from some 30 recent articles onknowledge management is both hopeful andcontradictory. The hopefulness is well summarizedby Clarke in his 1998 letter to the editor in SloanManagement Review where he described knowledgemanagement as a “new way to solve problems…anew strategic perspective influenced by a newappreciation to interrelationships, complexity, andcontext” (Clarke, 1998).

What is described collectively by a host of observersof the knowledge management scene seems,

indeed, an exciting, revolutionary move. On the onehand, the call to knowledge management isaccompanied by calls for less emphasis ontechnology, outcomes, routines, isolation, centrality,explicitness and obedience; and more emphasis onpeople, context, process, creativity, collaboration,diversity, tacitness and initiative. To the extent thatthis is a useful description of this new pulse, thenthe thrust toward knowledge management can beseen as an exemplar of the same pulse that ispercolating in virtually every realm of humanexistence. Other manifestations in the businessrealm involve the move toward processmanagement and learning organizations (Coulson-Thomas, 1997). In education, you hear calls forlearner-centered education (Norman and Spohrer,1996). In media practice, there are calls for civicjournalism, or public journalism (Dervin and Clark,1993). In library and information system design,there are calls for user-oriented systems (Dervin,1992). In computer science, there are calls for user-centered design (Norman, 1993).

Observers of the knowledge management pulsehave detailed a host of reasons for the revolutionaryforce: the demands of increased competition, andthe rise of information technologies being mostmentioned. But if we look at the knowledgemanagement phenomenon in broader perspective,we can conceptualize it as a symptom of, and aproposed solution for, human confrontation withissues of chaos versus order and centrality versusdiversity. Once upon a time, in the western traditionat least, it was thought that information/knowledgecould describe and fix reality and that transferringthat valuable resource into the minds ofparticipating humans would enable them to acteffectively in their work and life environments. Oneway of thinking about the major philosophic contestof our time is that this old world view is falling tothe ground and as a species we are struggling tocreate alternatives that work. Knowledgemanagement is one manifestation of this quest(Hayles, 1990; Wilson, 1998).

At this level of abstraction what this pulsemandates is a radical reconceptualization of what isinvolved in the enterprises of knowledge creationand management. While once knowledge wasvalued for providing answers, homogeneity andcentrality, now we need to think of potentials forempowering and releasing creativity and diversity.While once we thought we could bask in thecertainty of answers and solutions, now need tolearn to appreciate the courage and creativity ittakes to step into the unknown only partiallyinstructed by information/knowledge. In this view,every next moment is unknown; and the step into itcan never be more than partially informed.

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RETREATING TO THE SAFETY OF CERTAINTY

The magnitude of the change being pursued whenframed this way, at the highest level of abstraction,is awesome. Some observers suggest that thishuman struggling to recognize complexity,diversity and fluidity as marks of the humancondition will, centuries from now, be identified asone of the major accomplishments of the species inthis century and the next.

Understandably, given the magnitude of thechange, the movement shows signs of struggle andcontradictions. It is in this terrain that a secondpulse emerges from the knowledge managementarticles, a pulse that is rooted in a conceptualizationof information/knowledge not as verb but as noun,as a thing, as a commodity that can be captured,stored, retrieved and used in achieving effectiveoutcomes. In this view, there are calls to linkknowledge management activities to measurablebottom-line outcomes; and conceptualizations ofknowledge management that emphasize the needfor appropriate technologies and methods ofcapturing, storing, retrieving and sharing. Thisview, in fact, seems to typify knowledgemanagement in practice even for those who paysome kind of lip service to the revolutionary pulse.

Of course, the line between the revolutionary viewand this more instrumental alternative is not sopolarized and stereotyped. No one would arguethat the making, retrieving and applying of facts(what Sense making calls factizing) is not a usefuloutcome of knowledge management. But what doesdiffer between the two pulses is the extent to whichthe latter emphasizes implicitly or explicitly theidea that effectiveness is embodied in information/knowledge and its assumed capacity to direct use tocorrect outcomes. One of the primary conclusionsfrom 25 years of work on Sense making is that thesub-set of human sense-making situations whichare amenable to this view are small. To think thateffectiveness is embodied in information/knowledgerests on the idea that it can transfer from person toperson and time-space to time-space withoutinterrogation and interpretation. But life and workare not like that: there are no old situations: amarketing problem is not the same today; acustomer yesterday may well be different today. Ashuman beings we know this about our intimatesand our own lives. But in the old view ofknowledge we have disconnected this tacit survivalunderstanding as if it is irrelevant to the design ofour formalized knowledge management systems.

