My search for interesting and enjoyable blogs and newsletters led me here . The author, Scott Galloway, manages to stretch my thinking and bring a smile to my face whenever I read him. One of the things about him I enjoy are his attempts to create simple formulae to represent complex social issues. In this case the value of going to college (he is American) post Covid-19. This made me think about how to represent the need I’m seeing to make sense (together) of the Caronavirus crisis. Without a common perspective ( context ) we act from a different understanding and that means that we fail to address things in a consistent way; perhaps a fatal mistake when it comes to pandemics or indeed climate change or inequality. We close off the possibility of being wrong and dig in deeper to entrench ourselves in our beliefs. I do wonder whether there was a point in the Coronavirus crisis when we (in the UK and elsewhere) had time to act and prepare but were hampered by a prejudice that this was a virus that could only be caught be Chinese people and perhaps Italians? If this is the case I wonder what would have shaken us out of our error. An antidote to the echo-chamber of our own opinions is the concept of Dialogue, first developed by David Bohm (a theoretical physicist and therefore a person I immediately like (yes, I know this is another prejudice)). He makes the distinction between ‘discussion’, in which arguments are broken down into smaller elements and ‘dialogue,’ which he defines as the flow and creation of meaning. Dialogue sounds simple but is really hard. Dialogue sounds impotent but is really powerful. It is hard because we are mostly so attached to being right i.e. our own views, that the mere threat of listening to different views is often enough to shut us down and cause us to wait until there is an opportunity to repeat our own views again. Bohm talked about the need to ‘suspend judgement’. It is powerful because shared meaning can lead to shared action which can lead to bigger results (for example, the removal of plastic carrier bags from our shops). A willingness to listen has to be accompanied by a willingness to speak up; to speak up even in circumstances when you feel you are in the minority (or alone) or where we doubt our own legitimacy or where the difference in power between ourselves and others is large. In organisational life the notion of Psychological Safety entails a belief that speaking up is not only desirable it is absolutely essential if we are to tackle the complexity which we are surrounded by. Without a multitude of different voices we lack the collective intelligence, the alternative perspectives, the diversity of thinking which might just be ‘the difference that makes the difference’ ( Bateson ). The concept, which originated from research in hospitals, showed that medical mistakes were reduced considerably by ensuring it was OK for anyone on the medical team to say ‘this is not OK’. My formula for collective sense-making therefore contains these two elements of Dialogue and Psychological Safety. There is a third element which undermines the ability to do any of this effectively. An element that encourages us to stick with our own truths, to ignore the perspectives of others, to become dogmatic in the furtherance of our own beliefs. I believe this distortional element to be incentives. I mean incentives in the broadest sense, they need not be financial; they are the things that encourage us to adopt a particular position and pursue it resolutely. Some examples are the incentives of social belonging, identity, religion, the incentive of not disagreeing with the boss and in the case of politicians the incentive of votes at the next election. So here it is, my equation for sense-making, a critical skill when we are trying to navigate the unknown in so much of our professional and personal lives: SENSE-MAKING = (DIALOGUE + PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY) / INCENTIVES