Sensemaking in Organizations. - book reviews

Administrative Science Quarterly,  March, 1998  by Dave O'Connell

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Sensemaking in Organizations is about words in action. Located in Sage's Foundations of Organizational Science series, it actually crosses and knits through (rather than together) a plethora of fields - social psychology, communication studies, cultural analysis, cognitive psychology, decision making, and strategy, to name a few. As Weick promises in the preface, for the uninitiated, the book is an immersion in an ongoing conversation. The opening sentence of the preface, which refers to Lave and Wenger's (1991) discussion of situated learning, makes clear that Weick wants us to listen in on the conversation of an eclectic college of scholars whose diverse and overlapping perspectives sketch the outlines of the sensemaking perspective on organizational life. Starting with William James and ending in the moment and life-space in which the reader is situated, he challenges the reader to engage in the subject matter of the book, make sense of the sensemaking perspective, and then use that perspective in our immediate spheres of action.

Weick first sketches the rudiments of sensemaking, then throughout the book takes successive passes across the initial drawing, adding color, shading, and depth. Throughout, he makes claims for what it is and equally important claims for what it is not. He is adamant that sensemaking is not a metaphor and should be understood literally. The concept, at its simplest, is "the making of sense" (p. 4). It can be seen from many perspectives, such as structuring the unknown (Waterman, 1990), explaining surprises (Louis, 1980), or the interaction of information seeking, meaning ascription, and associated responses (Thomas, Clark, and Gioia, 1993). He takes great care to distinguish sensemaking from interpretation, with the key distinction being that sensemaking is about how people generate that which they interpret (p. 13). Sensemaking highlights the "invention that precedes interpretation . . . it implies a higher level of engagement by the actor" (p. 14).

People and organizations are constantly in the business of trying to make sense of the flow of activities in which they find themselves. Weick describes seven properties of sensemaking that set it apart from processes such as understanding, interpretation, and attribution: (1) It is grounded in identity construction. The process of figuring out what is going on is a product of and a process based on who the sensemaker is and is becoming. (2) It is retrospective. Since we make sense based on data, we do it primarily by examining history. Weick supports the notion that strategic planning often involves the ability to write the stow that fits recent history more than omniscient projection and attainment of future states. (3) It enacts sensible environments. By deciding on one's domain of activity and then taking action, we in a sense create our own environments for future action. (4) It is social. While it is easy to consider sensemaking to be primarily an introspective, intrapsychic process, in fact, we make sense of things in organizations while in conversation with others, while reading communications from others, while exchanging ideas with others. That is how sense becomes organizational and why Weick persistently pushes sensemaking to three levels above the intrapersonal. Constantly negotiated, sensemaking is intersubjective. Some notions become commonly accepted, or generically subjective, and others become extrasubjective as they enter the realm of culturally accepted meanings, replacing generic selves (Popper, 1972). (5) It is ongoing. We constantly bracket moments in the flow of life as we seek to reflect on and codify the meaning of things. Since words only approximate the territory and fail to map it perfectly (p. 107), however, the work of sensemaking is never done. (6) It is based on extracted cues. From the hurly-burly flow of action around us, we attend to, bracket, and extract certain elements, which become the targets and grist of the sensemaking process. (7) It is based in plausibility rather than accuracy. Organizational decision making is often based on the odds and can involve more intuition than careful analysis and systematic elimination of suboptimal choices. Beyond decision making, we construct the meanings of things based on reasonable explanations of what might be happening rather than through scientific discovery of "the real story."

In Weick's synthesis, there are triggers, or occasions for sensemaking. He points to the challenges of environmental uncertainty and problem definition as occasions for sensemaking and relies on Louis and Sutton's (1991) development of occasions for active thinking, which are triggered when situations are novel, discrepant, or are based on deliberate initiative. In discussing the substance of sensemaking, he says that sense is "generated by words that are combined into sentences of conversation to convey something about our ongoing experience" (p. 106). Sensemaking starts with three elements - a frame, a cue, and a connection - with frames tending to be past moments of socialization and cues tending to be present moments of experience (p. 111). Six vocabularies make up the substance of sensemaking. Ideologies are the vocabularies of society, third-order controls are the vocabularies of organization, and paradigms are the vocabularies of work. Theories of action are the vocabularies of coping, traditions are the vocabularies of predecessors, and stories are the vocabularies of sequence and experience. Weick categorizes the processes of sensemaking as either belief-driven (arguing or expecting) or action-driven (committing or manipulating).