One good example of this is the Challenger disaster,a situation where some suggest good managementof factually construed knowledge would haveavoided the disaster. Yet, recent analyses point to

five different possible causal factors, none of whichwould have been addressed by traditionalknowledge management approaches: a failure ineducating engineers so they were unable tointerpret appropriately the data at hand; a historicalconfluence of organizational and environmentalcontingencies; a failure by decision makers toattend to alternative narratives of the launchbecause of power games and organizational culture;a rhetorical failure on the part of those arguingagainst the launch; a non-dialogic organizationalcommunity (Harrison, 1993; Lighhall, 1991; Miller,1993; Vaughan, 1997).

What is interesting about the knowledge manage-ment literature is that both the revolutionary pulseand its opposite co-exist, often in the same article.The critique of the pull back to conceptualizingknowledge as mapping certainty in people,situations, and things is succinctly described byFahey and Prusak in their 1998 article on the 11deadliest sins of knowledge management. I repeattheir list here because as a communication specialistit is a list I have heard frequently over the past 25years in other fields: library and informationscience, information design, mass communication,health care delivery, public education campaigns,service delivery and so on.

Fahey and Prusak’s 11 deadly sins of knowledgemanagement are:

1. Not developing a working definition ofknowledge.

2. Emphasizing knowledge stock to thedetriment of knowledge flow.

3. Viewing knowledge as existing pre-dominantly outside the heads ofindividuals.

4. Not understanding that a fundamentalintermediate purpose of managing know-ledge is to create shared context.

5. Paying little heed to the role and importanceof tacit knowledge.

6. Disentangling knowledge from its uses.

7. Downplaying thinking and reasoning.

8. Focussing on the past and the present andnot the future.

9. Failing to recognize the importance ofexperimentation.

10. Substituting technical contact for humaninterface.


11. Seeking to develop direct measures ofknowledge.

The importance of listing these 11 sins here is not toconvey the exact nature of the critiques. Rather, it isto provide an impressionistic bridge. This is whereknowledge management is today; it is exactly likecritiques that began to emerge 25 years ago in thefields of communication and library andinformation science and still do. It is also the set ofgaps into which Sense making began to step 25years ago and what it still struggles with today.Knowledge management as a field has no reason toberate itself for its contradictions and struggles for,indeed, they mirror the same contradictions andstruggles in other fields. They form, if you will, oneof the highest mandates for attention by the humanspecies.

A METHODOLOGICAL QUEST: WHAT PEOPLE“REALLY” WANT

The bottom-line goal of Sense making from itsinception has been to find out what users –audiences, customers, patients, clients, patrons,employees – ”really” think, feel, want, dream.[4] Therepeated failures of surveys and studies and thewell-documented gap between how administrators/experts describe users and publics and the realitiesof what users and publics think and do, particularlywhen the going gets tough, became Sense making’sdriving problematic.

One of the premises of Sense making is that there isan inherent intertwined connection between howyou look at a situation and what sense of it you areable to construct of it. Attending to these issues isoften called methodological analysis. Sense makinghas been developed at one and the same time asboth a philosophic and a practical project. This isbecause at the highest level of abstraction, Sensemaking assumes that to generate research useful tothe design and practice of communicating (incommunication, information or knowledgemanagement systems) you must study communica-tion communicatively. To do so is the self-reflexively methodological with methodologyreferring here to ways of thinking about andselecting research practices not to the researchmethods themselves.

In turn, to study communication communicativelymeans to do battle with underlying assumptionswhich lead to the sins Fahey and Prusak expound.Readers who are interested may turn to thebibliography for more extensive accounts of howSense making has challenged these dragons. Myintent here is to lay out briefly the primary

assumptions which guide the Sense-makingapproach, to exemplify the kinds of findings abouthuman sense making which have resulted fromapplying these assumptions, and to then illustratethe potential use of these results in interpersonal,group and technology-mediated interfaces. The firstsection below will attend to research frameworksfor user studies; the second to design applications.

SENSE MAKING: A FRAMEWORK FOR USERSTUDIES

Looking to the gap: knowledge as verb

The trick, Sense making assumes, is to find a way ofthinking about diversity, complexity andincompleteness that neither drowns us in a tower ofbabel nor imposes homogeneity, simplicity andcompleteness. Sense making accomplishes this byusing and applying a central metaphor – themetaphor of human beings traveling through time-space, coming out of situations with history andpartial instruction, arriving at new situations, facinggaps, building bridges across those gaps, evaluatingoutcomes and moving on. The central foundationalconcepts of the Sense-making methodology are,thus, time, space, movement, gap; step-taking,situation, bridge, outcome.

This is a metaphorical framework, not a literal map.While we can usefully assume that life is lived in alinear time-space, in fact our results say that sensemaking and sense unmaking are not. But the Sense-making metaphor provides guidance for thinkingabout people, talking to them, asking questions ofthem and designing systems to serve them. Incapsule it says, look to the gap: this is where youwill find the action in sense making and sense-unmaking making; in communicating; and, in thecreating, seeking, using and rejecting of informationand knowledge.

