As 2024 draws to a close, we’re foraging for the right note to end things on. What feels like an apt response to such a tumultuous year? What are the lessons we’ve learned, and how can we begin to enact them? These are difficult questions to unknot, but one thread that seems to have rippled through the fabric of the year is the importance of critical thinking, especially in relation to planning ahead for 2025. 

In recent conversations about the future of retail (and countless other industries), we’ve noticed a pattern quite familiar in foresight work. While we’ve seen some fascinating explorations, the broader trends, signals, and ideas that emerge often feel … flat. Predictable. Despite all the prompt engineering, it’s always the same conversation: immersive digital experience meets physical space, with maybe a dash of AI-driven convenience.

But where is the surprise? Where is the friction that sparks cultural imagination, invention, and innovation? What about the tiny edge cases and the unexpected whispers?

It’s tempting to want to gather, smooth, and reflect what’s already being said, and while this can be useful and generative in its own way, at times we might find ourselves stuck in a loop, recycling familiar patterns instead of breaking new ground. 

This made us reflect on something essential to all futures work: the power of critical sensemaking.

What is sensemaking?

For Karl Weick, the prominent organisational theorist and emeritus professor at the University of Michigan who coined the term, sensemaking is a creative and interpretive process of assigning significance to unforeseen circumstances. It’s a retrospective practice of making something “sensible” in ways that aren’t purely cognitive. ‘The more ready you are to deal with reality,’ he’s noted, ‘the more you can acknowledge its complexity.’

Sensemaking is a form of meaning-making in ambiguous situations—both the large-scale uncertainties and the everyday precarities. It’s an ‘unending dialogue between partly opaque action outcomes and deliberate probing’; a tool for understanding how different meanings, triggered by uncertainty, are formed from the same event.

Sensemaking speaks to our capacity to navigate interruptions, to reorganise after a break in routine. Weick observes that disruptions, both mundane and catastrophic, ask individuals to make sense of both ‘what is occurring now, and to consider what should be done next’. From this lens, sensemaking is always comparative: a process of driving present actions based on information gleaned from past unfoldings.

What makes sensemaking critical?

Critical sensemaking is not just about identifying trends or following the mainstream narrative; it’s about navigating complexity, exploring the grey areas, and drawing connections between seemingly unconnected ideas. It’s about spotting weak signals and engaging with the friction that exists on the edges—because that’s where the real possibility for change lies.

Critical sensemaking serving as a useful lens to interrogate how individual actions interact with broader social issues. It’s about moving from the question “what” to “why”. Critical sensemaking isn’t just a skill; it’s a way of engaging with the world that allows us to imagine futures that are rich, complex, and full of potential.

Reports about the future can tend toward the prescriptive, but if we’ve learned anything from our fifteen years in the field, it’s that trends aren’t always the best indicators for how events will unfold. Futures evolve by way of unexpected twists and turns, and a valuable tool to navigate through the thicket is our capacity for critical understanding, as well as our imagination.

Critical sensemaking in practice

At Superflux, this is what excites us. We don’t just look for the key trends or the obvious outliers. We embrace the messiness, the uncertainty, and the ambiguity, because we know that’s where new futures begin to take shape.

Joan Didion famously wrote that ‘we tell ourselves stories in order to live.’ What’s less often quoted is the second half of what she penned: ‘We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers’—or futurists, thinkers, human beings—‘by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.’

When we embrace critical sensemaking, we’re contending with the discomfort of knowing that the stories we tell ourselves aren’t always linear. We’re pushing ourselves beyond the familiar, inviting exploration at the edges of possibility. It’s not always easy. This work requires us to hold multiple, often contradictory ideas in tension. It invites us to question our own assumptions and biases. But this is where true innovation thrives.

Critical sensemaking isn’t about having all the answers, but about asking better questions. It’s about developing the mental agility to connect dots that aren’t obviously related. It’s about sitting with uncertainty and allowing it to reveal new pathways forward. It’s a cartography of the future, a way of mapping what we don’t entirely know and can’t always prepare for.

Going behind the blueprints

In his seminal paper on sensemaking and enactment, Weick considers the blind spots that emerge under conditions of secrecy in chemical plants:

‘When people make a public commitment that an operating gauge is inoperative, the last thing they will consider during a crisis is that the gauge is operating. Had they not made the commitment, the blind spot would not be so persistent.’

– Karl Weick, ‘Enacted Sensemaking in Crisis Situations’, Journal of Management Studies 25.4 (July 1988)

What happens when we go behind the blueprints, when we start to question and critique the things we’ve been conditioned to accept as immovable truths?

We need to adopt a collective stance of epistemic humility if we’re going to meet the demands of both our turbulent present and emergent futures. We need to develop a healthy distaste for absolutism and a zest for alternative viewpoints that may or may not contradict what we hold to be true, to lean into the tacit understanding that the only certainty is that nothing can be known—or predicted—for certain, and to accept that reality is often stranger than fiction.

Critical sensemaking asks us to slacken our hold on the myth of unchangeability, to question even the things that seem to underpin our entire way of experiencing the world, and to comprehend just how permeable the boundaries are between stability and fluctuation.

With 2025 on the horizon, we invite our readers to tread lightly with the prediction decks that are bound to be hitting your inboxes soon. Attempting to shape our collective futures is to grapple with the fact that futures are elastic, sticky, and indeterminate. Being able to make sense of seemingly chaotic information, to spot patterns and opportunities where others see only the daily clamour, can set us apart.

