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During the early years of the Vietnam War, soldiers were discovering that they could capture Vietnamese or Viet Cong soldiers, but they could never get those soldiers to disclose secrets. They were so dedicated, so loyal to the cause that they would rather die than share any intelligence at all. So the US army turned to a team of psychologists to try to understand what was happening in the brains of these enemy combatants that was making them so loyal to their cause. And as a result of that research, the idea of sensemaking was born.
Sensemaking is essentially the way that all human beings process through making sense of some situation, or more specifically making sense of meeting a new person. And sensemaking has three different phases. Phase one is called avoidance. Phase two is called competition. And phase three is called compliance.
Avoidance really is exactly what it sounds like. It means that anytime you meet a new person or I meet a new person, our default instinct is to avoid them. It’s part of our survival instinct that’s protecting us from some sort of discomfort. When you meet somebody new in an elevator, when you talk to somebody new on the street, when somebody knocks on your door, sometimes it’s even when it’s somebody you know, when you see that your mother-in-law is calling on the phone. Your instinct is to avoid. That is a completely natural human instinct.
If you have the wherewithal to push through the avoidance phase, the next phase is called competition. When I talk about competition, I don’t want you to think about two competing teams, two football teams, two soccer teams, two hockey teams, where one person has to win and one person has to lose. Instead, think of competition more like you think of a scrimmage when the A team plays the B team, but you both belong to the same team. Competition is actually an investment into the relationship that you were previously trying to avoid. So competition doesn’t have to look like somebody wins and somebody loses. Instead, it looks like two people are exchanging ideas, exchanging conversation, exchanging or even debating on certain topics. But the activity of having those hard conversations is, in and of itself, a demonstration of the investment in the relationship.
The final step in sensemaking is called compliance. Compliance happens only after avoidance is overcome and competition is demonstrated. Then you reach a point where you can literally ask someone to take a certain action, and they will. You have to invest through a period of avoidance, through a period of competition before you get to a place where you have compliance from your target. Whether you’re asking them for a secret, whether you’re asking them for a dollar, whether you’re asking them to marry you, you have a certain expectation of compliance because you have worked through all the previous phases of sensemaking.
Even as I explain this to you now, you can see sense making in every aspect of your life. You can see it with your children. You can see it with your friends. You can see it in the workplace. You can see it with your clients. The people who understand sensemaking have an opportunity to shortcut the process to get to compliance faster. Where all the people out there who don’t understand sensemaking are going to be stuck missing opportunities.