When used to understand users and their needs, themetaphor forms the basis of the interpersonalinterface between, for example, the interviewer andthe user, the receptionist and a caller; the teacherand a student, one colleague and another. Thus, forexample, in a library setting the user is asked: Whathappened that brought you here today? If youcould wave a magic wand, how would we helpyou? What muddles are you facing? Or, in listeningto user assessments of their use of a database, theuser is asked: What happened that brought you tothe database? What happened while using it? Whatemotions/feelings did you experience? Whatconfusions or questions came to mind? What helpsdid you get? What helps did you want? What got inyour way? Sometimes these time-space-movement


questions are applied to an overall situation,sometimes to specific micro-moments in thesituation.

Looking to the gap has allowed our research tobreak out of picturing users only in the reflectionsof our own mirrors. For example, our studies havetypically found that users attend far more to issuesof cause and underlying connections and tocomparisons of the different answers constructedby different players in situations than traditionalknowledge databases account for. In mostknowledge management systems this kind ofknowledge is relegated to the subjective andopinion and often not treated as knowledge at all.Other studies have showed how users bring to bearentirely different sets of sense-making criteria whenthey are sense-making on their own terms. Thus, forexample, when users are evaluating answers fromknowledge sources that they found not useful, theyfocus on system criteria (e.g. credibility andexpertise) but when they evaluate answers theyfound useful they turn to time-space-movement(e.g. getting new ways of looking at things,unearthing causes, moving toward destinations).

One of our main findings has been that informationand knowledge are rarely ends in themselves; theyare rather means to ends. By freeing our interfacewith the user from the system’s obsession withinformation and knowledge, we leave users free todefine what is informing on their own terms.

Beyond rigidity: a new kind of prediction

By focussing on movement and gap, the Sense-making metaphor forces us to attend to thepossibility of change. Instead of focusing on humanbeings as unchanging entities best described byconstancy attributes such as relatively slow tochange demographic, personality and life-stylecharacteristics, we must find a different way toconceptualize. This forces our attention to humanflexibilities and fluidities as well as their habits andrigidities. For Sense making the answer to attendingto people as potentially changeable across timespace is to reconceptualize the unit of attention inresearch and system design from the person to theperson-in-situation. In Sense making this is calledthe sense-making instance. Results and designgeneralizations are applied not to people but tothese instances. The fact that some people repeatsense-making behaviors (internal or external acrossinstances) while others do not can be a secondaryattention, but it is not, for Sense making, primary.The other aspect of this fluidity across time space isto admit the tentative and experimental nature ofmuch step-taking into the unknown next moment.A step is taken, an assessment run, a mind changed.

This is one reason Sense making is described asattending to sense making and sense unmaking.The other reason, of course, is that today’sknowledge often becomes tomorrow’s struggle.

What emerges then is a different way of thinkingabout human beings. Their changes, formerlyconceptualized as error or chaos, becomes fodderfor a new kind of prediction. The issue of whatpredicts human information seeking and use besthas been the most tested of propositions in the lineof work driven by Sense making. Across a host ofstudies, two primary answers emerge: one is that itis rarely person attributes (traits and predispositions)or task or organizational attributes but rather howusers conceptualize their movement through time-space and their gap bridging that predicts sensemaking and sense unmaking best. The second isthat under those circumstances when noun-orientedcharacteristics such as status or demography orpersonality do predict best, it usually means there isa constraining force operating in the situation, aforce which may need attention because it may belimiting sense-making potentials.

In the process of addressing issues relating toprediction, Sense-making studies have constructeda set of universal categories of situation-facingbased on the concepts of time, space, movement,gap, constraint. One such category scheme codifiesthe user’s movement at a moment in time-space asstopped: two or more roads lie ahead (decision);something blocks the road (barrier); the road hasdisappeared (wash out); someone or something ispulling the user down the road (problematic); theroad is spiraled and has no direction (spin-out); orthe user blanked out (out-to-lunch stop). Thecategories, part of a scheme that has becomeidentified as focusing on situation movement, hasbeen pitted against demographic predictors in anumber of studies. In each case, situationmovement has accounted for far more variance inuser internal and external behavior. In short, take tenusers facing the same situation, those who see it as adecision involve themselves in knowledge creationand use in markedly different ways from those whosee it as a spin-out, or wash-out and so on.

Sense-making studies have developed prototypicalcategories based on the time-space-movementmetaphor for situations, gaps (questions), andoutcomes (helps and hindrances). These categoriesform a new kind of human universal. For example,across some 15 years of Sense-making studies theways in which users evaluate their uses ofinformation system has readily fallen into categoriessuch as: found direction, got a new way of lookingat things, got connected to information, gotcompanionship and support, avoided a bad place,got pleasure and joy, arrived where I wanted to.


