The Moment of Clarity: Using the Human Sciences to Solve Your Toughest Business Problems Hardcover – February 11, 2014

In the interest of full disclosure, I am not big on business books. I have only read a few, but I find them a bore to go through. They're often unnecessarily long, repeating themselves and ideas that other people have shared in dozens (if not hundreds) of books before them with slightly tweaked terminology. I am one of the human sciences people spoken about in this book, focusing more on sociology/anthropology, literature, and philosophy, so the fact that I enjoyed this book and devoured it should tell you a lot already.Moving on, what Madsbjerg and Rasmussen do here is provide an amazing new way to understand the challenges and shifts that a business must go through in order to survive (and thrive, ideally). Rather than merely making large claims and sweeping generalizations, they take their approach the way a philosopher does. First, they provide a short description of what "sensemaking" is by countering it to "default thinking," the dominant mode of thought in the business world today. From there, they look at the common default thinking patterns and begin to deconstruct them. They take care here, allowing themselves a good 50 pages (about 1/4 of the book's entire length) to these common ways of thinking and really dig deep into them. They unpack the assumptions and philosophies beneath these different forms of default thinking. You begin to see why businesses are destined to flounder and fail when they rely too heavily on these guides. And further, you learn why it is so difficult to get outside of these modes of thought. Even further, Madsbjerg and Rasmussen detail why traditional "outside the box" and "creative" thinking exercises fail as well; how they are merely extensions of already flawed understandings of people and business dressed up in a new gown.Madsbjerg and Rasmussen are not merely destructive, however. They are very quick to give these modes of thought credit for when they are successful. They are just clear that these can only be successful in very specific situations and with very specific problems. It is when a business "enters a fog" and has no idea what changes are coming, how to prepare for them, or where they are going as a company that default thinking fails. Madsbjerg and Rasmussen describe why exactly default thinking fails in certain scenarios in order to drive home what is unique about their approach and why it is so sorely needed.From here, Madsbjerg and Rasmussen provide an in-depth description of their method and its relationship with "the human sciences" (described above: sociology/anthropology, literature, art, philosophy, etc). Then, they detail four case studies of the correct and successful application of their sensemaking approach and the massive impact it had in correctly orienting their clients for the long haul. That is probably one of the strongest takeaways from this book: the sensemaking strategy and its findings are a foundation upon which success can be continually built. It provides an anchor of sorts, a better understanding of the company as a whole, its goals, values, and customers. From there, it is much easier to navigate the business world because you are seeing people as actual people, not as things or perfect marketing figures.The last chapter is a description of how to take the sensemaking method into your own business and work yourself out of the fog. A very helpful chapter that really hammers home how useful and adaptable this method is and acts as a great jumping off point.I believe that Madsbjerg and Rasmussen really added great value to the business world with this book. They took a daring approach that really seems quite obvious after they have finished stating their case. They provide impeccable logic to their argument, backing it up with lived experience and the human condition. I think this book has the potential to really change the business landscape and provides a great explanation for the use of the human sciences in not only the business world, but in everyday life as well.

This book is a disappointment because it makes false and misleading claims about how sensemaking (largely by itself) can create innovation for business growth. To understand how to manage innovation for growth, read other books and consider history.There have been four generations of innovation management that have evolved as best practice since 1900. The first (1G) created R&D labs and management for the modern corporation. The second helped end WWII with modern project management to rapidly create new capabilities and by forming collaboration between government, industry and universities to create antibiotics, radar and the atomic bomb. The third introduced Interstate highways, an information age supported with quality management, lean production and venture capital, and a combination of university and government R&D that created the Internet. The fourth generation (4G) introduced twelve new principles that support “open innovation” to create new industrial ecosystems. 4G integrates sensemaking with other methods to guide strategy, investments, the structure of organizations and external partnerships to create the radical innovations needed to sustain industry growth such as was done with the Apple iPhone.Sensemaking mainly helps marketing, not R&D, unless R&D is combined with marketing as it is in 4G innovation or in entrepreneurship with Lean Startup Methodology, which is a subset of 4G.Context and a broad range of capabilities are important in innovation. 4G overcomes barriers in 1G, 2G and 3G capabilities that block radical innovation. There are two major capabilities in innovation, R&D and marketing, that separately produce barriers to innovation in 1G, 2G and 3G. These barriers are eliminated in 4G. In markets and industries, economic growth gets stalled without radical innovation such as happened in telecommunications before cellular and the smart phone. Marketing without 4G has difficulty identifying customer needs for radical innovation based on new capabilities, new-to-the-world products and platforms, new business models, and new industry structures that form a new “dominant design”. R&D without 4G gets stuck investing in obsolete technology such as happened in telecommunications with analog technology supporting mainly voice. Kodak is a another case study in failure without 4G to create the radical innovation needed to switch from chemical to digital photography and create a new industrial ecosystem governed by a new “dominant design”. The new ecosystem contained digital cameras in smart phones and Internet applications such as Facebook with Instagram for sharing and managing photos in social communications and operates a new business model supplying eyeballs for generating advertising revenue. Without 4G, radical innovation is just too big a leap for sensemaking to make by itself.The twelve principles in 4G support the parallel development and application of R&D and marketing capabilities that merge in prototype iterative testing that is supported by sensemaking. 4G creates the prototypes – not sensemaking. Consider the case of immunotherapy in cancer that unfortunately took over 100 years to emerge because of barriers in marketing and R&D without 4G. Sensemaking by itself wouldn’t have removed the barriers and accelerated the innovation.Other enhanced capabilities in 4G overcome barriers in finance to support investments in intangible capital and barriers in strategy to support the psychology for learning (double loop) with organizational ambidexterity. The ambidexterity permits coexistence of the opposing paradigms of “what works and makes money now” and “what will replace what works and makes money now”. Corporations with sensemaking will die without ambidexterity.To support incremental innovation in existing markets and radical innovation to transform markets and create new markets, 4G splits a business organization into two organizational parts to achieve the organizational ambidexterity needed for survival. Ambidexterity enables coexistence of conflicting “dominant designs” and the renewal of the “dominant designs” that govern all markets and industries. The two organizational parts support two different types of 4G “dominant designs” – those existing in current markets and those emerging to govern future markets. The “dominant designs” are dual structures of capabilities. The first is a “supplier” set of capabilities used internally by suppliers and externally with partners and the secondi is a “customer” set delivered with partners to customers. The structure of the “supplier” set includes (1) “stacks” of capabilities linked together in business processes with shared knowledge, services, applications, tools, platforms, technology and components, (2) a business model for operations with partners, and (3) an industry or market structure such as supply chains, networks and distribution channels. Both “supplier” and “customer” sets are governed by different architectures.In summary, there are many more principles and practices required in innovation management to effectively create innovation for growth than sensemaking. Sensemaking is necessary but not sufficient. Creating a moment of clarity to effectively guide innovation requires 4G with sensemaking. 4G creates radical innovation in a competitively faster time frame than 1G, 2G or 3G – typically in as little as four years. Without 4G, radical innovation to create cancer immunotherapy took over 100 years.

