Sensemaking Tool Research Articles

The micro-dynamics of peace and conflict

The study of micro-dynamics has grown over the last two decades, emerging now as a mainstay in research on peace and conflict. The focus on micro-dynamics, and other micro-level approaches, challenges the primacy of state-centric research. Yet despite the growing literature around the micro-dynamics of conflict and peacebuilding, the term remains opaque. Its use has evolved beyond a sweeping indicator for ‘subnational’, yet the field of study has seen limited development of the definitional parameters of the term and why the term retains utility. In this article we explore the deployment of the concept in distinct literatures, provide a working definition, and assess its application to the study of peace and conflict. We argue that micro-dynamics are simultaneously a unit of analysis, a social phenomenon and a sense-making tool for understanding human relations in the broader societal ecosystem. We contend that a micro-dynamics approach contributes to peace and conflict studies, offering insight into how individuals get on with their lives in conflict-affected areas. By providing multilayered insights of complex scenarios based upon thick, empirically led inductive analysis, the micro-dynamics lens generates a granular understanding of (i) how individuals and groups live and perceive boundaries and (ii) the shifting and malleable nature of inter- and intragroup relations in conflict-affected societies. A micro-dynamics lens, moreover, evidences (iii) the interconnected nature of the micro- and other scalar levels of analysis, elucidating understanding of what we characterize as the peace and conflict ecosystem.

Conspiratorial narratives as cultural repertoires and methodological tools.

This article builds on data and field work notes from two ethnographic studies conducted in two cities: Istanbul and Trabzon, Turkey. It examines the socio-political dynamics behind the prevalence and impact of conspiratorial narratives. We explore the emergence, circulation, and effects of these narratives and how they shape political orientations and mobilisation. We raise methodological questions about these narratives and propose researchers closely scrutinise them rather than dismissing them as illogical or incoherent. Our research reveals three novel relational and methodological insights derived from conspiratorial narratives. First, these narratives serve as sense-making tools during times of uncertainty. They provide accessible explanations for abrupt changes, and they rely and draw upon 'cultural repertoires'. Second, by challenging the mainstream narratives, they shape subjectivities; empowering narrators to act as agents. Third, how conspiratorial narratives circulate has implications for the dynamics of state-public relationships, often following the neoliberal logic, they portray political leaders as central figures in navigating complex decision-making processes. Our case studies demonstrate that actors, even in less powerful positions, may not necessarily antagonise the state. We underscore the methodological significance of these narratives for researchers, to examine actors' agency, group dynamics, and responses to everyday injustices.

The Science Practice of Modeling as a Sensemaking Tool

The Science Practice of Modeling as a Sensemaking Tool

Map to Compassion

This article introduces the Human Needs Map — a sense-making tool that helps orient our minds to human needs that drive and trigger us, disrupting relationships and creating conflict. Initially inspired from fieldwork of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, the Human Needs Map has developed into a systems model that reveals the interior landscape of our Protective body/mind with needs and emotions in dynamic flux. The model provides a language to speak about the interconnectivity of needs through their synergies and tensions. Naming this emerging and coherent inter-dependency between needs and emotions offers a way to understand emotions as reasonable and provides more vectors to heal, dislodge or re-write narratives and beliefs, which perpetuate conflict. The implication lies not only at the individual level but also at the level of systems change to support the design of social and cultural structures more capable of taking needs and emotions into account. The present article traces the iterative process conceptualizing the model and discovering its internal patterns, followed by a discussion about the Needs system’s adaptive qualities and its role in creating and perpetuating Conflict, concluding with insights for Israeli-Palestinian peacebuilding.

“Aggravated, everyday aggravated—everyday”: senseMaking to truth tell, talkback and find belonging in educational research

This article explores an analytical, reflexive, epistemological, and liberatory research approach I call senseMaking. This article draws upon data from a larger narrative study of participants who work(ed) and/or learn(ed) in self-contained special educational environments in New York City. I use creative writing and quilting as examples of senseMaking tools to complicate and question the deficit-laden narratives and research that currently inform decision making about special education and traditional methods of educational research.