Another prime example of a new kind of universalis the marked differences found in sense makingand sense unmaking, depending on how the actor isattending to other people at a given moment intime-space. Strong predictors of differences includethe differences between attending to: self relating toself; self relating to another; self relating to acollectivity; self in a collectivity relating to another;self in a collectivity relating to another collectivity.The point here is this: regardless of whether aperson is involved in individual or collaborativework, the business of making sense regardingoneself and one’s relationships to others andcollectivities are universal mandates. Knowledgecreating, seeking and use change as thesesituational focuses change as the sense-makermoves through time-space. Collaborative work isnecessary to knowledge management, but it is notsufficient despite the too widespread assumptionthat the best knowledge is created only incollaborative settings.

Attending to power: a necessary condition

The core of Sense making’s assumptions rests onthe idea that knowledge made today is rarelyperfectly suited to application tomorrow, and insome cases becomes tomorrow’s gap. In this view,attending to the unmaking of sense is as importantas attending to its making. But, there are two mainconditions which make sense unmaking harder totap. One of these is the long legacy (in the westerntradition at least) of assuming that there must befactually definitive right answers to all situationsand the incessant programming of our world viewsto this end. More difficult to handle, however, arethe forces of power in society and in organizations,forces that prescribe acceptable answers and makedisagreeing with them, even in the face of theevidence of one’s own experience, a scary and riskything to do. Even more difficult is when the forcesof power flow through an organization or systemhidden and undisclosed.

Sense making addresses these difficulties on anumber of fronts. One is by understanding that nomatter how closed a system, somewhere, someoneis making deviant observations, arriving at a sensethat would be useful to the entire system if a waycan be invented to admit that deviance safely intothe discourse. To do this, Sense making mandatesparticular attention in its interviewing and designinterfaces to issues of power. Every sense-makinginstance, even one that seems factually prescribed,is offered as a time potentially to disagree or findhindrance or exception.

Further, across sense-making instances for a groupof users, Sense making mandates that analytic and

design attention be focussed both on communalityand contest. In designing a system, for example, themandate would be to seek out sites of maximumagreement as well as maximum disagreement.Sense making calls this the circling of perspectivesor frameworks, the surrounding of the phenomenain order to reach for that which can never betouched or held still.

In actual user studies, the mandate to attend topower has been implemented by the continuingapplication of questions focussing on the user’sstruggles, constraints, barriers, hurts andhindrances, as well as the user’s assessments of therelationships between a given moment of sense-making and the power structures of an organizationor society. As one example, in a large-scale study ofcitizens in the home town of a service company, welearned that a substantial number of citizens felt thecompany treated its employees unfairly. Whenasked what impact having come to this conclusionhad on their behaviors or thoughts about thecompany, a substantial number in turn replied thatthey did not intend to use the company’s services.In another study, members of a communityoriented toward unity and just inclusion unearthedhidden pockets of disagreement and conflict byasking members where they saw disagreements andcollisions and what they saw accounting for these.

Three main findings have emerged from this work.One is that users often have highly elaboratedtheories of how power works, how it is hidden inspecific arenas of activity, and how it constrainstheir sense making and their sharing of theirunderstandings with others. The second is thatusers have been willing to tell us things thatordinary surveys miss entirely. The third is that ifwe want users to tell us what they really think andfeel, we must make it safe for users to attend topower issues. If this cannot be done in publicarenas, then anonymity structures need to beadded.

Disciplining cacophony: making sense of diversity

The creating of helpful interfaces is a majormandate of Sense making. One of the difficulties ofpeople talking to one another in the nouns of theirworlds is that the nouns do not provide a commonlanguage. This appears to be one reason for therepeated attention in knowledge managementarticles on creating a common language. Of course,some degree of common language is necessary. But,Sense-making assumes that if an interface isdesigned dialogically and if contributions to theknowledge base are anchored in verbs and in thematerial conditions within which they arose, animportant result is a higher capacity of all parties to


understand one another. Reading about a bestpractice, for example, makes little sense without anunderstanding of the struggle and gaps it wasinvented to traverse; hearing that someonedisagrees with you about a decision can easily leadyou to stereotyping the speaker unless you hear aswell about the material struggles which have ledthe person to the position. One way of thinkingabout this is to say that Sense making mandates theembodiment of knowing by attending to the time,place, and action of its making and unmaking. It isthis anchoring in material conditions and actionwhich disciplines the cacophony of diversity.Further, by mandating attention to arenas ofmaximum disagreement and maximum agreement,Sense making forces attention to the full range ofdiversities that pertain to a situation.

In actual studies, diversity is made manageable bycodifying based on the time-space-movementcategories described above and by anchoring it indescriptions of material situations and actions.Further, studies have shown that the number ofcategories needed to account for the same variancein outcomes when described in verbing terms (i.e.time-space-movement-gap) is far fewer then whendescribed based on traditional categories fortapping diversity (e.g. personality and demographictraits). Perhaps the most telling finding of all is thatwhen diversity is treated within Sense making’smandates, users indicate they do not need to knowall perspectives on a question to be usefullyinformed and satisfied with participation. Rather,having a sense of the range and the situationalreasons for the differences releases thinkingpotential.