We are thrilled to share that our practice and projects were recently featured on BBC Radio 4! Sangita Myska and Eve Streeter from BBC Radio 4 visited the Studio to interview our Co-founder and Director Anab Jain about the emotive impact of our climate-related projects for their series Positive Thinking. You can listen to the full episode here.

We are happy to share that our work ‘Our Friends Electric’ commissioned by Mozilla Foundation has been acquired by the European Patent Office (EPO) for their Art Collection.

 Whilst researching Better Care Systems for a project we are currently working on with Doteveryone, I came across the work of economist and feminist Nancy Folbre. Nancy has worked extensively in the space of “caring labour” and her work articulates this immeasurable labour, often done by women, and how difficult it is to imagine alternative economic visions for such forms of labour. In one of her essays, Nancy acknowledges that whilst ‘economists are kind of engineers of the utopian, our job is to take care of the nuts and bolts of that alternative economic system; I think we depend on artists and writers to help us see where we want to go.” Something akin to this sentiment from Nancy was a leitmotif throughout much of Milica Begovic, Joost Beunderman, Indy Johar’s thinking on the need for more experimentation if we are to reimagine governance adequate for 21st century.

I encounter this desire for ‘imaginative’, ‘creative’, ‘artistic’ future visions from various different places — from CEOs, scientists, economists, technologists, governments, policy makers and so on. Many are searching for those beacons-of-hope, beacons to guide us towards “better futures”. There is a hunger for alternative visions, ideas, experiments. Radical imaginings that grasp the interconnected nature of complex systems; help navigate uncertainty; and shake up present day dogmatism. We welcome this desire with open arms.

Photograph from our situated simulation ‘Stark Choices’ where we transported people, viscerally and experientially, into two possible futures of work.

But the question is, whether desire is enough? Is there enough courage and commitment from those with decision-making power to actually follow through on that desire? While the appetite for innovative ideas abounds, there is less gumption when it comes to following alternative trajectories. This is where it gets tricky. So many visionary initiatives launched with the desire to be “radical”, “experimental” and “imaginative” end up incubating programs that seek to accelerate growth. Now, I have no problem with the intention behind such programs, but I have observed that as they are mapped and built, their metrics of success move further and further away from the intent with which they were created. Some initiatives end up as unrealised strategy documents, that then get evaluated on quarterly or annual ROI metrics. Others die when the individuals who drive experimentation and critical thinking leave the organisation. In worst case scenarios this happens.

Where there is the capacity (cognitive, intellectual and emotional) to forfeit fear for uncertainty, to let go the clutches of deeply ingrained structures, and give way to the unknown, the results have been astonishing. In his book ‘Being Mortal’ Atul Gwande writes about this incredible young doctor, Bill Thomas, who was put in charge of a care home. Bill was so taken aback by the despair he sensed there, that acting on little more than instinct, he decided to literally put some life into the nursing home. He spent hours, days, and weeks convincing management, regulatory and medical authorities. He even sourced an “innovation grant” to carry out his plan. This plan was to welcome two dogs, four cats, one hundred parakeets and an abundance of bona fide living plants (rather than miserable fake ones) into the care home — all in one day.

And so, that’s what happened, and yes, there was total pandemonium. But then, over the course of three months, the results were astonishing. Medical costs plummeted. Patients reported feeling much healthier. In many cases, looking after the animals, birds and plants literally saved lives, and most importantly, it gave the residents a raison d’être. What Dr. Thomas managed to pursue despite all odds, was an alternative, radical vision. He followed through on something that felt totally impossible. What this proves is that it takes instinct, guts, imagination, and commitment to challenge the status quo and then, critically, follow that through with integrity. But the outcome can be spectacular.

I would like to emphasise that we don’t need 100 parakeets to be let loose inside corridors of powers in order to commit to alternate, as-yet-unwritten futures (although the image of hundreds of birds flying loose inside Westminster is difficult to shake off). Smaller scale projects and experiments, when nurtured over time, can effectively “take you there”; to directly experience alternative perspectives without being unencumbered by the inertia of habit, custom, law, or prejudice.

Photographs from our immersive installation ‘Mitigation of Shock’ where we endeavours to design responses to near future first world disasters, by prototyping alternatives today. 

How do we unwaveringly commit to this kind of flexible, pluralistic mentality, though? How do we approach such work long term, without falling into THE TRAP? Here I’ll borrow from Nora Bateson to define one key trap: “Short-term reward, long-term damage: greed over curiosity.” Designing alternative lexicons and resisting the urge to seamlessly embed such work inside “strategy” and “roadmaps” is key to such work. Because imaginative experiments don’t — and shouldn’t — immediately align with existing structures (be they policies, products, services, financial models). Their very intention is to demonstrate alternates.

Realistically, it is best to think of this as PHASE CHANGE. A shiny new future won’t immediately materialise merely because alternatives are being considered. Our work with organisations is about garnering a long term commitment to the constant consideration, imagining and testing of plural possibilities. Awareness of challenges isn’t enough. Responsive action, and an openness to constant change is essential, too.

In the next post, we will write more on what can help us practice such phase change and plurality.

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Huge thanks to my colleagues; Danielle Knight for her insights and ninja editing, and Jon Ardern for continually pushing our thinking at the Studio.