Frame
Frame the work
What change are we trying to make—and what do we need to understand first?
Teams study the context and clarify the desired change. Inquiry gives the question its shape over time.
Kent State Regional Campuses
Learning our way through complex change.
The Sensemaking Collaboratory brings people across roles and disciplines into a carefully supported process: naming consequential challenges, studying them together, making shared thinking visible, and trying informed ways forward.
Expertise lives throughout the institution
Complex problems require collective inquiry
Equity shapes process and outcomes
Reflection is part of action
Commitments across the journey
Three lenses support every phase.
Framing, collective interpretation, and learning through action recur throughout the seven-phase journey.
Interpret
Make meaning together
How do our different experiences, disciplines, and positions change what we can see?
Dialogue across roles helps surface power, assumptions, missing perspectives, decision rights, and connections obscured by institutional silos.
Learn
Move learning into action
What can we try, learn from, communicate, and carry forward?
Teams make their thinking visible, test a feasible next step, gather feedback, and plan for continued learning.
The participant experience
A cohort process across time
Intensive gatherings create momentum. Full-cohort labs, modest between-session inquiry, and team coaching distribute the work and give ideas time to deepen.
MovePurposeIn the roomBetween gatherings
Ground participation and attend to what people are noticing.
Values, stories, community agreements, orientation
Light reflection; the problem can remain open and unfinished
Learn across positions, experiences, evidence, and system conditions.
Inquiry with affected people, power analysis, missing perspectives, and lived and implementation knowledge
Short conversations, observations, or evidence gathering
Develop a bounded and revisable account of the challenge.
Focusing statements, desired change, assumptions, How Might We questions
Check the frame with people affected by the condition
Develop alternatives and give them room before choosing a direction.
Lotus Blossom, rapid ideation, comparison, responsible convergence
Investigate the assumptions behind promising directions
Turn an idea into a small, responsible learning test.
Theory of change, learning questions, indicators, safeguards
Build and coordinate the smallest useful version
Interpret evidence and revise the idea, frame, or pathway.
Critical Friends, feedback from affected people and implementation partners, evidence-to-decision
Document learning and make an explicit next-move decision
Continue learning as the work moves into practice.
Change frictions, engagement strategy, ownership, evaluation
Adapt, share learning, and sustain relational and material support
Cohort learning
Cross-functional groups bring together perspectives and institutional realities that rarely meet in one room.
Skilled facilitation
Facilitators sequence activities, protect reflection, normalize ambiguity, and help groups make their thinking visible.
Team coaching
Coaching helps teams interpret feedback, navigate constraints, and continue when the work becomes less linear.
Implementation pathway
Leadership partnership, protected time, recognition, and resources connect learning to sustained action.
Inside a working session
A repeatable rhythm for collective learning
The topic and activity may change, but the learning rhythm remains recognizable.
Ground
Reconnect to purpose, people, and the work’s current reality.
Examine
Bring experience, scholarship, evidence, and competing interpretations into view.
Externalize
Use mapping, dialogue, and short writing to make collective thinking visible.
Choose
Identify the next question, smallest useful test, or decision the evidence supports.
Reflect
Name what shifted, what remains uncertain, and what the group will carry forward.
Early evidence from Kent State
Relationships became part of the change infrastructure.
Twenty-six regional-campus faculty completed the 2025 summer process. Descriptive pre/post survey patterns showed gains in perceived agency, belonging, respect, and alignment—alongside participants’ emphasis on trust, connection, and continued coaching.
Interpret with care. These descriptive results come from a small, selected cohort and support local learning and program refinement. Causal claims and transfer across contexts require stronger follow-up evidence.
Felt they had power to make positive change
Reported a strong sense of belonging