Sense Making

Sense making is the active practice of shaping a reality into a world. All living beings are, by their very nature, sense makers. Sense, sensing, and sense-making are not the same as knowledge management, storytelling, micro-narratives, etc. Aspects of sense-making can involve these – but it is both far broader and deeper.

Sense-Making is the dance of a living being actively engaged in and of an environment that eventually emerges from this swerve in the cosmos is one where information — effects that make a difference is always already of value — meaningful.

Francisco Varela in the 1980’s put it so simply: “Living is sense-making.”

What Varela was getting at is that sense-making is not some special skill we have and can deploy in the right context like mathematical reasoning or swimming. It is not a brand of knowledge management. Rather — it is how we are alive whatsoever.

Our reality — our world always already shows up as of value. We do not add value as an extra ingredient to reality — living is always already enacting a “value-chain.”

Life rests upon some sense of value — an active process — that dance — this is the ever ongoing process of sense-making. As an inherent quality of all life — it is far more than cognitive, conceptual or narrative.