Sensemaking: The Power of the Humanities in the Age of the Algorithm
TLDR: “Interesting book about holistic understanding”
The idea of this book is that you have to understand a situation or group of people from the ground up to make decisions about them.
The author is the CEO of a company that specializes in what they call “sensemaking” – they do workshops and research (an ethnography) to help companies understand their customers or target audience in a holistic sense. Instead of just understanding how they interact with your company, you need to understand how they experience everything related to your product or service.
This is apparently a science called “phenomenology,” which means understanding someone’s phenomenon from their perspective.
There are a lot of examples of how organizations just fundamentally misunderstood their target audience. They assumed they knew, but they didn’t understand the actual pressures and motivations the people where under. The organization behind the book did some deep research and interviews to help them understand why their customers used their product or service, what problem they were trying to solve, and what their motivations where.
Book Info
- I have read this book. According to my records, I completed it on .
- A hardcover copy of this book is currently in my home library.