We all know that innovation demands for new, disruptive, creative thoughts that might challenge your basic beliefs. And yet we find it difficult to communicate and collaborate with people who are very different from us …

The ability to communicate and cooperate across departments, divisions, countries and cultures is paramount to success for a modern organization. It is important to innovation processes, strategy development and implementation. It is important to project management. Business units. To sales forces. Everywhere.

And we rationally know that we will get the best results if we can work together with people who sense the world differently and can bring new thoughts and ideas to the table. If everybody were just thinking alike it would soon become very tiresome. There wouldn’t be any dynamic. Creativity and innovation will suffer.

In every day life, however, we have great difficulty in making a diversified group of people with different mindsets and opinions work together. Of course, sometimes you really hit it off. But most of the times, not so much …

Obviously, human interaction is very complex, but again understanding sensemaking processes are at the core of bringing communication and cooperation up to a higher level.

The funny thing is, that even though we are all very good at sensemaking – and do it all the time – we are not very good at making sense of things to other people. In fact, in this regard we do some very stupid things.

Understanding sensemaking is central to explaining why people keep misunderstanding each other. Why we keep misjudging good intentions. Why promises are not being met and why crystal clear agreements does not always comply – even when a great effort has been made to match expectations.

Sensemaking explains why our default way of presenting our very best arguments quite often have very poor results. And why we sometimes – with no intention at all – evoke very surprisingly, powerful emotional reactions in other people. They can become sad, annoyed, fearsome and angry. Sometimes they want to fight you.

Sensemaking also tells the story about why most of us are biased to prefer people who are just like ourselves. Why we mistrust people who look and think differently (and why we have a hard time admitting to this).

If we boil it down, sensemaking can explain why a lot of things go wrong when we communicate and cooperate. But it can also lead us in a direction in which we become much better listeners, much better at presenting and much better at taking more responsibility – to avoid communication and cooperation go bad.

Question is, do you want to do something about it?