About Sensemaking Labs

Mission & Vision

Our mission is to strengthen democratic discourse by equipping civic actors with better tools for collective reasoning. We believe that most hard social problems are not failures of will or resources — they are failures of understanding. When people cannot make sense of an issue together, they fall back on ideology, mistrust, and gridlock.

We envision a civic sector where shared understanding is the norm rather than the exception — where communities, advocates, and decision-makers can surface competing perspectives, examine evidence, and move toward coherent action even on genuinely contested questions.

Sensemaking, as we use the term, is the ongoing process of constructing meaning from ambiguous information in a social context. It draws on cognitive science, deliberative democracy theory, and systems thinking to ask: how do groups form shared pictures of reality, and what breaks that process down?

Focus: Civic Sector Sensemaking

We work exclusively in the civic sector — nonprofits, public agencies, philanthropies, advocacy coalitions, and the informal networks that connect them. This is a deliberate choice. The civic sector is where many of the most consequential and difficult collective decisions are made, yet it is chronically under-resourced in the tools and methods it needs to reason well at scale.

Our work spans three areas:

• Dialogue & deliberation tools — Digital and facilitation tools that help groups surface assumptions, map disagreements, and find productive frames for contested issues.
• Argument mapping & analysis — Structured methods for decomposing complex policy questions into their underlying claims, evidence, and value judgments so stakeholders can engage with precision.
• Applied research & case studies — Documentation of real sensemaking efforts in civic contexts — what worked, what failed, and why — to build a practical knowledge base for the field.

We publish our tools and research as open resources wherever possible. We believe the infrastructure for collective reasoning should be a public good.

Organizational Background

Sensemaking Labs was founded out of frustration with a pattern we kept observing: well-intentioned civic processes that brought people together around hard problems, only to end in confusion or stalemate — not because participants were unwilling, but because they lacked the structures and tools to think together effectively.

We started by building internal tools for our own facilitation practice. Over time we realized that the tools themselves — the argument maps, the dialogue simulators, the structured reflection prompts — were often more transferable than any particular intervention we delivered. We shifted our focus to tool development and open publication.

Today we operate as an independent research and development organization. We are funded through a mix of project-based engagements with civic organizations, grants from foundations interested in democratic innovation, and licensing of our professional tool suite. Our core work — research, open tools, and case study documentation — is published freely.

We are a small, distributed team. We do not publish individual staff biographies here because we believe the ideas and tools should stand on their own merits, and because the nature of civic work means our collaborators change as projects evolve. What stays constant is our commitment to rigorous, practical, open work in service of a more deliberative public sphere.

Our Principles