Sensemaking Quotes

“Without this texture of experience, the data shoved before these executives’ eyes loses any truth. Context and color are absent; all that remains are abstract representations of the world rather than the world itself.”
― Christian Madsbjerg, Sensemaking: The Power of the Humanities in the Age of the Algorithm

“When we get our understanding of humanity wrong, we get everything wrong. When”
― Christian Madsbjerg, Sensemaking: The Power of the Humanities in the Age of the Algorithm

“Big data makes us feel as though we can and should know everything there is to know on earth. But this is a fool’s quest, and it leaves everyone involved feeling depleted and lost. We”
― Christian Madsbjerg, Sensemaking: The Power of the Humanities in the Age of the Algorithm

“In a Silicon Valley state of mind, we care less about actively seeking out the truth than we do about engaging in discourse and experiences that make us feel affirmed and acknowledged.”
― Christian Madsbjerg, Sensemaking: The Power of the Humanities in the Age of the Algorithm

“Our fixation with STEM erodes our sensitivity to the nonlinear shifts that occur in all human behavior and dulls our natural ability to extract meaning from qualitative information. We stop seeing numbers and models as a representation of the world and we start seeing them as the truth—the only truth. We”
― Christian Madsbjerg, Sensemaking: The Power of the Humanities in the Age of the Algorithm

“What we can take away from this data is that most STEM training will get students a good income at the starting gate and a decent career. But powerful earners—the people running the show, breaking through the glass ceilings, and changing the world—tend to have liberal arts degrees. This”
― Christian Madsbjerg, Sensemaking: The Power of the Humanities in the Age of the Algorithm

“He connected with the storytelling in the manuscript painting, he said, because it was clear to him that this artist, working hundreds of years ago in an area of the world utterly foreign to him, had similar wishes for his family. “He wanted them to be in a place of beauty and calm after they died,” he told me. And then he thought for a moment before saying, “He must have been just like me.”
― Christian Madsbjerg, Sensemaking: The Power of the Humanities in the Age of the Algorithm

“It doesn’t matter that these are works of fiction and hence less scientific than the numbers and reports. They describe a human experience and that is what makes them true.”
― Christian Madsbjerg, Sensemaking: The Power of the Humanities in the Age of the Algorithm

“Over time, as management has become increasingly professionalized, you can sense a kind of nihilism or loss of meaning in the executive layers. This nihilism is strongest in large corporate cultures where management is seen as a profession in and of itself, with no strong connection to what the company actually makes or does.”
― Christian Madsbjerg, Sensemaking: The Power of the Humanities in the Age of the Algorithm

“An algorithm can arrive at optimization, but only a human being - an artist, a thinker, a mathematician, an entrepreneur, a politician - only someone with a sense of perspective can interpret the meaning of the destination. Masters spend their entire lives in pursuit of this interpretation. This is how they make sense of the world.”
― Christian Madsbjerg, Sensemaking: The Power of the Humanities in the Age of the Algorithm