Hunome delivers to many use cases

Which is your use case for collective sensemaking?

“Collective sensemaking is the process of generating shared understanding among people, often in response to a complex challenge. It involves the sharing of diverse perspectives and the co-creation of meaning in order to arrive at a common understanding of the challenge at hand.”

Open, semi-open or closed.
A case dependent choice

Open collective sensemaking is concerned with transparently bringing people together and along to the ‘what next’ understanding.

This approach delivers high trust in outcomes and awareness of the complex issue. It delivers the potential for a large set of experts and experiential inputs. This becomes, at best, robust, exhaustive and an evolving, never ending, view to what humans know to be an issue. With the build they know what emerges as the ‘yes this makes sense direction’ from the deliberation.

The open use case does not deliver to the needs for secrecy. Typically the thematics that are built in this way seek high awareness and shared understanding of the changing world without focusing on an organization's internal decisions. 

Semi-open collective sensemaking is concerned with sharing most of what people have built but having difficulty working on the thematic in the open.

It delivers some transparency and yet also controls by opening the SparkMap and analytics at some point to some extent.

It does not deliver full trust and buy-in for the outcome as some messages might be left out.

Closed collective sensemaking is concerned with highly sensitive content and people whose contributions could be misconstrued and used against the agenda and thus they need more controls.

It delivers secrecy.

It does not deliver transparency and trust with the wider ecosystems. It will lack some of the inputs and SparkMap universe and data connections that open sensemaking gets.

The output, as secret, cannot be connected with other deliberations that then would deliver faster learning and shared understanding in the world.

Getting to confident decisions, strong actions and resonating results

Trust-increasing shared understanding of the change afoot in the world, and it leading to robust decisions and strong actions, building resonating results across the ecosystem, is assisted with deliberation where everyone can see why a particular way of seeing the situation makes sense.

Then those who will act on it or need to ‘buy it’, need to internalize it by being part of the deliberation… Building alignment and influence early.

Multidisciplinary, open and transparent collective sensemaking is the best way to get there. 

The environment is structured to hear constructive thinking from all participants well and disregard the not so constructive, or report on it. 

What is a thematic?

What is changing around your group, organization or business? What do you need to understand in a multidimensional way? Or, what change are you working on and needing others to understand? Tackling uncertainty, opportunities and risks head on.

A theme is not a topic. A theme is a broader and more complex notion of the space of inquiry. It connects the dots across fields and ways of knowing.

There are millions of themes of change—some larger and some smaller. They continue to change with time.

Example themes to get your ideas going

  • Population decline and demographic shifts

  • Business growth in the age of environmental limitations

  • Global approaches to fixing the challenges in the health care systems

  • Deliberating your future with AI

Humans from many disciplines and many ways of knowing build toward a robust understanding in all collective sensemaking use cases

Talk to us about your use case if you cannot find your case below.

Which of these use cases are your goal?

  • Need
    A theme that is emerging and needs to be understood richly and by many.

    Benefit
    Increase understanding and natural evangelism with the participants. Learn fast. Get examples and experiments from around the world. Broaden your reach geographically, demographically, and expertise.

    Value
    Cut cost in aligning stakeholders. Dynamic and evolving. Easy to join at any time. Storytelling and analysis outputs.

  • Need
    How does the world not work in this area, how should it? Enable deliberation for unearthing the new and stronger thinking. Understand, in depth, people within their context.

    Benefit
    Access views that you could not before while improving quality, richness and depth. Without separating perspectives due to ‘statistical’ relevance at the input phase.

    Value
    Give people time to deliberate, and evolve their own views. Consider alternatives. Panel without a panel. Preconceived limitations in set up can be forgotten (bad survey questions etc).

  • Need
    Asking the ‘five whys’ to dig deeper into why a phenomenon happens. If this is the phenomenon what caused it, and what caused that? As a train of thought, together.

    Benefit
    Enable contributions with ease. Deliberate on the potential root causes before locking one in. Understand the relationships within a phenomena.

    Value
    Mature all contributors to think about the causes and consequences. No need for any particular skills.

