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--- name: narrative-sensemaking shapes: [narrative-sensemaking] description: > Some questions are "what happened and what did it mean", not "what is the mechanism". Use when an account must be reconstructed rather than measured, when a sequential process has a missing or out-of-order step, when a story is told to explain a failure, or when a claim sounds authoritative but may be structurally impossible before any source is even checked. --- # Narrative Sensemaking **Problem shape:** the material is an account — an incident write-up, a user journey, a roadmap story, a vendor claim, a postmortem — and the work is to recover its structure: which functions occur in which order, which roles are filled, where the sequence breaks its own grammar, and whether the account is even structurally possible. Paradigmatic/causal analysis is the wrong mode here and produces confident nonsense when forced. ## Relevant geniuses | Agent | Use when | |---|---| | [bruner](../../agents/genius/bruner.md) | the question is "what happened and what did it mean?" — decide narrative vs paradigmatic mode explicitly, then analyze the breach of the canonical script that made the event tellable | | [propp](../../agents/genius/propp.md) | a sequential process (workflow, pipeline, user journey, incident response) needs its invariant functions extracted, its roles abstracted from their current occupants, and its gaps found by grammar rather than by inspection | | [ibnkhaldun](../../agents/genius/ibnkhaldun.md) | a claim sounds authoritative but may be structurally impossible — filter on structural plausibility *before* evaluating the source; check whether the reported thing could occur at that scale at all | ## Invocation 1. Pick the best-fit agent above. If two or more fit, run `tools/genius-invoker.sh route "<problem>"` and take the top ranked match. 2. Load it: `tools/genius-invoker.sh invoke <agent> "<problem>"`, then read `agents/genius/<agent>.md` in full. 3. Apply the agent's `<workflow>` step by step and answer in its `<output-format>`. State which mode the account is being read in — narrative or paradigmatic — before drawing any conclusion from it. 4. Typical chain: ibnkhaldun filters out the structurally impossible → propp extracts the function sequence from what survives → bruner reads what the breach meant to the people in it. Run via `tools/genius-invoker.sh compose ibnkhaldun propp bruner -- "<problem>"`. 5. If no shape above matches, do not force a genius — use a standard team agent (INDEX.md routing rule). ## Refuse when - A mechanism is available and measurable — a causal question is being smuggled in as a story. Route to `causal-audit` or `failure-forensics`. - The narrative is the deliverable's *purpose* rather than its object: this shape analyzes accounts, it does not write persuasive ones. - Structural analysis is being used to dismiss a first-hand report that has not been checked against any record — implausible is not the same as false.