Interlocking models in classroom science

AbstractBoth professional and classroom‐based scientific communities develop and test explanatory models of the natural world. For students to take up models as tools for sensemaking, practice must be agentive (where students use and revise modelsforspecific purposes) and conceptually productive (where students make progress on their ideas). In this paper, we explore principles to support agentive and conceptually productive modeling. One is that models can “do work”; that is, participate in students' sensemaking by offering resources, making gaps visible, or pushing back on modelers' understandings. A second is that working across, and seeking to align, multiple models—what we explain asinterlockingmodels—supports models to do work. A third is that modeling activity can support fine‐grained conceptual progress. We detail how we used these ideas to guide and refine the design of a fifth‐grade investigation into the conservation of matter across phase change. We identify four ways that models participated in students' sensemaking as they interlocked: by providingcontradictions,constraints,representational surplus, andgapsfor students to engage with. We discuss how designing for models to be co‐participants in sense‐making and to interlock can provide productive paths forward for curriculum designers, researchers, and teachers.

Munchʼs “Scream” as a sense-giving object for the conceptual entity

A conceptual entity is a phenomenon that only exists in our thoughts as knowledge, linguistic, cultural, iconic, etc. All objects falling under this category are those that were created only by human intellect (power of eason or emotions). The article focuses on how a conceptual idea about the object chosen or given for in-depth discussion or study in an academic setting might be constructed and how the sense-giving potential of this object forms the conceptual entity. In this context, the object acts as a symbol for the idea and transforms into a sense-making tool that affects how linguistic or visual patterns manifest in the human mind. The articleʼs goal is to illustrate the problem of the expansion of every field of knowledge through the development of new concepts. This goal involves visual art as a reference point, notably Edvard Munchʼs Scream series becoming an object for idea generation. Practically, conceptualization strategies can make teaching a foreign language easier. The use of visual art images as nonverbal communication tools gives teachers a chance to improve studentsʼ discourse skills. The cognitive approach to understanding the scream image in the artwork enables us to connect it to symbolic qualities that heighten its emotional resonance and give it fundamentally indivisible characteristics. This article takes a cognitive approach to communication. Hence, teaching it involves developing mental representations of the conversational subject and its linguistic realizations. As the result, considering the object (image) as a conceptual phenomenon of visual culture gives the following sequence of causal modes of its cognition: stimulation – intentional stances and cognitive attitude – mentalization / presence of mental content – ideation / reasoning / presence of substantial content – conceptualization. All of these are either postures or processes in which a kind of object appears, depending on the psychodynamic or psychoemotional state of its meditator, more specifically: stimulus object – intentional object – mental object – ideative object – substantial object / semantic object – conceptual object. So, Munchʼs conception of the scream has not assumed a stable character, we are not inclined to consider the scream as a concept and leave it to us to designate it as a conceptual sense-given object. Future studies might focus on creating conceptual frameworks for the language learning process.

New Ways for Patients to Make Sense of Their Electronic Health Record Data Using the Discovery Web Application: Think-Aloud Evaluation Study.

In the United States, patients can access their electronic health record (EHR) data through patient portals. However, current patient portals are mainly focused on a single provider, with very limited data sharing capabilities and put low emphasis on independent sensemaking of the EHR data. This makes it very challenging for patients to switch between different portals and aggregate the data to obtain a complete picture of their medical history and to make sense of it. Owing to this fragmentation, patients are exposed to numerous inconveniences such as medical errors, repeated tests, and limited self-advocacy. To overcome the limitations of EHR patient portals, we designed and developed Discovery-a web-based application that aggregates EHR data from multiple providers and present them to the patient for efficient exploration and sensemaking. To learn how well Discovery meets the patients' sensemaking needs and what features should such applications include, we conducted an evaluation study. We conducted a remote study with 14 participants. In a 60-minute session and relying on the think-aloud protocol, participants were asked to complete a variety of sensemaking tasks and provide feedback upon completion. The audio materials were transcribed for analysis and the video recordings of the users' interactions with Discovery were annotated to provide additional context. These combined textual data were thematically analyzed to surface themes that reflect how participants used Discovery's features, what sensemaking of their EHR data really entails, and what features are desirable to support that process better. We found that Discovery provided much needed features and could be used in a variety of everyday scenarios, especially for preparing and during clinical visits and also for raising awareness, reflection, and planning. According to the study participants, Discovery provided a robust set of features for supporting independent exploration and sensemaking of their EHR data: summary and quick overview of the data, finding prevalence, periodicity, co-occurrence, and pre-post of medical events, as well as comparing medical record types and subtypes across providers. In addition, we extracted important design implications from the user feedback on data exploration with multiple views and nonstandard user interface elements. Patient-centered sensemaking tools should have a core set of features that can be learned quickly and support common use cases for a variety of users. The patients should be able to detect time-oriented patterns of medical events and get enough context and explanation on demand in a single exploration view that feels warm and familiar and relies on patient-friendly language. However, this view should have enough plasticity to adjust to the patient's information needs as the sensemaking unfolds. Future designs should include the physicians in the patient's sensemaking process and improve the communication in clinical visits and via messaging.

