In 1999, I was a silly young consultant who had no business flying halfway across the world to a diamond mine in the East Kimberley region of Western Australia to help make sense of their environmental risks. I had barely begun to make sense of myself.

On that occasion, I blundered across a songline and sacred site with no respect and even less awareness. Whatever actually happened, it catalysed a personal crisis that veered way beyond my control. Two weeks later, I returned to South Africa, home of the global diamond monopoly, sick and shaking. I was lucky enough to be mentored by people who knew how indigenous Africans have worked with human-nature relations for millennia. Eventually I began to understand, though it took me another 20 years to fit things together. I had a lot to unlearn.

Sustainability strategy must address our intersect with society and nature.  The epitome of dynamic, new sticky issues emerge every week as this intersect grows to constrain and influence business operations. The spreadsheets and methods we use to understand this intersect are vastly different to those that evolved with us over millennia. Our ability to make sense of the world evolved before science had  succumbed to its present splits and assumptions of objectivity that determine what’s real. Our encounters with nature and communities – both human and more-than-human  (to use geo-philosopher David Abram’s words) – found wonder and wildness, danger and opportunity in equal measure. That hasn’t changed, though our response has.

So, when we find ourselves at the blunt end of a Zoom session voting on the relative importance of 12 (that’s what Mentimeter stretches to) ‘material matters’, our animate intelligence senses something amiss. Whether we notice or not is another question. What we do with it is yet another.

Sense-making pervades our work as sustainability practitioners. We call it materiality analysis in deference to investor jargon for disclosure on risks that might derail their investment. Reflecting backwards on what was material over a given reporting period is tricky enough; reflecting forwards – to inform strategy at our ESG intersect – is far more difficult. I prefer the word sense-making.

When we use sense-making to inform strategy, we seek a handle on what matters, why it matters, how much it matters and in what direction its matteriness may be moving. (To coin a term from my six-year-old’s current interest in Winnie the Pooh.) Whether we are six or older, this is quite a lot to juggle. But especially so when we are older because most of us have learnt to think in categories: one list of things that matter; another for those that don’t. Of course, Covid-19 just blew our neat categories away. We’ve realised that it’s not about the things on our lists: what really matters is the relationships between the things – on our lists or not. Which takes us to an entirely different space.

I was taught a particular approach to sense-making (although it wasn’t called that) when I began my training as a diviner of the Southern African Tswana-Shangaan Majoye lineage in 2002. Learning to divine – or ‘throw the bones’ – is part of the indigenous cure for the sickness I arrived home with from Argyle Diamond Mine. Learning the hakata was arduous and frankly unpleasant as my teacher sliced uncompromisingly through my disposition to analytics of the ‘best practice’ variety. Weeks of sweat and nausea would give way to little epiphanies as patterns started to appear in the tumble of bones on my mat.  A few days of joy would follow, and then the sweaty cycle would begin again. Graduating as a diviner did not mean I had to abandon reason; it required me to reason in a different way.

I value my education from both the University of Cape Town and Yale School of Environment, but it came with a cognitive tax that I could not foresee. I studied at a time when only the quantum physicists had encountered directly the limits of matter and whether we were able to know it in the first place. They decided that we couldn’t, which led to a lot of innovation. For better and for worse. Tyson Yunkaporta shares this insight and much more in his inspiring book, Sand Talk.

As we recognise the entangled and unpredictable nature of sustainability issues, we’ve reached the limits of expert consultants and best practice guidance that rely on what worked before. Making sense of things at the requisite level of granularity requires another way of seeing – what my mentor Niall Campbell calls ‘tracking’; what Yunkaporta refers to as ‘pattern-mind’. Either way, we’re well beyond the comfort zone of most boardrooms and business teams.

An interim solution is to find a materiality process that engages with complexity at least better than the last one. Thanks to Covid, these are emerging thick and fast from consultancies, though you can be sure they’re not all as complexity-fit as they claim. Incite’s VILROS materiality framework is based on an iterative process of sense-making and sense-checking. We’ve always avoided lists and voting, and we’re finding ways to apply it in a more complexity-fit way. But it’s still early days.

I am excited about working with Sonja Blignaut, founder of More Beyond, to see how applied complexity tools could feed more insight into this process. SenseMaker’s digital platform can gather and analyse, at scale, a diverse range of real experiences and perceptions from a company’s intersect with society and nature. The perceptual landscapes generated by SenseMaker’s digital analytics are reminiscent of the bones, but the outputs are more decision-useful for executives.

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Banner image overlays a photo of me as a student in Botswana in 2002 (original: Marilyn McDowell) and some of my ‘bones’ (traditional divination tool).