Attending to the full human being: bringingemotions out of the closet

Sense making mandates attention to sense makingvery broadly. It does not distinguish, for example,data from information from knowledge and insteadlooks for fodder that informs sense making bywhatever name it might be called. To this end, ideasand cognitions, feelings and emotions, questionsand muddles, Angst and hunches, dreams andwishes are all elicited. With this move, Sensemaking explicitly places on the agenda for thestudy and design of communication, informationand knowledge systems some aspects of the humancondition that have been too long relegated to non-public spaces. Sense making mandates attention notonly to the material embodiment of knowing, but tothe emotional/feeling framings of knowing as well.Sense making assumes that the entire humanpackage – body, mind, heart, soul – issimultaneously verbed, constantly evolving andbecoming, and intricately intertwined.

Emotions are conceptualized by Sense making asplaying a role in several important ways. One isthat they are a major measure of outcomes forhuman beings. Systems ignore this at their peril.The second is that emotions play a large role inhuman capacities to share and cooperate with otherpeople. On the one hand, we need rigorousattention to all manner of points of view. But on theother hand, people work best when they feel goodabout themselves and being fearful because ofdifferences in viewpoints usually leads tocounterproductive emotions and actions.

The third emphasis on emotion in Sense makingfocuses on emotions are a site of human struggles.People talk naturally, for example, about emotionsblocking their thinking, or repetitive mistakemaking driven by emotions. This natural talk isanother kind of sense making. In the context oforganizations trying to capitalize on humancreativity and flexibility, it is a useful kind ofknowing. It goes without saying, of course, that itrequires an unusual level of safety to be created inthe organizational environment.

Numerous Sense-making studies have incorporatedthis enlarged conception of the human knower. In atypical study, for example, it was determined that agroup of graduate students had what could best bedescribed as a stereotyped viscerally negativeemotion about a certain author. The study thenteased out the range of positions on this author andallowed to be aired alternative viewpoints whichopened up the possibilities for discussion. Inanother kind of study, a typical result ranksemotional helps among the primary ways usersevaluate the utilities of information systems.

Disciplining us: opening ears and eyes

The principles above have all mandated a particularway of looking at and intersecting with users ofinformation, communication and knowledgemanagement systems. Yet, bottom-line, themandate for change is not directed toward users,but rather toward us – researchers and designers.The question is how can we build systems whichare maximally useful and responsive to real living-breathing human beings and the real nitty-gritty,changing conditions of their work and lives. Theswitch is subtle but important. The question is nothow can we reach them, but how can we changeourselves to be useful to them.

In this framework, Sense making mandatesrespectful listening to users as theorists andknowledge-makers in their worlds; as actors who ifasked can tell you at least something of what theyneed. Our evidence shows that what users have to


say is sometimes hard to hear, but that in fact whenthe hearing of difference and contest is designedwell, designed communicatively, the results can benot only useful, but also fun.

Permeating the Sense-making framework is anassumption that all interfaces between humanbeings and between them and the systems theydesign to serve them are guided by assumptionsabout the nature of reality, the nature of humanbeings and the nature of information andknowledge. Most of our current systems, includingknowledge management systems as well as ourcommunication and information systems, are basedoften implicitly on assumptions of order andcertainty: human beings as cognitive and rational;reality as fixable; information and knowledge asdescribing that reality. These assumptions operateimplicitly even while we are extolling thespontaneity and naturalness of collaboration andcommunication.

But the difficulty is this: effective interface andcommunication is rarely well-described asspontaneous or natural. Communication is designed,whether in antiquity or by hidden forces or here-and-now by us with explicit attention. Sensemaking attempts to provide a beginningmethodology that can discipline that design.

SOME POTENTIAL KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENTAPPLICATIONS

The purpose of this final section is to illustrate theabove with a small set of examples. Each of theseexamples is based on an actual application of Sensemaking to a real communication/informationsystem or on small scale experimental tests. Theexamples are selected based on their appropriatenessto the knowledge management context and comeprimarily from Dervin (1988; 1989a; 1992) andDervin and Dewdney (1986).

Designing interaction in a community of thinkers

Sense making has been applied in numeroussituations for more than 20 years to groupdeliberations, focus groups, graduate andundergraduate classes and so on. In one example,representatives of the various constituencies in anorganization were mandated to design theorganization’s first intranet. The meeting wentthrough a successive series of rounds in which eachparticipant spoke uninterrupted. The roundsfocussed in turn on: communication situations inthis organization that work well for me;communication situations that have hindered me; ifI could wave a magic wand I would want this help.