A Categorization of Resilience: A Scoping Review

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the existential public health and economic fragilities of the civil aviation industry. To prevent future public health disruptions, the civil aviation industry is gaining interest in becoming more “resilient” but rarely elaborates on its meaning, hampering decision-making and strategy development. When looking into the academic literature it seems that a proliferation of resilience-related concepts occurred. Although enriching resilience, it also dilutes its meaning and reduces its use for practice. This paper aims to create concept clarity regarding resilience by proposing a categorization of resilience. Based upon a scoping review, this categorization dissects resilience into four reoccurring aspects: fragility, robustness, adaptation, and transformation. This categorization is expected to support sensemaking in disruptive times while assisting decision-making and strategy development on resilience. When applying this categorization in the civil aviation and public health context, the transformative aspect seems underused. Further research will focus on maturing the categorization of resilience and its use as a sensemaking tool.

Building health system resilience and pandemic preparedness using wastewater-based epidemiology from SARS-CoV-2 monitoring in Bengaluru, India.

The COVID-19 pandemic was a watershed event for wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE). It highlighted the inability of existing disease surveillance systems to provide sufficient forewarning to governments on the existing stage and scale of disease spread and underscored the need for an effective early warning signaling system. Recognizing the potentiality of environmental surveillance (ES), in May 2021, COVIDActionCollaborative launched the Precision Health platform. The idea was to leverage ES for equitable mapping of the disease spread in Bengaluru, India and provide early information regarding any inflection in the epidemiological curve of COVID-19. By sampling both networked and non-networked sewage systems in the city, the platform used ES for both equitable and comprehensive surveillance of the population to derive precise information on the existing stage of disease maturity across communities and estimate the scale of the approaching threat. This was in contrast to clinical surveillance, which during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in Bengaluru excluded a significant proportion of poor and vulnerable communities from its ambit of representation. The article presents the findings of a sense-making tool which the platform developed for interpreting emerging signals from wastewater data to map disease progression and identifying the inflection points in the epidemiological curve. Thus, the platform accurately generated early warning signals on disease escalation and disseminated it to the government and the general public. This information enabled concerned audiences to implement preventive measures in advance and effectively plan their next steps for improved disease management.

Tasting ‘kienyeji’: gustatory explorations of city futures in Nakuru, Kenya

AbstractIn Nakuru, a secondary city in Kenya, the city’s future is explored multi-sensorially. In this article, I argue that Nakuru residents explore urban futures through the taste of different kinds of foods. I examine how the relational power of taste not only triggers visceral imaginaries of greener and ‘cooler’ futures in which bodies and landscapes grow more ample, lush and healthy but also invokes memories of, and nostalgia for, pasts in which the entanglements of foods were configured differently, often explained as more ‘authentic’ and ‘clean’ (safi). I argue against vision as the most important sense-making tool to look back at lost pasts and to ‘imagine’ healthier urban futures. Instead, I demonstrate how futures in Nakuru are experienced and given shape by engaging in critical gustatory explorations of the real, tangible materialities of different kinds of food that flow through the city.

