CONCEPT
Cue Extraction
The sensemaking property by which people notice a small number of signals from the vast field of available information and use them to construct their interpretation of the situation.
Organizations are saturated with available cues — far more data than anyone could possibly process. Sensemaking proceeds by extraction: the selective noticing of certain signals and the corresponding unnoticing of others. The extracted cues become the raw material of interpretation. What gets extracted depends on identity, on prior frameworks, on institutional priorities, on the affective tone of the moment, and on the sheer chance of where attention happens to land. Cue extraction is the mechanism through which the same situation produces radically different interpretations for different observers, and through which weak signals — the small, ambiguous, inconsistent cues that precede catastrophic failure — either get noticed and incorporated into organizational action or get filtered out by the prevailing narrative. In AI-augmented organizations, cue extraction is reshaped by the tool's own extraction patterns, which amplify certain signals and suppress others in ways that are structurally invisible to the users whose attention the tool is now mediating.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The concept operationalizes what