Why Multimodal Reflection Matters in Sensemaking

At Quotidian Strategies, we’ve learned that how you ask shapes what you hear. In sensemaking workshops and reflection sessions, we design and facilitate to help organisations reflect on their work, not as a ritual of closing out a project, but as a practice of learning.

We’ve seen that different modes of reflection — photos, music, annotated timelines, interviews, voice notes, drawing, or journaling, — elicit different insights.  What emerges is often a fuller and more intricate understanding of individual and group interactions that offer a multidimensional picture of organisational life.

By enabling multiple modes of engagement, we tap into the everyday ways people move through the world, surfacing different dimensions of knowing, remembering, and feeling.

Reflection isn’t just a retrospective, it’s a method of worldmaking - how people build their realities not only in the present but for the future. And when we expand how we ask, we expand what both they (‘learning participants’) and we (‘learning partners’) are able to know. Not just stylistically, but substantively.

A hand-drawn sketch might reveal how a person feels about their role in a project, its tensions, flow, or fragmentation, in a way an interview never could. A photo of a rainbow submitted during a reflection prompt might surface an emotional register that no survey could capture.

We've also noticed how asking someone to explain the same situation or phenomenon in multiple ways (e.g. by drawing the first time and a piece of writing the next) elicits vastly different responses. The very method of reflection seems to invite distinct ways to understand and communicate.

This isn’t just about inclusion. When we invite people to reflect in different ways, we open up space for:

🪟Hearing from voices who often stay quiet in traditional formats.

🪟Surfacing emotional, sensory, and relational layers of experience.

🪟Accessing diverse ways of knowing (visual, embodied, affective).

🪟Reconsidering what “evaluation data” and “evidence” can look like.

🪟Engaging with memory, emotion, and experience in diverse ways.

🪟Reflection to feel less extractive and more meaningful for all parties.

It's not only what question you ask that matters, but how you ask it. So one of our strategies is to attend to both content and form. The format is never just a container, it’s part of the meaning-making process itself