Introduction

Have you ever watched a video and wondered if it is real? Or questioned whether a meme was created by a conspiracy theorist, a bot, or your best friend? If so, you have first-hand experience of the challenges created by our rapidly changing sense-making environment.

Sense-making is the process by which we gather and interpret information to give meaning to our world, make decisions, and take action. Examples of this can be as simple as considering which phone to buy, or as complex as recognizing and coping with disinformation.

In either case, we might think we are doing this on our own, but sense-making is never entirely separate from the context in which it happens. It is shaped by physical environments, cultural surroundings, social relations, and many other external factors. These factors shape the information we encounter and how we interpret it as the basis for decisions and actions.

Disruptions to how individuals and collectives learn, decide, and act will increase in speed and power, and deserve close attention. Some elements of sense-making have remained fairly constant, such as the cognitive potential of the human brain or the social aspect of learning. However, many others evolve more or less continually, like language, popular culture, or news media. The present is a period of especially significant upheaval in sense-making, which is likely to accelerate in the future. Novel digital information and communications technologies could drive much of this upheaval. But powerful social and cultural shifts, such as rising political ideologies or conspiracy theories, may also play a major role.

Current and future disruptions to sense-making are relevant to policy makers in two broad ways. First, governments are sense-making institutions. They generate knowledge and distribute it to help the public make sense of the world. Second, the success of many policies and programs, including those designed to safeguard public health or sustain a healthy democracy, depends on whether or how the public makes sense of them.

Strategic foresight on sense-making is a systematic way to explore how current and future changes may affect the sense-making processes of governments and the public. It can help policy makers consider how new technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) could enhance the government’s capacity to build stronger policies and programs. It also highlights how some types of AI could make it harder to know what sources of information to trust. It can illustrate the troubling implications of shifting views on things like science, expertise, and democratic institutions. And it reveals opportunities that might arise from the breakdown of old narratives and symbols that sustained various forms of discrimination and oppression.

This just scratches the surface. If your work involves communicating with the public, sustaining national identity, regulating communications infrastructure, shaping economic activity through tax policy, advancing reconciliation, integrating newcomers, or securing privacy, among many other things, then changes in sense-making matter to you.