Research & Publications
FlowSentience explores how organisations and societies can preserve collective understanding as complexity, technology and decision speed increase.
Our research connects organisational sensemaking, systems theory, value streams and human–AI systems.
Sensemaking Debt
How Unrecovered Interpretive Obligations Accumulate in Adaptive Systems
Jan Windahl & Dennis Johansson
FlowSentience Research Paper No. 1 · Version 1.3 · 11 September 2026
Organisations can have extensive information and still struggle to understand how their decisions affect one another. When the work of clarifying assumptions, responsibilities and purposes is repeatedly postponed, later decisions inherit the difficulty.
This paper proposes Sensemaking Debt as a way to investigate how that unfinished work accumulates and constrains future action. It explores how AI can accelerate this process or help restore understanding, and why earlier collective understanding can matter for climate action and learning across generations.
The report develops a theoretical proposal and a research agenda, with clear distinctions between established evidence, proposed mechanisms and illustrative examples.
FlowSentience Research Programme · CC BY 4.0
Sentient Value Streams in Healthcare
“Lyhörda flöden för vård och omsorg”
FlowSentience White Paper · 2025
The starting point of the FlowSentience research programme: how value streams can continuously sense changing conditions, detect weak signals and remain responsive without replacing human judgement with automated control.
Version of record — open access
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17142073
Books
“The Sentient Value Stream Framework”
How Organisations Learn to Sense Themselves
From value-stream sensing to organisational awareness.
“The Sentience Threshold”
How Civilisations Learn to See Their Own Consequences
From organisational sensing to civilisation-scale situational awareness.
FlowSentience Research Programme
An independent research programme by Jan Windahl and Dennis Johansson exploring collective understanding, systemic listening and the conditions under which increasingly complex human and human–AI systems remain adaptive and governable.