This article explores the power of collective sensemaking in innovation and strategy. Discover how integrating diverse perspectives helps organizations navigate rapid societal and technological changes, avoiding common pitfalls of superficial innovation for more meaningful, resilient outcomes.

We're drowning in knowledge, yet struggling to solve complex challenges. Expertise is locked in silos, hindering our ability to see the bigger picture. Tim argues for shared understanding built through the interactions of diverse perspectives. This bridges the gap, empowering informed decisions, fostering innovation, and building resilience in a rapidly changing world.

This article examines global population decline through Hunome's collective sensemaking platform, where diverse participants explored the complex factors behind falling birth rates in developed nations. Led by foresight specialist Adam Sharpe, the group identified nine key drivers including shifting social priorities away from traditional family obligations, economic barriers making children unaffordable, women's increased education and career focus, environmental toxins potentially harming fertility, and growing eco-anxiety about bringing children into an uncertain world.

This article explores the challenges of navigating complex information and making confident decisions in our knowledge-saturated world, proposing multidimensional thinking as the solution. Using the parable of blind men describing an elephant from their limited perspectives, the author argues that embracing diverse viewpoints creates more complete understanding than relying on single sources or experts. The piece outlines five benefits of multidimensional thinking: it helps identify bias and misinformation, breaks down knowledge silos, fosters empathy across different perspectives, promotes self-reflection about our own assumptions, and enables more creative and sustainable decision-making.

This article identifies societal polarization as a "wicked problem"—complex social issues that are difficult to solve due to incomplete knowledge, numerous stakeholders, and interconnected nature with other problems. The author argues that social media's advertising model has deepened societal divisions, creating echo chambers where different viewpoints become sources of hostility rather than understanding. Drawing on design theorist Richard Buchanan's work, the piece suggests that wicked problems like polarization, climate change, and inequality require systems thinking combined with collaborative, iterative approaches that understand both big picture and contextual details.

This article discusses applying human-centered design principles to help businesses build resilience during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. It outlines four core principles: understanding the fundamental problem rather than just symptoms (using the example of remote work solutions that address broader business continuity rather than just providing laptops), focusing on all impacted people by understanding their needs and involving them in solution development, considering entire systems rather than isolated components (illustrated by chatbot implementation that might solve wait times but create misdirected queries), and iterating quickly through prototyping and testing. The piece references examples like Zoom's rapid scaling and Airbnb's pivot to homestays, emphasizing that companies following human-centered approaches during uncertain times should shift perspective from what's right for the company to what's right for the people surrounding it.