§ I
Sensemaking in the C-Suite
Information has never been more abundant, and clarity has never been scarcer. This paper makes the case that sensemaking — the work of turning noise into a shared, actionable read of reality — is the executive capability that most determines whether a leadership team decides well under pressure. The provocation at its center: in an MIT Sloan study, fewer than 4% of the 1,395 leadership characteristics executives named had anything to do with sensemaking — even though sensemaking is one of the strongest predictors of leadership success. Grounded in decades of research (Weick, Maitlis, the upper-echelons and Cynefin frameworks) and written for the people in the seat, it argues that the scarcest resource in the modern enterprise isn't data or talent — it's human synthesis.
§ II
The Four-Party Problem
Why the hardest problems in your organization are the ones nobody you can hire is built to solve
Sooner or later a leader says the quiet sentence: "This doesn't make sense to me." Not too hard, not too expensive — just a situation she owns and can't get her arms around. So she goes looking for help and finds four doors, each the wrong size. The coach works on you, not the problem. The consultant delivers a recommendation, not a decision. The advisor offers counsel from outside the room where the disagreement actually lives. The facilitator runs the agenda someone else wrote. Four parties, one problem, zero owners. This paper names the fifth thing that borrows the best of each and mitigates the failing of each — executive sensemaking — and gives leaders the tells for knowing they have a four-party problem on their hands, so they can stop buying partial solutions to a problem defined by the space between them.
§ III
Peak VUCA
Forty years ago, a war college borrowed four words — volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity — to describe a world that had stopped making sense on the old terms. The acronym escaped into business and hardened into wallpaper. This paper argues the condition it named isn't behind us but cresting, and that the reflex to meet it with more data, more consultants, and more frameworks only thickens the fog. What resolves it is a capability most leadership teams have never named: sensemaking.
