Multimodal sensemaking.

John Vervaeke, a cognitive scientist at the University of Toronto, describes four interdependent types of knowing. Most planning processes operate almost exclusively in the top layer: propositional knowledge (facts, data, frameworks). The three modes beneath it hold significant information about what a situation requires, and are rarely engaged intentionally.

Antonio Damasio's somatic marker hypothesis establishes why this gap matters: emotions and bodily states aren't obstacles to reasoning. They're inputs to it. Patients with damage to emotion-processing regions don't become more rational; they become worse decision-makers, unable to weight options meaningfully. Read supporting research.

That hypothesis sits inside a wider embodied cognitive science view: minds are not sealed off from bodies, and strategy conversations often under-weight the signals people already carry somatically. The figure below maps the four E's to how that literature shows up in judgment: an easy way to hold Damasio's mechanism alongside Vervaeke's layers.

Embodied knowledge is the gut signal that something is off before you can name why, the physical sense of relief or resistance when a decision is announced, the quality in a room that tells you whether a plan has genuine commitment behind it or just verbal agreement.

Gary Klein's research on Naturalistic Decision Making found that experienced experts in high-stakes fields (firefighters, military commanders, emergency physicians) rarely decide through systematic analysis. They recognize patterns, sense into situations, and act from internalized knowing that is faster and often more accurate than deliberation.

This isn't an argument against analysis. A 2015 meta-analysis of 80 studies across 27,000+ participants found that intuition and analytical thinking are independent systems that can operate simultaneously without conflict. A 2022 study of 103 strategic decisions found combined use produced higher-quality outcomes than either alone.

Francis Galton's 1907 ox-weighing experiment makes the same point for groups: 787 villagers guessed the weight of an ox; the median was 1,197 pounds; the actual weight was 1,198. The crowd's distributed intelligence exceeded expert judgment, but only because the conditions preserved the independence and diversity of inputs. Analytical convergence without that breadth first is exactly what squanders it.

Engagements are informed by the work of Theory U, developed by Otto Scharmer and colleagues at MIT and used globally in large-scale systems change for over two decades. The U process moves a group through deepening modes of attention, moving from observing and sensing into presencing, before crystallizing direction and prototyping action. It provides a proven sequence for helping individuals and organizations move through uncertainty into committed, authentic direction.

When we work with clients we embed practices drawn from established traditions in both embodied and analytical work, selected and integrated based on what each moment in the process requires.

As AI tools absorb more analytical workload, the remaining challenge shifts. It becomes less about processing information and more about ensuring the right information gets processed at all: what you actually believe, fear, and want; where genuine energy for a direction exists; what you're experiencing that hasn't been named. None of this is in the dataset.

Analysis can tell you what's true. It can't tell you what you actually sense or whether the direction you're choosing has real commitment behind it. That's the territory multimodal sensemaking works in.