As each participant spoke, other participantsrecorded on a continuing dialog sheet things theyagreed with, things that they disagreed with, thingsthat they found useful, and their questions/muddles. All contributions were timed. At eachstep in the dialogue, participants were asked toanchor their contributions into their own life andwork conditions (e.g. what led to this?). Whileparticipants started with marked animositiestoward one another, by the end of the day theywere brainstorming ways to help one another. Theday’s proceedings – both written and taped – werecollated and used as a basis for system design.

In another ongoing application, participants in acommunity where each member works on separatebut interrelated projects come together weekly toshare their work. In the typical format, presenters ina given week are given 20 minutes to describe theirprojects in these terms: the best of what I haveachieved so far, what has helped me so far, thestruggles I am facing now, the help I could use now.Then each participant responds in timed rounds inthis format: what I admired/found useful was, theconnection to my own work is, the struggle I hadwas, what I think you might find useful is, what Ilook forward to is. Results of this mode ofinteraction have yielded overwhelmingly positiveevaluations and duplication and adaptation innumerous other settings.

Designing a public information product

Another frequent application of Sense-makingprinciples has been to the design of publicinformation products – newsletters, newspapercoverage and information sheets. In thisapplication, typically users are asked in a Sense-making way for their reactions to past products andtheir assessments of what would help them ifattended to and what would help others if attendedto. The design of the actual newsletter or articlethen implements Sense-making principles by bothattending to aspects which are agreed on and at thesame time attending to disagreements anddifferences in views and what accounts for thesedifferences. In the process. the communicative aimis not the typical presentation of one linear coherentnarrative, but rather an analogic exploration ofsense-making potentials.

Designing the interface between a user and asystem intermediary

Another frequent application of Sense making overthe past 20 years has been to the interpersonalinterface between a system and its users. A typicalexample is the library reference desk where


traditionally librarians had been trained to askusers noun-based questions. Thus, for example, if auser asks: “Do you have any books on RenaissancePainters?,” the librarian has traditionally beentrained to respond: “Yes, we do. Do you have aparticular painter in mind or a group of painters?Do you want copies of art or biography? Do youwant art in color or black and white?”

Numerous studies have documented the mismatchesbetween users and systems that arise from thistypical model of questioning, one that stilldominates not just in libraries but in all manner oforganizational interfaces with their users. Analternative mode of questioning, called Sense-making questioning, makes minimal use of nounsand ask the user instead: What happened thatbrought you here? What question are you trying toanswer? What help would you like? If I was able tohelp, what would you do with it?

While no large-scale formal study has been executed,practitioners – primarily reference librarians – whouse the Sense-making questioning approach swearby it, saying that it makes their interchanges withusers both more efficient and more effective.

Designing the entries for a knowledge base

While Sense making’s work in this terrain has allbeen experimental, a variety of tests have illustratedthe potentials. A primary example is asking users ofa given information resource to describe the helpsand hindrances they now face when using theresource and to then wave a magic wand telling usthe help they would want if anything were possible.In a recent study of uses of books catalogingmovies, for example, users indicated that theywanted to be able to search by date, actor, title,director and producer. They made relatively littlemention of the standard categories of mysteryversus comedy versus romance. But they had highinterest in knowing of movies that others thoughtwere like a particular movie, and they wereinterested in seeing a sample of movie reviews, notjust from experts but also from other ordinaryviewers like themselves.

In another experimental test, we selected a set ofjournal articles appropriate to a graduate level class,articles for which we had access to the originalauthors. In one class, we gave the studentstraditional abstracts and keyword summaries andasked them to anticipate the utility of the articles. Ina second class, we had the authors add to thetraditional abstracts and keywords one or twoparagraphs describing what led them to write thearticle, what they thought was good about it, whatthey struggled with in it, and how writing it helped

and hindered them. Again, students made utilityjudgments. After reading the full-length articles,students in both classes did a final rating. Resultssuggested that the addition of the Sense-makingoverlay produced a marked improvement in userability to decide what would be useful.

Designing a Sense-making overlay to a noun-basedknowledge base

The most complicated application is one that existsprimarily in imagination, although aspects of ithave been tested in small scale experiments. In thisvision, a time-space-movement overlay is laid ontop of a traditional noun-based knowledge system.Users are invited to add their entries using Sense-making categories: What helped? What hindered?What are the barriers? What do you conclude?What emotions/feelings relate? What would help?What things need to be discussed here that aren’tbeing discussed? Whose voice needs to be heardthat is not being heard?

In this vision, users have the option of exploring theSense-making overlay or the traditional noun-overlay. Within the Sense-making overlay, userscan move from helps to hinders to barriers toconclusions to emotions to unheard voices orundiscussed issues as they wish. They can add theircomments. They are invited to anchor theircontributions in their material conditions (e.g. whathappened that leads you to this?) They can alwaysopt for anonymity if they feel they need it. In thisvision, computerized tools maintain the last set ofcomments in a particular track within the system,using a maximum diversity rule for retention.

