Change In Practice: Collective Sensemaking

Beyond Silos and Competition: The Power of Collective Sensemaking in Innovation Policy

Welcome back to my “Change in Practice” Series, where I explore how the innovation support ecosystem can become a more effective and credible partner to government. Building on last week’s discussion of impact narratives, this post turns to another critical capability for navigating complexity: collective sensemaking.

In a rapidly changing world, marked by profound challenges and uncertainty, our current approaches – often siloed and constrained – are failing. To build better policy and achieve real outcomes, we need to fundamentally change how we understand the problems we face and how we forge paths forward. Collective sensemaking offers a powerful, collaborative way to do just that.

Today, I’ll explore some of the challenges that hold back our ecosystem right now, examine more about what collective sensemaking entails, and end with some tangible recommendations. I hope you enjoy!

Photo by israel palacio on Unsplash

Challenge 1 - A Complex and Rapidly Changing Environment

As I have written repeatedly, we live in a complex and rapidly changing environment. We face numerous threats. We also have opportunities depending on how we choose to respond.

We live in difficult times, characterized by climate change, rapid technological change, housing and affordability crises, polarization, geopolitical threats, and many other challenges.

In this environment, anybody who proclaims to have all the answers or knows a clear, obvious path forward should not be trusted. That is true for governments as much as for individuals. How events shake out and the best path for people, communities, organizations, and Canada through all of this is far from clear. We have imperfect information, and in the case of Trump, we are also dealing with irrational actors with immense power to shape these events.

Challenge 2 - Competition not Collaboration

Navigating such a complex world is exacerbated by a second challenge: the lack of collaboration and coordination that characterizes much of Canadian policy and innovation.

As I explored last week, our policy system is dominated by internally focused elites within government, with weak external policy actors unable to shape our direction.

We operate in a system marked by silos and competition. Within federal and provincial governments, work is often narrowly mandated, with insufficient collaboration with related policy files. It is often marked by unequal resourcing, where legacy priorities can access far greater budgets and analytical capacity.

Outside of central government, external organizations face overlapping mandates and often insufficient funding for the tasks at hand. This creates a mess where different programs and organizations compete for the same pots of money. The siloing within government exacerbates this by creating limited funding pools that are narrowly defined and don’t consider the complexity on the ground. For example, the boundaries between workforce development and tech adoption can be blurred, yet the funding streams for each might be distinct and delivered by separate organizations.

In this environment, organizations that might be complementary in their work are instead put in positions of competition, creating a system that is a nightmare to navigate as a user, and not much less of a nightmare to operate in from one of these organizations.

Challenge 3 - Constrained Policy Work

A further challenge is that policy work within these external organizations, if it happens at all, tends to fit into one of two buckets. The first is as an add-on to government relations work. Budget summaries and briefing notes for meetings with ministers and officials are the primary fodder for that type of policy work. It fits into a paradigm of competition where these meetings are geared towards future funding asks above all else.

The second bucket of activity is the policy of implementation. Once that funding has been secured, often without clear metrics or sufficient guidance on what success actually looks like, there will be some policy work to support an organization in actually implementing its program as best as it can, often given very tight timelines.

The Missed Opportunity - Collective Sensemaking

These three challenges create a cocktail that impoverishes our public policy. In such a rapidly changing and complex environment, we need different approaches. This is where collective sensemaking comes in.

Collective sensemaking is based on the idea that bringing diverse people together in dialogue can enable groups to generate a shared understanding of the situation and co-create meaning. In doing this, we can strengthen our agency to effect change.

This is precisely the kind of collaborative understanding-building missing across our innovation support ecosystem, perpetuating the cycles of poor policy design. If policymakers within government don’t have access to this kind of sensemaking, which the innovation support ecosystem should facilitate, we get stuck in a vicious circle.