I have worked in User Experience for 9 years at the time of reading, and I still found value in its stories.It was an easy read. Broken into three sections, by the time I was done I had forgotten the first one, because the lessons of the last were the most valuable. "Getting people wrong" is easy to forget. "Getting people right" will fuel several conversations you have if you work in a "making things for people to use" industry.The examples of companies who have used sensemaking, and how they used it were very interesting. Did you know Intel cared about how people use technology? I didn't!I would not advocate sensemaking as a solution to many problems, but the ones that it can solve, it should solve exceptionally well. It was very good to read that taking more than 6 months to rephrase a problem as an experience, observe the experience, analyse the results, and find groupings, and finally come to a moment of clarity which enables further action, was a) normal and b) a path to success.

If we accept that change has become inevitable and many of the old ways of looking into business transformation and innovation are becoming obsolete, Christian and Mikkel bring a new and better rooted perspective on how to approach shifting industries, particularly in the consumer sector.For those who expect an easy recipe or the 7 infallible steps on how to transform a company, you will be disappointed. This is a far more cohesive and comprehensive approach that invites us to look at consumer behavior as a phenomenon not as simple characteristics, puts humans into the right perspective (usually irrational, always social and making most decisions without really any conscious reasoning) and makes the case for looking into a more uncomfortable approach of avoiding certainties and understanding the consumer through the techniques of social sciences. I particularly enjoyed the abductive reasoning approach of arriving without preconceptions or hypothesis to observe changes.All in all, a highly recommendable business book on techniques foreign to traditional business people

Eye-opening book! Introduce the reader to sensemaking methodology, a new way to gather thick data which lead to better customer insights.

Great read for anyone in business trying to navigate behavioural shifts and forge a clearer way forward.

endlich ein gegengewicht für alle "big data" fanatiker. kernaussage: durch den blick aufs excel sheet allein lässt sich leider nicht alles vorhersagen und verstehen, denn meistens bleiben uns motivationen, kontexte und emotionen verborgen. an dieser stelle können z.b. ethnographen (oder allgemein geisteswissenschaftler) helfen, die darin geschult sind, menschen zu beobachten und zu interpretieren was sie sagen und tun. die autoren nennen das prinzip "sensemaking" und sehen darin 5 schritte:1. re/frame the problem as a phenomen: probleme als phänomen verstehen (z.b. bei LEGO: warum spielen menschen?)2. research / collect data: daten erhebung und v.a. qualitative recherche3. find a pattern: muster finden4. create key insights: die richtigen schlüsse ziehen5. build business impact: das gelernte ein/umsetzendas buch beinhaltet auch beispiele, anhand derer das modell der autoren aufgezeigt werden soll. manchmal ist das einleuchtender und klarer, manchmal nicht ganz so.toll finde ich v.a. die tipps am ende des buchs, wie man z.b. teams zusammen stellt (endlich lohnt es sich mal, ein businnesbuch bis zuende zu lesen).fazit: insgesamt ein interessantes buch mit einer guten mischung aus denkanstössen und direkter handlungsempfehlung.