Critical Constraints: Building Sensing & Learning Capability
Why your marketing organization keeps getting surprised by change, and how to build the radar you need.
[This post is helpful reading on its own, so feel free to read on, however it's intended for anyone who completed the Disruption-Fluency Self-Assessment. I encourage you to start there.]
If your Disruption Fluency Assessment identified Sensing & Learning as your lowest-scoring dimension, your organization faces a critical vulnerability: you're navigating an increasingly turbulent environment without the radar to detect what's coming or the systems to learn from what you've experienced.
Organizations weak in Sensing & Learning exhibit a troubling pattern: they're perpetually surprised. Market shifts that competitors anticipated catch them off guard. The same mistakes recur across teams and over time. Valuable insights from campaigns and customer interactions evaporate rather than accumulating into organizational wisdom.
What Sensing & Learning Actually Means
In the Disruption-Fluent Marketing framework, Sensing & Learning is defined as "the capacity to detect emerging changes in the environment from all sources and systematically convert experience into organizational knowledge." It comprises four interconnected components:
