Organizing and the Process of Sensemaking

Abstract

Weick, Sutcliffe, and Obstfeld (2005) examine how sensemaking shapes situations and alternatives and relates to organizing. This post reviews seven properties of sensemaking and considers how people construct experiences and narratives in workplace learning, reflection, and career research.

The concept of sensemaking

The paper by Weick, Sutcliffe, and Obstfeld (2005) distinguishes sensemaking from interpretation and decision making.

Interpretation involves finding meaning in an existing text. Sensemaking asks how that text came to exist. Decision making involves choosing among given alternatives, and sensemaking examines what people recognize as a situation and how alternatives take shape.

This process involves bracketing portions of an ongoing flow of experience, labeling them, and grouping them into categories. Deciding where a single “event” begins and ends within continuous experience is part of sensemaking.

Seven properties of sensemaking

The paper and Weick’s earlier work outline the following properties of sensemaking.

Property	Description
Grounded in identity	What one sees as a situation is intertwined with “who I am.” When identity changes, the same scene becomes a different situation
Retrospective	Meaning is assigned after action occurs. We understand what we were doing by looking back on what we did
Enactive of environments	Through action, people create the environments to which they will respond
Social	Even when an activity appears solitary, the presence and expectations of others and shared language are always involved
Ongoing	It has no beginning or end. It takes place within a flow already in progress
Focused on extracted cues	People hold onto selected cues from a situation and develop a story from them
Plausibility over accuracy	Accounts that make sense and enable continued action are adopted

Retrospection and enactment describe the cycle linking action and meaning. People look back on their actions and assign meaning to them. Those actions create the environment they will interpret next.

Organizing and sensemaking

As people articulate and coordinate their understandings, a shared story emerges. This story guides subsequent action, and repeated interactions stabilize organizational activities. Organizing emerges from sensemaking and shapes the conditions for further sensemaking.

An event that existing stories cannot explain disrupts this stability. People construct new accounts to understand the event and continue acting. Other studies of crises and accidents by Weick also examined this process.

Reading notes

The paper offers a theoretical account that reorganizes seven properties of sensemaking and explains their relationship to organizing. Applied to reflection records in medical education, ‘plausibility over accuracy’ treats a record’s consistency as evidence of how the learner constructed a narrative of the experience. The record’s relationship to subsequent action is best interpreted in the context of actual performance.

The account in Weick (1995) systematically explains how organizational members assign meaning to experience and develop understandings that enable action. The 2005 paper reorganizes these concepts and develops their relationship to organizing. The review by Maitlis and Christianson (2014) synthesized research on what triggers sensemaking, how meaning is constructed, and the resulting actions and organizational outcomes.

The study by Gioia and Chittipeddi (1991) analyzed how sensemaking and sensegiving interact at the outset of strategic change at a university. Leaders explain and persuade, and members reinterpret. A shared organizational story takes shape as people understand a situation and influence others’ understanding.

The review by Sandberg and Tsoukas (2015) examined the tendency of sensemaking research to focus on interruptions, exceptional events, and explicit interpretation. Their discussion clarifies the tension between describing sensemaking as “ongoing” and explaining it primarily in relation to crises and accidents. The review proposes developing this research by giving fuller attention to everyday practice, bodily engagement, and temporality.

The study by Battles et al. (2006) used a sensemaking perspective to understand patient safety risks and hazards. The study emphasizes how organizational processes link findings from risk analysis to dialogue among members, priority setting, and actions to improve care.

References

Weick, K. E., Sutcliffe, K. M., & Obstfeld, D. (2005). Organizing and the process of sensemaking. Organization Science, 16(4), 409–421. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.1050.0133
Battles, J. B., Dixon, N. M., Borotkanics, R. J., Rabin-Fastmen, B., & Kaplan, H. S. (2006). Sensemaking of patient safety risks and hazards. Health Services Research, 41(4, Pt. 2), 1555–1575. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-6773.2006.00565.x
Gioia, D. A., & Chittipeddi, K. (1991). Sensemaking and sensegiving in strategic change initiation. Strategic Management Journal, 12(6), 433–448. https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.4250120604
Maitlis, S., & Christianson, M. (2014). Sensemaking in organizations: Taking stock and moving forward. Academy of Management Annals, 8(1), 57–125. https://doi.org/10.5465/19416520.2014.873177
Sandberg, J., & Tsoukas, H. (2015). Making sense of the sensemaking perspective: Its constituents, limitations, and opportunities for further development. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 36(S1), S6–S32. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.1937
Weick, K. E. (1995). Sensemaking in organizations. Sage Publications.