The Sense Making Process, and Its Potential Pitfalls

The sense making process is a part of our everyday lives. The way we make sense of the world around us can have a big factor in our ability to make judgments and decisions. That is why it is important to establish a valid model in which we can run through the thought process that allows us to come with high quality solutions to problems in an efficient manner. Once I have established this model and given examples on how it operates, I will move onto potential impediments. Impediment are biases that can hinder us from running through the sense making process in an efficient manner. These impediments can vary from affecting our previous knowledge to affecting our ability to process new information. The end result of these impediments when effective means they have negatively impacted our ability to rationally make decisions. This can cause the overall quality of solutions provided by the sense making process to be degraded. After I have discussed the most relevant impediments to this process, I will begin to discuss external factors such as complexity, dynamism, and uncertainty. These external factors can directly affect the validity of our sense making process, as well as empower the impediments to do more damage than what was possible before. I will discuss how the external factors operate, and their individual ability to affect the sense making process and impediments. Finally, I will conclude this thesis by taking the research I have done so far and apply it to how we make sense of financial markets. This will involve analyzing how we make decisions with regards to the stock market, and how external factors and our impediments can impact the validity of those decisions made. Finally, I will summarize my findings, and discuss the biggest factors that impact the sense making process.