The power of language to influence people: Mary Kay Ash the entrepreneur

PurposeAs a business executive and philanthropist, Mary Kay Ash is legendary as a glass-ceiling breaker. With the belief that Mary Kay Ash is both modern and relevant, while simultaneously legendary, the overall purpose of this paper is to explore the role of Mary Kay Ash as an influential entrepreneur. This research responds to the call by Cogliser and Brigham (2004) for an increased understanding of how entrepreneurial leaders influence, challenge, inspire and develop followers.Design/methodology/approachFollowing on research by Hoppe (2013), this objective was accomplished via a pentadic analysis of Mary Kay Ash’s rhetoric aimed to influence the mental mindset of readers (followers) over the course of generations. Burke’s pentad was the sense-making tool used for examining Ash’s rhetoric of influence as an entrepreneurial leader. The data used in the pentadic analysis were also analyzed via Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) and IBM Watson Emotion Analysis to see where analyses might converge or diverge.FindingsBased on the analysis of her written work, Mary Kay Ash resided at the intersection of leadership and entrepreneurship and, in so doing, was an influencer. Her primary rhetorical approach to influencing was idealism. Interwoven in her writings, she also exhibited both pragmatism and realism. She knew that she had to start the business to have the future she desired and that she needed to train her team appropriately for success to be forthcoming. The motivation in Mary Kay Ash’s rhetoric was that of influencing people so they would be the best that they could be.Research limitations/implicationsQualitative research brings with it an array of inevitable research problems. Pentadic analysis cannot be judged by the basic objective standards of reliability and validity because objective reality does not exist in personal interpretation. That is, one person as a critic cannot be impartial because the interpretation is only one personal way of viewing the data and another critic might view the same pentads and come up with different ratios. With this subjectivity in mind, however, the data used in the pentadic analysis were also analyzed via LIWC and IBM Watson Emotion Analysis to see where analyses might converge or diverge.Practical implicationsThe findings from this research denote clearly that Mary Kay Ash was a forerunner of the modern day influencer. As a primogenitor of the influencer marketing phenomenon, Mary Kay Ash’s entrepreneurial legacy is expected to continue through generations of followers. This finding speaks to the importance of today’s entrepreneurs using the spoken and written word to influence others and create a lasting organizational legacy.Originality/valueCountless scholars have used pentadic analysis, with a variety of artifacts, to examine the motives behind the rhetoric. However, rhetoric as a means of persuasion and influence has received little attention within the context of the written works by management gurus (Jones et al., 2009), and, aside from the exploration by Berglund and Wigren (2012), the narrative of entrepreneurial influence has not benefitted from close examination.

Medical student perceptions of reflective practice in the undergraduate curriculum.

Introduction: Reflective practice (RP) forms a core component of medical professionalism but, despite its benefits, it remains largely undervalued among medical students. The aim of this study was to explore medical students' attitudes and barriers to engagement with RP in the undergraduate programme at a UK based medical school. Methods: This was a qualitative study based on the methodology of phenomenology. All penultimate year medical students at University College London Medical School (n=361) were approached for this study and altogether thirteen participants were recruited, with data collected through two focus group discussions. Thematic analysis was used to generate the coding framework. Results: Five key themes emerged around student attitudes to RP, which were grouped into three domains: 'value of RP', 'barriers to engagement', and 'strategies for enabling RP'. 'Value of RP' centred on the themes of humanising medicine and developing empathy, developing professionalism and RP as a tool for sense-making. 'Barriers to engagement' centred on the purpose and tokenism of RP and in the third domain, 'strategies for enabling RP', the theme of student agency in RP emerged strongly. Conclusion: Overall, the value of RP was not fully appreciated until students began their clinical placements. Potential strategies identified by participants for optimising engagement included student co-design and positioning RP within a broader pastoral role early in the undergraduate curriculum.

Are Micro-credentials the Netflix of the tertiary education industry? And how do we ensure they are ‘bingeworthy’?

