What’s Sensemaking? Sensemaking involves the ongoing retrospective development of plausible visuals that rationalize what people are doing. Using a visual language to help unfold as a sequence in which people concerned with identity in the social context of other actors engage ongoing circumstances from which they extract cues and make plausible sense retrospectively. We are not limited to one identity when we do this. In a human complex system, an agent is anything that has identity, and we constantly flex our identities (both individually and collectively) and behave differently depending on the context.

Sensemaking is a metacognitive strategy, it is clear that people recognize patterns in the data in ways that they can’t talk about. That kind of inarticulate recognition (meaning that you can’t express it easily) is what we perceive as intuition. We’ve all got it, and good sensemakers have good intuitions about how things go together. Boundaries are possibly the most important elements, in sensemaking, because they represent differences among or transitions between the patterns we create in the world that we perceive. The exercise can effectively serve as the springboard to action.

What’s Weak Signals Reading? This is about the strategic management of surprising and potentially impactful (not necessarily bad) events, or call it card management system. Wild cards refer to sudden and unique incidents that can constitute turning points in the evolution of a certain trend. As the first of the two components of such a wild card system, a weak signal methodology to take into account those wild cards that can be anticipated by scanning the decision environment. The second component, the nurture of improvisation capabilities, is designed to deal with unanticipated ongoing crises as part of a broader agenda on how to manage in conditions of continuous but unpredictable change. Seeing the unseeable and thinking the unthinkable.

These are some of the more concrete definitions of *what* sensemaking and weak signal reading are. I like the visual representation of the past as part of sensemaking. I also like the description of weak signals as potential "wild cards".