Immersion provides the raw material for doing design well, but it leaves us with a challenge how to find the meaning in what we've observed. That meaning must reflect the perspectives of those were designing for rather than our own. Innovators need to successfully make sense of their mass of data in ways that uncover patterns, common themes, and unique differences. These allow us to identify powerful insights that point us towards unfulfilled needs and ultimately real value added solutions. Succeeding its sense making can be a pivot point for novice innovators triggering an epiphany in which they move from a fear of failure and lack of clarity about what they've learned during immersion to experiencing an energizing confidence that they can meet the needs of those they're designing for and how to do that. Since making happens at both individuals and group levels, so the activities that sense making involves like clustering observations, capturing what we find in visualizations like posters. And creating journey maps and personas can be done either individually or in teams, but sense making really benefits from working with others. So it also involves communication skills, summarizing interview takeaways and insights so that they can be shared with others or inviting key stakeholders to do gallery walks with us. We all saw, pray to interpreting data through our own background experiences, values, and expertise in spite of the heightened awareness of these biases we've built during immersion. This brings to mind the experience of one of our students Melanie. When Melanie's design team set out to explore how to improve the financial health of survivors of domestic violence, the work was very personal for her. It was a subject that she already felt she knew too well, as a child from a home with abuse, she had always felt guilty that she had not been able more to help her own mother. Doing the ethnographic research for the project was both hard and cathartic for her. But if she listened to survivors discussed the challenges involved, Melanie was surprised to find new additional insights coming from this data. She realized for the first time how bouncing from person to person as survivors attempted to get help required them to tell their stories over and over again, and each retelling added further pain and insult. And she had never really thought that abuse could be financial as well as physical. In fact, she was shocked to realize that she herself had been a victim of the form of financial abuse in a previous relationship, but had never recognized it as such. Now, Melanie can't escape the influence of her past no matter how hard she tries. Yet, as she explores since making with her team, she uncovers new insights about a subject that she believes she knew all too well. Reflecting deeply on the experience of others, gives her an opportunity to dig deeper and find meanings that she had missed in her own personal journey. As she works with her teammates, their collaborative sense making helped each of them to see new things. So each member of the team arrives at a place that they would likely never have reached without the provocation of their conversations with each other. The sense making experience resist rules for organizing, it is kind of a black box, a puzzle. Think about the mystery surrounding Haha moments. We can't anticipate how and when they'll come, we just know that when they do, it feels great. Data gathering during immersion was active, now making sense of what we've gathered requires putting a pause on the action and reflecting. This movement between action and reflection is a hallmark of DT and an important driver of learning. Sense making is almost always a very challenging phase, but it's also arguably the most important. If since making fails to produce deeper insights, innovators lose confidence and are unlikely to envision truly creative solutions. Time and time again we've witnessed the initial enthusiasm produced by DT's much loved ethnographic tools dissipate as innovators struggle with sense making. Drowning in an ocean of information and floundering in the messiness of their search for deeper insights. In order to succeed at making meaning of their observations, innovators need to tame that messiness by structuring their data so that they can learn from their observations in the field. And then they have to translate that learning in the discovery of valuable, new insights. When this works, it sets the stage for another critical shift, not only in how innovators think, but again, in who they are. Successful sense making drives a new kind of becoming as innovators transition from being overwhelmed by the chaos of the process and unsure of what they've learned to instead being inspired, energized, and more confident than ever in their creative abilities. They learn how to mind their data to uncover what really matters to those they designed for. In the process, emotional commitment to meeting those needs also grows. Let's look in detail a bit more about what that means. Since making moves innovators from a mindset that is uncomfortable with ambiguity to one that has the courage to step into ambiguity on the path to uncovering deeper meanings. They moved from despairing that problems seem intractable to believing that they can be solved. Instead of struggling to understand why users think and act as they do, they develop clarity about what really matters to those they're designing for. Rather than acting on a superficial level of understanding, they can now refrain the definition of the problem itself in ways that open up exciting new possibilities. They stop avoiding conflict and worrying about getting the one right interpretation of the data and they come instead to value the contribution of differing perspectives and the subjective reality of many interpretations. Hypothesis driven thinking really starts to make sense, and that the problem itself must be treated as much of a hypothesis as any solutions to it. All of this culminates in a magic moment went out of the valley of darkness innovators emerge with clarity around the deep needs of those they're designing for. They gain confidence that they will be able to create value for them and they are ready to move on or maybe this doesn't happen. Maybe they're still stuck in the valley and they need to be airlifted out. But the time has come to move on anyway, because sense making doesn't stop as we move into other stages of the DT process, it's always there in the background as other mindsets and skills move to the foreground.