When Netflix revealed its trailblazing subscription video streaming service, it was both a game changer and disruptor in the digital entertainment industry. Are micro-credentials set to do the same? Certainly, micro-credentials are both disrupting and paving the way to a new tertiary & professional education landscape. Like Netflix, Micro-credentials offer flexibility, can be ‘on-demand’ and can represent a range of topics or themes that can be personalised to individual choices and needs. However, in a learning context, there is much more to ensuring they are ‘bingeworthy’ for both learners and industries. By ‘bingeworthy’, we mean engaging and meaningful enough to motivate the learner to want to complete more and for industry to be convinced of their value. With the rush toward micro-credentials, there is ambiguity about what it takes to make these verifiable learning achievements high value to institutions, learners and employers. Ensuring a strong value proposition for all stakeholders and a great experience are critical in determining whether they will be ‘bingeworthy’ and worthy of investment. Our team uses a combination of Design Thinking (Liedtka & Ogilvies, 2011; Liedtka, 2018) and ‘Participatory Co-Design’ (PCD) (Kristiansen & Bloch-Poulsen, 2013), to conceptualise, design, pilot, learn and iterate micro-credentials. Design thinking offers a systematic way of problem solving and solution-finding that is people-centred and iterative and uses a variety of ethnographic research techniques as well as other sense-making tools (Liedtka, 2018). The ‘intellectual roots’ of design theory are steeped in a design process that is learning-focused and hypothesis-driven (Schon, 1982). Defining attributes include ‘problem centredness, nonlinearity, optionality and the presence of uncertainty and ambiguity’ (Liedtka, 2015, p.926). The concept ‘Participatory Co-Design’ is derived from Sociocultural Theory and represents a theoretical commitment to learning from, and designing for, local contexts’ (Gomez, Kya and Mancevice, 2018, p.403). For us, it offers a powerful pathway to productive partnerships that combine educational and industry expertise and insights to assess the current state, reimagine the future state and find solutions that work and are meaningful for all stakeholders. This is key to the stakeholder value chain and fundamental in designing the micro-credential experience. Our poster follows our process for getting started with micro-credentials and what comprises micro-credential experiences that are ‘bingeworthy’.

Medical student perceptions of reflective practice in the undergraduate curriculum

Introduction: Reflective practice (RP) forms a core component of medical professionalism but, despite its benefits, it remains largely undervalued among medical students. The aim of this study was to explore medical students’ attitudes and barriers to engagement with RP in the undergraduate programme at a UK based medical school. Methods: This was a qualitative study based on the methodology of phenomenology. All penultimate year medical students at University College London Medical School (n=361) were approached for this study and altogether thirteen participants were recruited, with data collected through two focus group discussions. Thematic analysis was used to generate the coding framework. Results: Five key themes emerged around student attitudes to RP, which were grouped into three domains: ‘value of RP’, ‘barriers to engagement’, and ‘strategies for enabling RP’. ‘Value of RP’ centred on the themes of humanising medicine and developing empathy, developing professionalism and RP as a tool for sense-making. ‘Barriers to engagement’ centred on the purpose and tokenism of RP and in the third domain, ‘strategies for enabling RP’, the theme of student agency in RP emerged strongly. Conclusion: Overall, the value of RP was not fully appreciated until students began their clinical placements. Potential strategies identified by participants for optimising engagement included student co-design and positioning RP within a broader pastoral role early in the undergraduate curriculum.

Medical student perceptions of reflective practice in the undergraduate curriculum

Introduction: Reflective practice (RP) forms a core component of medical professionalism but, despite its benefits, it remains largely undervalued among medical students. The aim of this study was to explore medical students’ attitudes and barriers to engagement with RP in the undergraduate programme at a UK based medical school. Methods: This was a qualitative study based on the methodology of phenomenology. All penultimate year medical students at University College London Medical School (n=361) were approached for this study and altogether thirteen participants were recruited, with data collected through two focus group discussions. Thematic analysis was used to generate the coding framework. Results: Five key themes emerged around student attitudes to RP, which were grouped into three domains: ‘value of RP’, ‘barriers to engagement’, and ‘strategies for enabling RP’. ‘Value of RP’ centred on the themes of humanising medicine and developing empathy, developing professionalism and RP as a tool for sense-making. ‘Barriers to engagement’ centred on the purpose and tokenism of RP and in the third domain, ‘strategies for enabling RP’, the theme of student agency in RP emerged strongly. Conclusion: Overall, the value of RP was not fully appreciated until students began their clinical placements. Potential strategies identified by participants for optimising engagement included student co-design and positioning RP within a broader pastoral role early in the undergraduate curriculum.

From ambiguity to action: integrating collective sensemaking and rational decision making in management pedagogy and practice

