Sensemaking Sessions: How Digital Marketing Stops Playing Insight Circles

Digital teams learned to collect more signals than they can digest. Every week—new reports, retros, "insights" from chats, memos from contractors. All this gets dumped into Notion, where it dies. People go in circles, repeating the same hypotheses. To break out of this, we run sensemaking sessions.

Sensemaking is a process where a team makes sense of ambiguous information and turns it into actions. In marketing, this means: take scattered metrics, user feedback, trends, constraints, and assemble a meaning map. No esoterics, just logic.

What a Session Looks Like

1. Preparation — gather the team: marketing, product, analytics, support. Assign a facilitator.
2. Artifact collection — export metrics, take call recordings, customer support, traffic reports.
3. Labels and clusters — on a virtual board, lay out signals: segment behavior, barriers, insights.
4. Meaning mapping — connect where causes, consequences, triggers are. Form theses.
5. Hypotheses and decisions — for each "problem → trigger → hypothesis" link, assign an owner, deadline, success criteria.
6. Documentation — transfer everything to a solution: table, Confluence, Notion. This isn't a pretty protocol, but a project plan.

In the end, a map appears where priorities are visible. For example: segment "new users"—high churn due to complex onboarding. Hypothesis: need a simplified product version + onboarding message series. Actions: connect AI for message personalization, redesign UX, set up CRM validation.

Why This Works

Sensemaking is attention management. We're not trying to come up with a "creative idea," we're creating a coordinate system. When the map is ready, decisions are made faster. We save a week of discussions because we already know where the pain is, who feels it, and what to do about it.

Any "insight circles" are profanation. If you just share opinions, nothing changes. Sensemaking returns teams to reality: here are real numbers, here's behavior, here's what we'll do.

Facilitation Rules

To prevent the session from turning into a sprint of shouting:

• Clear timing — each section is time-limited. Want to speak—prepare.
• Veto right — if there's no data, say "we don't know" and record an observation, not a conclusion.
• AI as assistant — use models to aggregate feedback, but people make final conclusions.
• Documents at start — participants receive prepared artifacts in advance. The session isn't a place for first encounter with numbers.

How This Connects to Everything Else

Sensemaking is an injector for further processes. After the session, we pass hypotheses to the AI team so they assemble modules and orchestrate marketing. We notify product: what UX changes are needed, where's the bottleneck. We set up communications: launch an email series with a new tone.

Teams that skip sensemaking usually live in chaos: everyone pulls in their direction, hypotheses aren't synchronized, budgets flow into sand.

The future belongs to teams that can turn data into decisions, not just collect metrics. Sensemaking sessions are how you build that capability.