What is Sensemaking?

            “The concept of sensemaking is well named because, literally, it means the making of sense” (Weick, 1995, p. 4). “Sensemaking involves the ongoing retrospective development of plausible images that rationalize what people are doing” (Obstfeld, Sutcliffe, & Weick, 2005). “Viewed as a significant process of organizing, sensemaking unfolds as a sequence in which people concerned with identity in the social context of other actors engage ongoing circumstances from which they extract cues and make plausible sense retrospectively, while enacting more or less order into those ongoing circumstances” (Obstfeld et al., 2005). “Stated more compactly and more colorfully, ‘[S]ensemaking is a way station on the road to a consensually constructed, coordinated system of action’ (Taylor and Ven Every, 2000, p. 275)” (Obstfeld et al., 2005).  “At that way station, circumstances are ‘turned into a situation that is comprehended explicitly in words and that serves as a springboard to action’ (p. 40)” (Obstfeld et al., 2005).  “These images imply three important points about the quest for meaning in organizational life” (Obstfeld et al., 2005).  “First, sensemaking occurs when a flow or organizational circumstances is turned into words and salient categories” (Obstfeld et al., 2005). “Second, organizing itself is embodied in written and spoken texts” (Obstfeld et al., 2005). “Third, reading, writing, conversing, and editing are crucial actions that serve as the media through which the invisible hand of institutions shapes conduct (Gioia et al. 1994, p. 365)” (Obstfeld et al., 2005).

            “Explicit efforts at sensemaking tend to occur when the current state of the world is perceived to be different from the expected state of the world, or when there is no obvious way to engage the world” (Obstfeld et al., 2005).  “In such circumstances there is a shift from the experience of immersion in projects to a sense that the flow of action has become unintelligible in some way” (Obstfeld et al., 2005).  “To make sense of the disruption, people look for reasons that will enable them to resume the interrupted activity and stay in action” (Obstfeld et al., 2005). “These ‘reasons’ are pulled from frameworks such as institutional constraints, organizational premises, plans, expectations, acceptable justifications, and traditions inherited from predecessors” (Obstfeld et al., 2005).  “If resumption of the project is problematic, sensemaking is biased either toward identifying substitute action or toward further deliberation” (Obstfeld et al., 2005).

            Sensemaking is 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 (Weick, 1995, p. 17).