CURRENT — Concept

Sense

The second movement of Stay · Sense · Shape: reading the organisation as it actually is.

In short

Sense is the practice of reading patterns, relationships, tensions, signals and movement before collapsing them into a convenient explanation. It reads how a system behaves rather than how it describes itself.

What Sense is

Every organisation carries two accounts of itself: the one in its strategy documents and the one visible in what it repeatedly does with time, money, attention and forgiveness. Sense is the practice of reading the second account. It attends to where energy actually goes, which disagreements are permitted, what gets escalated, and what is quietly worked around.

What it reads for

Patterns rather than incidents. Relationships rather than roles. Tensions that persist rather than the ones that flare. Movement — what is already changing without anyone having decided it should — and the signals at the edge of the organisation, which are usually earliest and least welcome.

TMO

TMO is the orientation lens most often used within Sense: movement is read across Technology, Market and Organisation together, because a shift in one is routinely misread as a problem in another. A market movement experienced as an execution failure, or a technology shift experienced as a culture problem, is the everyday form of that error.

The failure mode

Premature explanation. An organisation under pressure will reach for the account that requires the least change of it, and once an explanation has been adopted it is defended rather than tested. Sense is the practice of leaving the explanation open long enough for the evidence to select it, rather than the reverse.

Lineage

Sense draws on Edgar Schein's levels of culture, on Donella Meadows on leverage, and on Karl Weick's account of sensemaking. CURRENT applies these readings; it does not claim to have originated them.

Questions

What does Sense mean in CURRENT?

Sense is the practice of reading patterns, relationships, tensions, signals and movement before collapsing them into a convenient explanation. It reads how an organisation behaves rather than how it describes itself, and TMO — Technology, Market, Organisation — is the lens most often used within it.

How is Sense different from analysis?

Analysis decomposes a situation into parts and usually presumes the frame. Sense holds the frame open: it reads relationships and movement across the whole field, and treats the first plausible explanation as a hypothesis to be tested rather than a conclusion to be defended.

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