  • Need
    If this is the phenomenon what happens next and after? Imagination and facts are both welcome. What impact will our thinking and plans have on the world: what improves, what doesn’t? Are there any unintended consequences?

    Benefit

    Gain insights from many people’s perspective on what the impact might be and why.

    Value

    Rich views to impact. Not tied to a particular approach to impact but enables a deep deliberation on the possibilities, good and bad.

  • Need
    Understand a trend’s evolution and meaning in the world and for your context. Unearth and analyze unintended consequences and novel opportunities and risks.

    Benefit
    Assessing ‘What if’ with many contributors while evolving views of ‘what next’. Contextual as well as world and human aware instead of generic imagining and generic facts.

    Value
    Contextualize a trend that might otherwise be too generic and yet get the outside in view of what the trend might mean irrespective of your context. Mature many in your organization to the changing landscape.

  • Need
    We have identified various risks but we need to understand their importance better. What could happen if the risk played out?

    Benefit
    Contextualize the identified risk with deliberation. Identify key risks for your context.

    Value
    Risk analysis becomes a living, breathing understanding of the meaning of the changing environment.

  • Need
    Our people and the stakeholders need to be immersed in our ‘xyz’ thematic to unearth new thinking.

    Benefit
    Mature everyone to think new thoughts. As the world changes no one has the facts and the answers but the many inputs together shape what makes sense next.

    Value
    Innovation potential increases by a large amount when your organization and even your ecosystem deliberate broadly. New thoughts arise as ideas collide. We help this happen with the assisted serendipity as you mingle in the thinking.

  • Need
    Validate and gain human deliberation on experience and context and more during a design process. Create an output that lives on for your next challenge. Involve many people and give credit with ease and more.

    Benefit
    Gain insights you could not get prior—deliberation among several people. Finding new thoughts.

    Value
    Deepen the real world ideas and examples for your design & creative endeavour.

  • Need
    To understand interest in our planned new or hypotheticals we need insights and input. We seek to unearth the contextual relevance for people rather than just ask questions from them in isolation from each other. With more knowledge and understanding the input becomes more relevant to our context. We need to understand our markets and what is changing

    Benefit
    Humans who do not live and breathe our changing context would find it hard to imagine the potential unless we deliberate on it with the people. Here we can mature humans like a wine to the change to their lives with our hypotheticals.

    Value
    Continuity saves resources. Dynamic output provides the latest results with ease.

  • Need
    We need to stay on the pulse of the competitive moves in a manner that is continually updated and accessible.

    Benefit
    Make it a dynamic and collective output.

    Value
    Enable clients of the information to have access at all times. Everyone participating can add new bits of information as acquired to the mapping.

  • Need
    An emerging research theme, solution, need space, or other needs input from around the world, from diverse disciplines, ways of knowing (or a geo). Across established silos.

    Benefit
    No need to research in a limited manner, due to resource constraints. Make it visible early.

    Value
    Save time and money. Broaden the resource use. Get better results.

  • Need
    We need to understand how a system might evolve and what is involved before we map it.

    Benefit
    Gain valuable insights from those not familiar with systems design and theory.

    Value
    Connecting the dots makes your thinking systemic.

  • Need
    We need to ensure that our stakeholders and wider audiences understand the change we know is important.

    Benefit
    We can better promote the agenda by involving natural evangelists and the community in the deliberation and expand in ripple effects over time. We become the key hub for the theme we progress.

    Value
    We gain stronger decision making with confidence and continuity in all the right corners, where are future is shaped for the better.

  • Need
    Our societal role needs to be visible and transparent. We run deliberations on themes relevant to us. We wish to improve our democratic deliberation. More representative of perspectives, informing all better, gaining short and longer term views to what needs to be done, for a sustainable outcome.

    Benefit
    What makes sense to humans emerges from the deliberation. Everyone knows why something rises in importance. Decisions are made and they resonate.

    Value
    Smoother path for decisions in a given context. Stronger decision making with confidence.

  • Need
    We are doing great work that needs awareness and would benefit from a strong argument formed with relevant contributors to be better received, accepted and taken into action by many.

    Benefit
    Convince with a great argumentation with many people, not just one person’s say-so: make it visible. Develop your natural evangelists by involving them.

