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Making Sense of the Organization - Book Review

Administrative Science Quarterly, Dec, 2002 by Roderick M. Kramer

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Another major theme of this section is that organizational realities are, for the most part, negotiated products. "When people engage in acts of sensemaking," Weick asserts, "it is more precise to think of them as accomplishing reality rather than discovering it" (p. 460). The difficulty of this achievement is compounded, Weick points out, by the fact that sensemaking is seldom solitary but, instead, is inherently social. Thus, people embedded in sensemaking predicaments must take others' inputs (interpretations) and outputs (actions) into account at the same time that they are desperately trying to make their own sense of a situation. As with the innocent bystanders in Latane and Darley's (1968) experiments on emergency intervention or the hapless subjects in Asch's (1956) conformity studies, people tend to look to others to help them decide just what it is that they are seeing or not seeing. Ultimately, of course, sensemakers succeed or fail at this task--and the papers in this section document both the triumphs and tragedies of sensemaking.

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The third and final section addresses applications of Weick's ideas to several important contemporary organizational issues. The first piece elaborates on the merits of the small wins approach to solving large-scale organizational problems and includes compelling examples of how even tentative first steps set in play large-scale social and organizational change. The second piece provides a thought-provoking analysis of how and why sensemaking "online" can become unexpectedly fraught with difficulty and frustration. Weick's basic observation is that, while the online experience seems to provide ample data and in ever more efficient formats, it can actually make it harder--not easier--to make sense of the pattern in those data. Weick argues that this difficulty derives from the fact that the online experience short-circuits or undermines many of the crucial processes that underlie sensemaking in more normal contexts, including effectuating, triangulating, affiliating, deliberating, and consolidating. As a consequence, he proposes, people might be better off if they were to simply push back from their terminals, take a walk, and perhaps talk to others. The third and final contribution in this section examines sensemaking as an organizational dimension of global change. Here Weick challenges the predominant tendency to think about global change from the standpoint of strategic decision making, proposing instead, "Precisely because global change is so difficult to comprehend, organizations designed to deal with it must be organizations designed as much to develop a coherent story of what is going on as to decide what should be done given that unfolding story" (p. 458).

Given such inherent complexity, one might imagine that success at sensemaking requires a rather disciplined mindfulness and even steely cognitive resolve. Weick (1989) himself once proclaimed, after all, that theory-building is really an exercise in disciplined imagination. Yet there is a strong sense running throughout these papers that disciplined imagination is a much more playful and liberating endeavor than the term itself might seem to suggest or imply. It is often when attention is most relaxed that we observe the most, he seems to suggest. Improvisation is a disciplined form of experimentation and play. Similarly, bricolage requires a disciplined tossing out of rules and reinvention of old forms into new variations. In this regard, there is a recurrent provocativeness in Weick's analyses, coupled with an impish spirit that often dances beneath his elegant prose. There is an admonition to "listen carefully" but "don't take all of this too seriously."

Business Services Industry

Making Sense of the Organization - Book Review

Administrative Science Quarterly, Dec, 2002 by Roderick M. Kramer

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