PurposeManagers are increasingly presented with complex, ambiguous decision problems that affect multiple stakeholder groups. Such problems cannot be tackled solely by classical approaches that prescribe rational methods to weigh evidence and select an optimal course of action. Yet most courses on decision making still focus on these methods. This paper draws attention to the complementary nature of rational decision making and sensemaking techniques in management decision making, and describes a practical pedagogy that demonstrates how the two can be integrated into management curricula.Design/methodology/approachBased on an in-depth review of relevant research, the authors propose a conceptual model that highlights the complementary nature of rational and sensemaking methods for making decisions relating to complex and ambiguous problems. They then describe a course on decision making as an illustration of how the model can inform decision making pedagogy.FindingsDecision makers need to think of their decision problems in terms of two distinct types of uncertainty: those for which uncertainty can be quantified and those for which it cannot. When faced with the latter, decisions are best made by working with relevant stakeholders to collectively frame the problem using practical sensemaking tools prior to applying rational decision making techniques to address it. Decision making under ambiguity is an iterative, social process requiring a combination of rational decision making methods and sensemaking techniques.Practical implicationsThe paper seeks to increase awareness about the complementary nature of sensemaking and rational decision making. It emphasizes the need to integrate the two in management curricula and provides details on how this can be done via an example of a course implemented at an Australian Business School. The techniques described will also be of interest to practitioners.Originality/valueThe paper describes a practical pedagogy that blends rational decision making and collective sensemaking techniques in a way that fosters managers’ decision making skills in contexts characterized by ambiguity.

Seven Steps to Strategic SDG Sensemaking for Cities

This practitioner paper is based on the need to make sense of UN Agenda 2030 and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at the city level and in an urban context. We examine the need to explain how to utilise the SDGs in strategic, tactical and operative urban development. We find that there are knowledge and practise gaps in how to localise SDGs in the urban context. This need and the lack of existing tools has led to the development of a strategic sensemaking process, which has been tested and developed with municipal and other practitioners, locally and globally. The paper presents findings from this process of development and from implementation pilots, including an SDG Sensemaking Tool (SST), a step by step iterative procedure to address these gaps. The main focus of this paper is the SDG Sensemaking process, which relies on analysing SDGs in relation to any given phenomena or project within or outside a city. The first results in this work-in-progress show that it contributes to an understanding on the complexity of how SDGs are related to the analysed phenomena, and catalyses the SDG localisation process, which helps make sense of how to navigate and measure progress in such complex environments. More research and applications are, however, needed, so as to further understand how urban governance can meet holistic, sustainable-development needs. Future work will, firstly, comprise further integrating SDGs into city-level strategies with a focus on the local, regional, national, and global impact on sustainable development and the actualisation of SDGs, and secondly, on further developing SST so that it can serve these purposes.

SightBi: Exploring Cross-View Data Relationships with Biclusters.

Multiple-view visualization (MV) has been heavily used in visual analysis tools for sensemaking of data in various domains (e.g., bioinformatics, cybersecurity and text analytics). One common task of visual analysis with multiple views is to relate data across different views. For example, to identify threats, an intelligence analyst needs to link people from a social network graph with locations on a crime-map, and then search for and read relevant documents. Currently, exploring cross-view data relationships heavily relies on view-coordination techniques (e.g., brushing and linking), which may require significant user effort on many trial-and-error attempts, such as repetitiously selecting elements in one view, and then observing and following elements highlighted in other views. To address this, we present SightBi, a visual analytics approach for supporting cross-view data relationship explorations. We discuss the design rationale of SightBi in detail, with identified user tasks regarding the use of cross-view data relationships. SightBi formalizes cross-view data relationships as biclusters, computes them from a dataset, and uses a bi-context design that highlights creating stand-alone relationship-views. This helps preserve existing views and offers an overview of cross-view data relationships to guide user exploration. Moreover, SightBi allows users to interactively manage the layout of multiple views by using newly created relationship-views. With a usage scenario, we demonstrate the usefulness of SightBi for sensemaking of cross-view data relationships.

The scheme of delegation as a sensemaking framework in multi-academy trusts in England: Useful tool or constraint?

Changes to the structure of English education because of decentralisation policy, particularly since 2010, have resulted in the creation of large groupings of schools – multi-academy trusts, organisations with multi-level governance structures, set out in schemes of delegation. Although the government has demanded absolute clarity on the role and remit of each part of the structure and the relationship and reporting between them, recent research suggests that there is little clarity or consistency in the role and function of board structures, with members often confused about their roles. This study draws on data from a funded project to examine: What level of consistency there is in multi-academy trust schemes of delegation, and what evidence is there that schemes of delegation align with sensemaking models of board members? The article concludes with a discussion on what the findings imply for use of schemes of delegation as useful tools for board member sensemaking in multi-academy trusts; revealing that although they can be useful tools for sensemaking, their usage varies a great deal between boards and board members.