I wish Australia’s politicians would start making sense!!!
One of the key elements of the Distributed Leadership is the concept of Sensemaking…which, simply put, is making sense of the environment in which we find ourselves. And it is one of the key elements, I would suggest, that is needed in an election campaign. When you think about it, it seems pretty logical that understanding the environment in which you find yourself is pretty key to winning an election…what is the mood of the public, what is their state of readiness for change, what things are important to them etc. But the thing is, all sides of politics seems to be chronically bad at it….and I think part of the reason is their excessive fascination with opinion polls.
Now don’t get me wrong, opinion polls are no doubt a very valuable tool. But they are just that…a tool, and one of many ways of establishing an understanding of the circumstances they are facing. At the moment, however, they seem to be being used as the definitive answer to a complete understanding of the environment. Unfortunately good sensemaking is much more than that. Klein, Moon and Hoffman (Making Sense of Sensemaking) define sensemaking as a motivated, continuous effort to understand connections (which can be among people, places and events) in order to anticipate their trajectories and act effectively. Or, in hopefully plainer language, sensemaking is an ongoing, iterative process of making sense of uncertainties in environments through interaction, that links information and knowledge to help establish meaning…and until we have meaning both information and knowledge are of limited used to us. I can see how opinion polls can provide some of the information needed to sensemaking but it is really just that, information…and it is only ’some’! The problem I see with polls is that an over emphasis on them establishes only a limited meaning.
So why is this? Well, sensemaking consists of a number of elements. I’m not going to cover all of the elements but a couple of them seem particularly relevant here. The first is that sensemaking is grounded in identity construction. This means that how we interpret our environment is determined by the identity we have assumed at the time. For example, in a classroom how a teacher interprets events, and what meaning they place on them, will be different from how the students do. And we also switch between identities depending on the circumstance we are in. How someone perceives events as a parent may be different from how they perceive them as an employee. The thing this immediately says to me is that a poll can’t tell you the identity that a person was assuming at the time they completed the poll…it also can’t tell you more simply things like the mood they were in, where they were at the time etc etc. And conversely how the data is interpreted will depend on the identity assumed by the person interpreting it. A climate change sceptic will interpret poll data very differently from a climate change believer….its the ‘nearly half of all people’ versus ‘less that 50% of people’ situation.
Another crucial element of sensemaking that makes an excessive dependence on polls problematic is that sensemaking is enactive of sensible environments…this is basically a fancy way of saying that how we react to the environment we sensemake will impact upon both our future environment and our future sensemaking, because nothing we do happens in a vacuum. So how a political party reacts to a poll, by maybe announcing a new policy to address concerns found in the poll, will influence the results of the next poll. If the sensemaking is too dependent on the initial poll and not complete enough then their reaction may be inappropriate, which will show up in the next poll…which they will then react to… and so a vicious cycle is created.
And the final element of sensemaking that applies here is that sensemaking is focused on, and by, extracted cues. This means that we don’t generally focus on our environment until something out of the ordinary happens, an extracted cue…and then we sensemake like crazy. There are a couple of issue related to polls here for me….firstly people will tend to focus on information depending on the cues that they extract. Different people will extract different cues. For someone looking at polling data, sensitivity to an certain issue will likely focus them more on data related to that issue. On the flip side, a person completing a poll will be affected by what cues they are extracting from their environment at a given time. Asylum seekers may not actually be a significant issue for a person but if, at that time they are being polled, the news is filled with stories about boat arrival it might affect their responses to a poll.
I guess to wrap it all up, I just wish that politicians and political strategists would broaden the scope of their sensemaking…get out and about, collect data from a whole range of sources and get lots of people to interpret any polling they do use. Maybe they do but the way they lurch from position to position on issues doesn’t suggest it!