CONCLUSIONS

In the above applications of Sense making to thedesign of communication, information andknowledge management systems, the design neverfocusses on arriving at right answers or bestknowledge. Rather, the assumption is that underthose circumstances where accuracy and factizingare important aspects these will emerge from theSense-making surround. But the surround allows,as well, other strategies for knowledge making andusing. The surround by definition does not mandate,as traditional information/communication systemsdo, attention to coherency or centrality or certainty,but rather to the unleashing of sense-makingpotential.

Such system designs must by definition beresponsive and iterative and open. But Sense-making research suggests these characteristics arenot enough. What is needed is a way of


conceptualizing knowledge making and usingwhich unleashes sense making for the realities ofhuman situation-facing. This also inherentlymandates attentions to ways of bracketing ortaming at least in part the impacts of power whichconstrain human willingness to share and problemsolve collaboratively.

These are, of course, not small mandates. They offera radically different conception of what aknowledge management system might be about. Itis, however, the conception which 25 years of workon human sense making has led me to conclude wemust implement in design if our systems are to bemaximally useful to their users. More than that,however, is the fact that the mandate for oursystems may be even more serious: the success ofour enterprises, the haboring of scarce resourcesand perhaps even the survival of the species. ❑

Notes

[1] Sense making has been developed since 1972 byDervin and colleagues. A Web-site is devoted to it,listing articles written by Dervin, and some 600articles citing the approach in some way:http://communication.sbs.ohio-state.edu/sense-making/.The descriptions presented here present a brushstroke portrait across some 100 studies andapplications. Particularly relevant specificpresentations include: Dervin (1980; 1983; 1989a;1989b; 1992; 1993; 1994; 1997), Dervin and Clark(1993) and Dervin and Nilan (1986). A debt is owedto Richard F. Carter without whom the developmentof Sense making would not have been possible(Carter, 1989, 1991).

[2] Particularly relevant is Gould’s The Mismeasurement ofMan, originally published in 1981 and recentlyrevised (1996).

[3] The author’s understanding of the field ofknowledge management is based on a reading of therelevant items listed in the bibliography.

Bibliography

Carter, R.F. (1989), “Reinventing communication,scientifically”, in Kim, H.S. (Ed.), World Community inPost-industrial Society: Continuity and Change, Wooseok,Seoul, Korea, pp. 59-84.

Carter, R.F. (1991), “Comparative analysis, theory, andcross-cultural communication”, Communication Theory,Vol. 1 No. 1, pp. 151-8.

Clarke, D.S. (1998), “Knowledge management (Letter toeditor)”, Sloan Marketing Review, Vol. 39 No. 3, Spring,pp. 4-5.

Coulson-Thomas, C.J. (1997), “The future of theorganization: selected knowledge management issues”,

The Journal of Knowledge Management, Vol. 1 No. 1,September, pp. 15-26.

Dervin, B. (1980), “Communication gaps and inequities:moving toward a reconceptualization”, in Dervin, B. andMelvin, V. (Eds), Progress in Communication Sciences, Vol.2, Ablex Publishers, Norwood, NJ, pp. 73-112.

Dervin, B. (1983), “An overview of Sense making:concepts, methods, results”, International CommunicationAssociation annual meeting, Dallas, TX, May, http://communication.sbs.ohio-state.edu/sense-making/art/artdervin83.html,

Dervin, B. (1989a), “Audience as listener and learner,teacher and confidante: the Sense-making approach”, inRice, R. and Atkins, C. (Eds), Public CommunicationCampaigns, 2nd ed., Sage, Newbury Park, CA, pp. 67-86.

Dervin, B. (1989b), “Users as research inventions: howresearch categories perpetuate inequities”, Journal ofCommunication, Vol. 39 No. 2, pp. 216-32.

Dervin, B. (1992), “From the mind’s eye of the user: theSense-making qualitative-quantitative methodology”, inGlazier, J.D. and Powerl, R.R. (Eds), Qualitative Research inInformation Management, Libraries Unlimited, Englewood,CO, pp. 61-84.

Dervin, B. (1993), “Verbing communication: mandate fordisciplinary invention”, Journal of Communication, Vol. 43,pp. 45-54.

Dervin, B. (1994), “Information <—> democracy: anexamination of underlying assumptions”, Journal of theAmerican Society for Information Science, Vol. 45 No. 6, July,pp. 369-85.

Dervin, B. (1997), “Given a context by any other name:methodological tools for taming the unruly beast”, inVakkari, P., Savolainen, R. and Dervin, B. (Eds),Information Seeking in Context, Taylor Graham, London,pp. 13-38.

Dervin, B. and Clark, K.D. (1993), “Communication anddemocracy: a mandate for procedural invention”, inSpilichal, S. and Wasko, J. (Eds), Communication andDemocracy, Ablex Publishers, Norwood, NJ, pp. 103-40.

Dervin, B. and Dewdney, P. (1986), “Neutral questioning:a new approach to the reference interview”, RQ, Summer,pp. 506-13.

