Common Sense

We can decide to go on doing the same thing, or even doing nothing but pretend that our contributions are far reaching, changing lives and building communities. Like performance review exercise, sensemaking is necessary to review and make sense of the things we do. In fact, sensemaking precedes performance review exercise. The former is about doing the right things and the latter, doing things right. Admittedly it is difficult to excite ourselves if we have not done much to make sense out of it in the first place. To paraphrase, how do we go "upstream" if we have no handle on the "downstream"?

Nonetheless this is what leaders are expected to do. To tackle the entropy head-on or take the bull by its horn, so to speak, although oftentimes it is lonely up there, or down somewhere.

To assist our sensemaking exercise, a simple matrix of four quadrants is a useful start to posit questions and to cohere the entries or responses to these questions. Notwithstanding the one dimensional limitation of this entry, the quadrants are dedicated for responses to the following questions:

What is our role?
What is the content to deliver?
Who are the target audience?
What are the goals to achieve?

To summarise, its a Role-Content-Target-Goals (RCTG) matrix.

Let's try to fill up the matrix.

Role = Befriender
Content = ?
Target Audience = Youth-At-Risk
Goals = Keep them in school, better academic achievements, improved social skills

There are several possibilities for content and process for the befriender to work with the youth-at-risk to achieve the specified goals. These include learning skills, personalised tuition for subjects that required attention, team-building exercises, outdoor endurance games, to list a few.

For many of us who had dabbled with strategic plans, scenario planning exercises and horizon scanning endeavours, this matrix looked overly simple and simplistic to capture the rich and multifaceted dimensions of the 5Ws and the How, to make a good strategy.

I agree.

However sensemaking begins with common sense.
Unfortunately common sense is not common anymore.