    Value
    Strong and rich arguments for your case. Connect the core group first in the build and then invite others to join in to view and contribute to it. Maturing all to an awareness without a push campaign.

  • Need
    We need to create buy-in across many stakeholders and ecosystems and know this happens when the change is internalized.

    Benefit
    Mature many people to finding the areas where ‘this makes sense’ with deliberation.

    Value
    Efficient, effective way to include and engage a wider group.

  • Need
    We need to quickly understand how the ecosystem thinks about a theme of change (other).

    Benefit
    Easy to involve. Easy to set up. Easy to engage.

    Value
    Get to action faster with a shared understanding across the ecosystem.

  • Need
    We need to programmatically ensure that we engage our generations in the deliberations and build a dynamic view.

    Benefit
    Run a ‘panel without a panel’ with good deliberation, not just answers from the unprepared. Engage society’s wisdom no matter what type, age, geography.

    Value
    Humanity needs to learn fast. Relearning from our own mistakes is slow and wasteful. Engage the young for longevity of our decisions and the old for the wisdom of elders.

  • Need
    We need to support students of all ages to think critically and for themselves.

    Benefit
    Helps students think for themselves and find their passion areas of interest. Enables students to continue after formal education on their leadership agenda with the community built.

    Value
    Lifelong education is driven by student’s own interests. Students need to learn to think for themselves. Teach leadership & deliberation.

  • Need
    We need to build bridges between research areas for a more impactful whole. We need to make research accessible and engaging.

    Benefit
    Make many research phases faster and deeper. Define interesting questions. Use as a tool for research Share ‘democratize’ make science for impact accessible for multi-trans- or interdisciplinary research.

    Value
    Break silos. Influence better with research.

Not so good use cases

  • Insights in isolation of context are not useful. Typically, insights emerge from strong shifts in the present. They are an evolution of thinking and combine in a novel way. They demand doing or thinking differently for a reason. You earn useful insights through deliberation.

  • Drowning in data is a common issue, especially with a lack of relevant data . We aim to no exacerbate this issue. In the open use-cases it is not your data but that of many who have contributed. You have rights to view it with Hunome. In the closed use-cases you should invite external contributors so that you do not think in a narrow way. You could also bring in ‘data’ resources to turn into insights and understanding with human ingenuity. The external contributions belong to the contributors. You have some rights of use. Dismantling the thought connections into a data table loses a tremendous amount of value.

  • Answers are not understanding of how the dots connect in the world and why. They just reflect one way to see it—one context, one point in time. A continuous and dynamic build delivers understanding that enriches rather than giving simplistic answers that diminish you into a corner.

  • There are a myriad of tools to handle tickets and build a report on them. They are not an evolving narrative of many ways of knowing but rather a snapshot in time, context and participation. But if you like to boost your existing work, e.g. scenarios to a lively and dynamic identification with it, buy-in and the dynamic iteration then do consider Hunome a great place to make that work live on.

  • Unfortunately companies have disappeared with the dismissive attitudes that demanding only ‘the facts’ creates. In a rapidly changing world you have to be able to bring together the ‘let’s create something new’ with ‘what do we think we know that would help us understand’ and ‘what out of what we know is relevant to our purpose’.

Jumping to conclusions without deliberation assumes that ‘what next’ is a given, facts, ready set go insights, simple answers, everyone sees things the same way.

This is not how the world works. This is how companies have disappeared. If you want to survive in the changing world you need all the people you can muster to build and internalize a direction that makes sense. Then go for it with strength and confidence.

There are no facts for the future that you can buy off the shelf, you need to mature the thinking to a point of a rich and robust shared understanding for your context—also understand what might happen without you in the picture, then what you would do to make a difference and what the world looks like with you in it.

You can understand the future better and its shape is formed now, delivering the future ‘facts’ later. It is too late to wait for others to make it happen before you decide what is important, or waiting for the crisis to hit as then a lack of resources make things harder. If you build your shared understanding by hearing the societal and ecosystem voice properly you will last longer and your actions will resonate.

45% of global CEOs believed their companies would no longer be viable in ten years time if they continued on their current path. (PwC 2024, Global CEO Study)