Sensemaking

Conceptual Overview and Discussion

The term sensemaking has been broadly used by a number of researchers to describe the process in which individuals engage to make sense of ambiguous situations. Weick's sensemaking model provides the most comprehensive description of the sensemaking process at both the individual and the organizational levels. The strength of Weick's sensemaking is in its ability to bring together the various strands of his earlier research into a comprehensive framework for understanding the social psychological and structural elements of organizing.

The origins of sensemaking are rooted in Weick's dissatisfaction with more traditional approaches to organizational analysis and his concern for process over outcomes. His initial intention was to provide a framework for understanding the process of organizing. His view of organizations as loosely coupled systems led him to explore the social psychological aspects of organizations. Thus, sensemaking is an alternative to mainstream methods of analysis, which see organizations as rational entities. By tying together various strands of social and psychological theories, including Harold Garfinkel's work on juries, Chris Argyris and Donald Schon's double-loop learning, and elements of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann's social constructionism, Weick was able to develop a full-blown sensemaking model.

According to Weick, through sensemaking “people make sense of things by seeing a world on which they have already imposed what they believe.” The action of sensemaking is triggered by ambiguous or uncertain events that disrupt our routines and force us to deal with them—or, in this case, make sense of them. Early attempts at using sensemaking include analysis of organizational disasters and the processes that set them in motion. Through a study of the cockpit tapes of the Tenerife air disaster, Weick showed us how small separate failures could contribute to major disaster by suggesting that when interruptions of important routines lead to system breakdowns, people revert to familiar scripts and habitual responses. This 1990 study, which shows how interdependence, and sensemaking by the extraction of cues, lent plausibility to pilots' actions, is one of the earliest applications of sensemaking as an analytical tool.

Much of Weick's early work was used to analyze organizational disasters. In 1993, he again applied a form of sensemaking to the study of the Mann Gulch disaster, to show how organizations unravel. In this study of firefighters, most of whom died because they failed to heed the advice of their leaders to drop their tools and not try to outrun the fire, Weick linked identity construction with routines to show how the firefighters' sensemaking was made plausible when they faced contradictory cues, which made their actions seem contradictory. The analysis of Mann Gulch is significant because it stresses the importance that interlocking behaviors and structure have on the sensemaking process and behavior.

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