Sensemaking

Fundamentals

Sensemaking begins in situations in which people define, elaborate, identify, and name something. Sensemaking is transactional and interactional, collective, and shared. While individual actors struggle to create order, it is through the discourse and written texts that collective meaning arises and is sustained. Weick’s foundational concern is how people make sense and how this is done in organizational context. The base for analysis might be called a field—a taken-for-granted world of assumptions and tacit meanings that cannot be captured easily or directly. As soon as it is noticed, it is no longer out of sight and may be questioned. The taken-for-granted field contrasts with what might be called the ground or what is noticed. Ambiguity and uncertainty with the accompanying emotional arousal produces responses, interpretation, or enactment. Enactment leads to selection among cues. Retention of some cues takes place, while others fade in importance. Remembering has both an individual and [Page 695]social aspect. These processes somehow become refined by feedback and amplification and are then part of generic sensemaking of the organization. The organization’s view of itself, its identity and image, are reflected in the actor’s sense of placement, or not. It is essential to understand the taken-for-granted culture of an organization to understand its resistance to change. On the other hand, change is incipient in sensemaking, because responses to new events are contrasted with memory of consequential past events. Practices then may be found wanting and adjusted. The richness of the ideas is found in the capacity to understand change as well as stability. This is a unique feature of a frame of reference since most are used to examine cross-sectional patterns of stability rather more than change. Failure, dissonance, confusion, and doubt are features of organizational life.

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