Sensemaking

Conceptual Overview

As sensemaking unfolds, at least seven resources—social context, identity, retrospect, salient cues, ongoing projects, plausibility, and enactment—affect not only the initial sense one develops of a situation, but more important the extent to which people will update that sense. These properties have an effect on the willingness of people to disengage from their initial story and adopt a newer story that is more sensitive to the particulars of the present context.

To elaborate briefly on the seven

• 1.
  Social context: Sensemaking is influenced by the actual, implied, or imagined presence of others. Sensible meanings tend to be those for which there is social support, consensual validation, and shared relevance.
• 2.
  Personal identity: A person or group's sense of who they are in a setting, what threats to this sense of self the setting contains, and what is available to enhance, continue, and render efficacious that sense of self all provide an explanatory frame.
• 3.
  Retrospect: Sensemaking is influenced by what people notice in elapsed events, how far back they look, and how well they remember the past.
• 4.
  Salient cues: Sensemaking is about the elaboration of traces into full-blown stories, typically in ways that selectively shore up an initial hunch. An initial linkage between a particular cue and a category is elaborated into a more confident diagnosis through successive rounds of selective search for confirming evidence.
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• 5.
  Ongoing projects: People insert brackets into continuous flows in order to convert portions of the flow into events. Thus, sensemaking is shaped by the speed with which interpretations become out-of-date.
• 6.
  Plausibility: To make sense is to answer the question, “What's the story here?” Sensemaking is about creating meaning that is sufficient to proceed with current projects.
• 7.
  Enactment: Actions such as asking questions, making declarations, or inserting probes to see reactions and then infer meanings modify what is being observed. Inquiring shapes and enacts the environment one deals with. It is this sense in which part of what one sees in any moment of sensemaking is a partial reflection of oneself.

A summary account of sensemaking would therefore emphasize that sensemaking (1) is focused on directions, (2) is about updating one's grasp of what is happening, (3) is about pacing, keeping up with ongoing events, and dealing with interruptions, (4) is more about plausibility and confirmation than accuracy, and (5) is about thinking while acting by means of implementing the recipe, “How can I know what I think until I see what I say?” While the preceding distinctions make clearer what sensemaking is, it is equally important to specify what sensemaking is not.

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