The book being analyzed is called Sensemaking:The Power of the Humanities in the Age of the Algorithm by Christian Madsbjerg. Sensemaking examines how humans have become submissive to algorithms. And as a result, we have stopped thinking since machines do it for us. The book argues that our fixation with data often hides deficiencies, and the risks for humankind are becoming enormous. Blind devotion to numbers threatens our businesses, our educations, our governments, and our life savings. Too many companies have lost touch with the humanity of their customers, while minimizing the amount of workers with liberal arts-based skills. Contrary to popular thinking, Sensemaking shows how many of today's biggest success stories emerge from deep engagement with culture, language, and history. And this method is called sensemaking.
Christian Madsbjerg is a well known author and founder of ReD Associates. ReD is a strategy consulting company based in the human sciences and employs anthropologists, sociologists, art historians, and philosophers. Christian Madsbjerg has two objectives while creating his work thus far. The first objective is a call for a return in educating business leaders in the fields of humanities and social sciences in order to combat the rise of algorithmic intelligence- which the author argues, lacks the ability to produce analysis that can understand perspective and meaning. The second objective was to offer phenomenology as the ideal study to analyze the context of business situations as phenomena, which can then provide greater insights leading to solutions.
Christian Madsbjerg wrote “sensemaking”, which he defined as a “wisdom grounded in the humanities” or “the exact opposite of algorithmic thinking” (p. 6). The book is structured to present the five principles that make up sensemaking: culture – not individuals; thick data – not just thin data; the savannah – not the zoo; creativity – not manufacturing, and; the North Star – not the GPS. The first principle argues that focusing on individual behavior de-contextualizes human action since such action can only be analyzed through a larger cultural context, or as the author states, “[n]othing exists in an individual vacuum” (p. 11). The second principle discusses “thick data,” by which the author is referring to looking beyond a phenomenon (,algorithmic empirical data collected–or“thin data stripped of all its organic life” (p. 16) and, instead, focus on why it’s happening through a holistic synthesis of the data. The third principle calls for analysis of true social contexts that cannot be found in abstract numbers. The fourth principle emphasizes creative thinking or abductive reasoning, which the author defines as “non-linear problem solving” (p. 19) over traditional approaches of inductive or deductive reasoning. The last principle argues against reliance on the acquisition of information without being able to understand how it was collected and without acquiring the ability to interpret “new and unfamiliar contexts” (p. 22). The author concludes by stating that these five principles can be operationalized by apply phenomenology as a tool which he believes is context-sensitive. He argues that studying human experiences within a cultural context creates an “analytical empathy” (p. 116) that better helps to explain the complexities of the world.
It is important to note that the author’s work does not regret technological advances in algorithmic intelligence towards a technological future. It is an important work because of its advocacy of knowledge in the humanities being acquired by business leaders. Indeed, a similar argument can be made for everyone. This work argues that without a philosophical framework and a meaningful approach to analyzing the world, we are at a loss to understand and solve complex problems in the business world and beyond.
Such an advocacy is welcomed and missed in recent works by Martin Ford (2015), and Ryan Avent (2016), to give just two examples, that examined the challenges of a technological future only to advocate redistribution of wealth and guaranteed income schemes. Madsbjerg succeeds where they failed. He declares that algorithmic intelligence, whether from a computer or a future robot, will never be able to replicate the thinking of humans. The author implies that the soul of a human being, in the non-supernatural sense, constitutes the unique life experiences, emotion, knowledge, and contemplation that, in turn, generates innovation and creativity.
However, If the author had focused solely on this message, this book would have been laudable, and somewhat short. However, Madsbjerg then reached into social sciences and made an unfortunate selection in the methodology to be used for business analyses. This is where the book became problematic to the point of unintended self-sabotage. The author argues that individuals should always be viewed as “situated in a context” and, therefore, human behavior cannot be understood without understanding the context itself . To accomplish this, he chose phenomenology as the methodological tool to accomplish analysis. This presents several problems. Firstly, phenomenology, lacked a clear definition in the book. Phenomenology views subject matter as free-willed and, that validation is useless for analysis. More examples of phenomenology in the book, still suffer from weak foundations, and these weak foundations, are responsible for weak analysis and uncertainty in the actual meaning of the concept and its use.
Phenomenology argues that contemplation of human experience is primary for understanding what truly matters is how things are seen. This is problematic in that humans lack a detailed representation of any given scene, which contradicts what the Christian has been arguing in the book. Also, the author then praises Martin Heidegger as our future philosopher king. Heidegger is mentioned more than a dozen times in the book, and it is from Heidegger’s writings, that the author derives his version of phenomenology. A major problem with this choice is that Heidegger was a devoted Nazi, known to have delivered lectures about his beliefs as a nazi. This is important because, Christian would argue that it is possible to separate a man’s politics from his philosophy or, specifically, that Heidegger’s philosophical worldview was not in regard to phenomenology. The problem is that politics is indeed a branch of philosophy and one heavily depend on three other branches. Heidegger’s philosophical sense of life, including his emphasis on the importance of the Germanic community, was based to a great extent on racism. Heidegger’s version of phenomenological is very flawed and why phenomenological research methods have been limited to odd philosophical journals. The link that the author did not keep in mind was not to suggest that phenomenology is a Nazi construct. Their was a major weakness in Heidegger’s overall philosophical worldview and evidently contradicts multiple points the Christian made in the book.
A lot of reviewers agree that, Heidegger’s ideology of phenomenology is very limited and have almost no value in academia. A better choice the author could have chosen as a methodological orientation would have been dialectics. Dialectic analysis, is a methodological concept that goes beyond ideology. Dialectics should have been more focused on in the book, because it relates to the specific factors mentioned. On a final note, the author illustrated the five principles of sensemaking by using case studies and anecdotes. He profiled George Soros for his mastery at being able to “simultaneously synthesize inputs of inconceivable complexity” (p. 80) as an example of utilizing “thick data” over “thin data.” This anecdote went on for nearly three pages where the author informs readers that Soros “trained himself to rigorously stay open to all types of knowing” (p. 83). This is contradicting because Soros was convicted in 2002 of insider trading regarding the takeover of a French bank. In relation, Soros (of Jewish descent) collaborated with Nazis in helping them confiscate property from Jews that Soros identified. The choices of Heidegger for philosopher king and Soros as a virtuoso of business were very contradicting to the points and principles Christian was arguing in favor of. They diminished the seriousness needed for the author’s worthy points, which leads readers to ignore his call for the return of a robust educational background in the humanities and social sciences for future business leaders.
Sensemaking means making sense of the world in the old-fashioned way, the way we did before algorithms. At one point Madsbjerg demolishes much of his principles. Madsbjerg is against big data and the misuse of science, but he’s also guilty of the misuse of science. Not content with misappropriating science, he does the same with poetry. A chapter on creativity kicks off with Prufrock and The Waste Land, which are expressive of a world, in which “ a world without any divine glow of meaning surrounding human action” (Elliot). But the poems were statements about his developing personal existential crisis and, in the case of his breakdown. As the book goes on, and the slogans retreat before some case studies, things perk up little. His mentions of techniques for exploiting moods that make a killing convincing. Nevertheless, it’s a strange plank of Madsbjerg’s supposed defence of everything human against machine learning to cite as evidence the techniques that broke the Bank of England.