Critical Sensemaking

Conceptual Overview and Discussion

Critical sensemaking is an approach that evolved in part from Karl Weick's sensemaking framework. He has described sensemaking as a recipe that provides both a way to interpret the environment and a guide to action. A recipe can help to make retrospective sense out of observed behavior, or in a more active sense, a recipe can direct individuals on how to take action, manage situations, and create meaning.

Sensemaking introduced seven properties that influence how individuals make sense of the world around them. The sensemaking framework tells us that individuals make sense of their experiences through a process that is (1) grounded in identity construction, (2) retrospective, (3) enactive of sensible environments, (4) social, (5) ongoing, (6) focused on and by extracted cues, and (7) driven by plausibility rather than accuracy. However, these properties on their own do not fully explain why some experiences, language, and events become meaningful for individuals while others do not. Individuals do not make sense of their experiences in isolation from their broader environments. For example, some individuals within an organization may have more influence on meaning than others. Individuals with more power in organizations may also exert more power on the sensemaking of organizational members. Critical sensemaking provides a lens through which to analyze the power relationships reflected in these inequalities within organizations and the consequences of those power effects for individuals.

Jean Helms Mills and Albert J. Mills developed the concept of critical sensemaking by combining the ideas of sensemaking and organizational power in an analytic approach that offered a more complete picture of how individuals process their experiences. Critical sensemaking argues that the analysis of sensemaking needs to be explored through, and in relationship to, the contextual factors of structure and discourse in which individual sensemaking occurs. Although individuals are making sense of their day-to-day actions on a local level, the concept of organizational power places local meanings in a broader understanding of privilege. Critical sensemaking draws on Mills's organizational rules theory to offer an analysis of how these actions are determined. Organizational rules focus on social practices that determine the ways in which individuals organize and the manner in which “things get done” in an organization. However, the rules also set limitations on individual sensemaking and actions. From that perspective, rules provide a preexisting sensemaking tool that contributes to the plausibility of an interpretation or the likelihood of a cue to be extracted as meaningful. The incorporation of organizational rules into the critical sensemaking framework also introduces the concept of meta rules to sensemaking practices. These rules (including privatization, competition, and globalization) are broad in scope and represent points of intersection among a number of formative contexts.

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