Fahey, L. and Prusak, L. (1998), “The eleven deadliest sinsof knowledge management”, California ManagementReview, Vol. 40 No. 3, Spring, pp. 265-75.

Gould, S.J. (1996), The Mismeasurement of Man, W.W.Norton & Co, New York, NY.

Harrison, E.F. (1993), “The anatomy of a flaweddecision”, Technology in Society, Vol. 15 No. 2, pp. 161-83.

Hayles, K.N. (1990), Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder inContemporary Literature and Science, Cornell UniversityPress, Ithaca, NY.


Lighthall, F.F. (1991), “Launching the space-shuttleChallenger: disciplinary deficiencies in the analysis ofengineering data”, IEEE Transactions of EngineeringManagement, Vol. 38 No. 1, February, pp. 64-74.

Miller, C.M. (1993), “Framing arguments in a technicalcontroversy: assumptions about science and technologyin the decision to launch the space-shuttle Challenger”,Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, Vol. 23No. 2, pp. 99-114.

Norman, D.A. (1993), “Toward human-centered design”,Technology Review, Vol. 96, pp. 47-53.

Norman, D.A. and Spohrer, J.C. (1996), “Learner-centerededucation”, Communications of the ACM, Vol. 39, April,pp. 24-49.

Vaughan, D. (1997), “The trickle-down effect: policydecisions, risky work, and the Challenger tragedy”,California Management Review, Vol. 39 No. 2, Winter,pp. 80-6.

Wilson, E.O. (1998), Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge,Knopf, New York.

Suggested reading

Abecker, A., Bernardi, A., Hinkelmann, K., Kühn, O. andSintek, M. (1980), “Toward a technology fororganizational memories”, IEEE Intelligent Systems, Vol.13 No. 3, May/June, pp. 40-48.

Baker, M. and Barker, M. (1997), “Leveraging humancapital”, The Journal of Knowledge Management, Vol. 1 No.1, September, pp. 63-74.

Been, K. (1998), “Knowledge management (Letter toeditor)”, Sloan Management Review, Vol. 39 No. 3, Spring,p. 4.

Chase, R.L. (1997), “The knowledge-based organization:an international survey”, The Journal of KnowledgeManagement, Vol. 1 No. 1, September, pp. 38-49.

Davenport, T.H., DeLong, D.W. and Beers, M.C. (1998),“Successful knowledge management projects”, SloanManagement Review, Vol. 39 No. 2, Winter, pp. 43-57.

Dervin, B. and Nilan, M. (1986), “Information needs anduses: a conceptual and methodological review”, AnnualReview of Information Science and Technology, Vol. 21,pp. 3-33.

Eisenberg, H. (1997), “Reegineering and dumbsizing:mismanagement of the knowledge resource”, QualityProgress, Vol. 30, May, pp. 57-64.

Glazer, R. (1998), “Measuring the knower: toward atheory of knowledge equity”, California ManagementReview, Vol. 40 No. 3, Spring, pp. 175-94.

Knott, D. (1997), “Get smarter by sharing ideas”, Oil &Gas Journal, Vol. 95, May 26, p. 32.

Liebowitz, J. (1998), “Expert systems: an integral part ofknowledge management”, Kybernetes, Vol. 27 No. 2,pp. 170-8.

Manville, B. and Foote, N. (1996), “‘Harvest your workers’knowledge”, Datamation, Vol. 42, July, pp. 78-80+.

O’Leary, D.E. (1998a), “Knowledge management systems:converting and connecting”, IEEE Intelligent Systems,Vol. 13 No. 3, May-June, pp. 30-48.

O’Leary, D.E. (1998b), “Using AI in knowledgemanagement: knowledge cases and ontologies”, IEEEIntelligent Systems, Vol. 13 No. 3, May/June, pp. 34-9.

Ruggles, R. (1998), “The state of the notion: knowledgemanagement in practice”, California Management Review,Vol. 40 No. 3, Spring, pp. 80-9.

Sieloff, C. (1998), “Knowledge management (Letter toeditor)”, Sloan Management Review, Vol. 39 No. 3, Spring,p. 4.

Skyrme, D. and Amidon, D. (1997), “The knowledgeagenda”, The Journal of Knowledge Management, Vol. 1 No. 1,September, pp. 27-37.

Teece, D.J. (1998), “Research directions in knowledgemanagement”, California Management Review, Vol. 40 No. 3,Spring, pp. 289-92.

Wiig, K.M. (1997), “Knowledge management: anintroduction and perspective”, The Journal of KnowledgeManagement, Vol. 1 No. 1, September, pp. 6-14.

Zuckerman, A. and Buell, H. (1998), “Is the world readyfor knowledge management?”, Quality Progress, Vol. 31No. 6, June, pp. 81-4.


Brenda Dervin is Professor of Communications at Ohio StateUniversity, USA. E-mail: [email protected]

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