The North Star – not the GPS

I was out with my 17-year-old son this evening, being the dutiful parent in helping him learn how to drive. We'd made our way to the other side of town thanks to a foray around our city's ring road and were getting ready to head home. As he started asking me for directions, my son Jamie commented that he might need to invest in a GPS (or at least use the one available on his phone).

That made me pause for a moment. There were no such things as GPS or smart phones when I was first learning to drive.

"How about you find your own way home this time?" I suggested. "No Google Maps."

What followed was a fascinating episode of watching a device-dependent teenager get himself a bit lost, but then –?bit by bit –?begin to find his way, noting the bigger main roads he was familiar with, the river that passes through the middle of town, and the light towers of the big sports stadium quite close to our home. Even along roads he'd never seen before, he started to figure it out.

By looking for the landmarks and a pattern of smaller hints to guide him home.

It reminded me of the fascinating chapter in Christian Madsbjerg 's brilliant Sensemaking: The Power of the Humanities in the Age of the Algorithm named The North Star – not the GPS, the final of his five principles of sensemaking. I touched on the first of these, the notion of Addicted to the thin, don't forget the thick in an earlier Leader TWIGs post. But here's a little of what Madsbjerg has to say on the North Start versus the GPS:

"We are so fixated on staring at the oracle of the GPS that we have lost all sensitivity to the stars shining right above our heads. The tools of navigation have always been available to all of us. But we must take responsibility for interpreting them. This means executives need to be prepared to understand new and unfamiliar contexts – political, technological, cultural – and to interpret their place in our increasingly interdependent world." (1)

Madsbjerg's North Star is all about having a paradigm for thinking about what we intend to study in the world (through the collection of some sort of data) and "cultivating a perspective on how data fits together as an expressive portrait." (2)

"In this way, sensemaking teaches us where to put our attention. We don’t try to know everything; we work to make sense of something. In the midst of complexity, a sensemaking practice allows us to determine what actually matters." (3)

Leaders are increasingly being offered more sophisticated and alluring 'GPS oracles' to supposedly guide their awareness and judgement. I can't help feeling that these things are acting more as sense-takers, not sense-makers.

Try putting away your GPS and figuring your way forward through your next morsel of complexity. There's a muscle you need to work there – the one that helps you figure out where to put your attention, what paradigm to work within and what perspective to bring when selecting and fitting together the smaller pieces of the puzzle.

In other words, try making sense of things. You're a better navigator than you may be giving yourself credit for.

(1) (2) (3) Madsbjerg, Christian. Sensemaking: What Makes Human Intelligence Essential in the Age of the Algorithm (pp. 22-23). Little, Brown Book Group. Kindle Edition.?

This is a?Leader TWIG?- the concept of (a)?growing something new?(a new awareness, skill or 'branch' to what you currently already know) but also (b) becoming equipped to 'catch on', realising or suddenly understanding something that is in fact right in front of you in the performative leadership moment (from the Gaelic 'tuig').

Access the?LeadRede self-coaching learning journey?attached to this TWIG.