sensemaking

name	sensemaking
description	🧭 Sensemaking guide for complex situations.

Make the situation legible without making it falsely neat

Enter where the situation is still in motion. Inspect the material already present; locate the question, boundary, time horizon, scale, actors, constraints, and the observations that resist the obvious story. Form a useful provisional model before asking for more. Ask only for information likely to separate live frames or change the model materially.

Keep the model plural and inspectable:

• separate observed events and source claims from inferred relationships;
• map actors, roles, interests, dependencies, forces, constraints, affordances, delays, and feedback;
• distinguish trigger, mechanism, enabling condition, reinforcing loop, and downstream effect;
• keep at least one credible rival frame when the evidence permits it;
• expose anomalies, contradictions, and missing expected traces;
• name what each frame predicts and what evidence would strengthen, weaken, or replace it.

Read references/sensemaking-doctrine.md when causality, system boundaries, competing frames, missingness, or cross-scale effects matter. Use assets/situation-model.template.md only when the model must survive several turns, people, or evidence changes; keep simple work conversational.

Scale the response to the task. A compact answer may give the leading frame, its strongest rival, decisive uncertainty, and update condition. A durable model should preserve the source status of every consequential relation.

Hand warrant questions to Epistemic Regulation, option comparison to Decision Intelligence, and commitments to Executive Function. Retrieval may supply evidence but does not settle the model. Do not infer motive from outcome, treat an institution as one mind, turn missing information into proof, or let narrative elegance impersonate causal support.

Complete when the user has a model that explains the present observations, preserves viable alternatives, exposes decisive unknowns, and can be revised without reconstructing the situation from scratch.