History of Sensemaking as a Theoretical Framework
‘‘One of the most important developments in organization science during the past 20 years has been the growing interest in how organizational mem- bers conceptualize and make sense of their organizational worlds’’ (Porac, Meindl, & Stubbart, 1996, p. ix). Sensemaking as a theoretical framework for the study of organizations evolved from changes within the fields of sociology, psychology, and organizational theory. It represented a melding of concepts that were moving along parallel paths. Gradually during the 1970s the strands began to intersect and come together.
During the 1960s developments within sociology ‘‘called into question a strictly realist view of the world’’ (Porac et al., 1996, p. x). A field evolved
which was called social constructivism or social interactionism, because it started from the premise that
there can be no objective social or organizational reality because reality is a product of perceptual and interpretive processes. yIn a significant sense, then, perception and interpretation are all that matter. Perception and interpretationdefinereality (Gioia, 1989, p. 222).
Social constructionists believe that individuals actively interact with, con- struct, and shape their environments and their realities. ‘‘Social reality, in- sofar as it is recognized to have an existence outside the consciousness of any single individual, is regarded as being little more than a network of assumptions and inter-subjectively shared meanings’’ (Burrell & Morgen, 1979, pp. 28, 31).
Within this tradition, organizations also came to be seen as social con- structions:Berger and Luckman’s (1967)The Social Construction of Reality served as the core text on the sociology of knowledge from the constructivist view. According to them, organizational members create the realities they inhabit. AsGioia (1986a, p. 348)articulated it: ‘‘organizational reality is a socially constructed one, forged out of consensus of vision and action that exists largely or completely in the minds of the organizations’ members’’.
Based on language and face-to-face interaction with others, we each inter- nalize particular meanings about events, roles, and other aspects of organ- izational life. Through interaction, power is negotiated and roles are defined, and thus leadership itself is considered to be a socially constructed phenomenon (Smircich & Morgan, 1982, p. 258).
In 1979 Weick wrote a book entitled The Social Psychology of Organ- izing, which introduced the term sensemaking, and, as he called it, a ‘‘new way of talking about organizations’’ (1979b, p. 234). It clearly embraced a social constructivist framework. In it he claimed that people invent organ- izations in order to reduce the equivocality of everyday experience and to create coherent, stable meanings (Weick, 1979b, pp. 12–13); they develop consensus about the meaning of behaviors, events, and actions (Weick, 1979b, p. 165).
Meanwhile, during the 1970s social cognition and information processing models of organizations were also evolving in the field of psychology and being applied to the study of management. The publication of Fiske and Taylor’s (1984)text on social cognition was a major step in the evolution of the field. Fiske and Taylor defined social cognition as the study of ‘‘how people make sense of other people and themselves’’ (1984, p. 12). Social cognition is interested in the perceptions, thinking and reasoning behind
behavior (Fiske & Taylor, 1984, pp. 9–10). ‘‘The growing interest in cog- nition, both within and between organizations, has coincided (not acciden- tally) with the increasing legitimacy of a constructionist point of view among organizational scholars’’ (Porac et al., 1996, p. x).
The broader field in which sensemaking fits is sometimes referred to as managerial and organization cognition. These scholars are interested in how managers absorb, process and disseminate information about the issues, opportunities, and problems facing their organization (Walsh, 1995). They are interested in how managers reason and ‘‘figure things out,’’ but not necessarily in logical terms (Isenberg, 1986, pp. 242–243). Focus is on knowledge structures, which are variously referred to as cognitive frame- works, implicit theories, interpretive schemes, mental models, organization- al ideologies, thought structures, frames of reference, industry recipes, perceptual filters, belief structures, and more (Walsh, 1995, pp. 284–285). In studying cognitive aspects of organizations, Weick proposed that ‘‘the re- searcher’s job is to spot the thinking people in an organization, see what they’re thinking about, and examine how those thoughts become amplified or diffused through the organization’’ (1979a, p. 43). In articulating the need for sensemaking as a theoretical framework, Gioia and Sims asked the fun- damental question: ‘‘Does the discipline of management really understand the complex internal and social influences that affect and drive organiza- tional behavior?’’ (1986, p. 5).
Thus, sensemaking as a framework ties the cognitive perspective and so- cial constructivism together (Pfeffer, 1981, p. 3). Managerial and organi- zational cognition combines the sociologist’s interest in beliefs and social practice with the psychologist’s interest in decision-making, perception and leadership (Porac et al., 1996, p. xi). Weick recognized the convergence of these strands, and is the one who articulated and named the framework of organizational sensemaking.Weick’s 1995book, Organizational Sensemak- ing, is the preeminent, seminal work in the field. The book offered a sys- tematic conceptualization of sensemaking as a framework for the study of organizations (Gioia & Mehra, 1996, p. 1228) and precipitated a more co- herent and consistent stream of original research.
Sensemaking and the Study of Leadership
Organizational sensemaking has been used as a framework to study many elements of organizational life and organizational communication. In this paper I focus on its application to the study of leadership. Weick contended
that ‘‘people try hardest to build meaning around those actions to which their commitment is strongest’’ (1995, p. 156), i.e. those for which they bear heavy responsibility. Thus it is natural that sensemaking scholars have looked especially at managers and management teams.
A basic postulate of the organizational sensemaking literature is that leaders simultaneously study and enact their environments—that manage- rial thought and action are inseparably woven together (Weick, 1983, p.
222). Leaders influence how organizations enact their environments in that they ‘‘choose which aspects of their environments to attend to, and their world views, interests, and biases shape these choices’’ (Miller, 1993, p. 128).
Successful members of organizations are typically proficient processors of information and creative architects of meaningful experience. They engage in active attempts to make sense of the myriad of information cues that surround them. They forge understanding out of some very limited and ambiguous cues, and on the basis of that understanding, they act (Gioia & Sims, 1986, p. 2).
Daft and Weick (1984, p. 285)noted that information converges at the top management level, and strategic action is formulated there. From the lead- er’s perspective ‘‘the effectiveness of one’s organization, as well as the fate of one’s own career, often hinges on the mastery of the ability to turn thought into act’’ (Gioia, 1986a, p. 336).
Management is both an art and a science, requiring analysis, organizing, and deciding, but also intuition, insight, and perception (Gioia, 1986a, p.
339). Sensemaking is good for studying what goes on in the heads and hearts of leaders as they deal with both daily organizational life and with the crises and surprises that inevitably surface. ‘‘[L]eaders, by nature of their lead- ership role, are provided with a distinctive opportunity to influence the sensemaking of others’’ (Smircich & Morgan, 1982, p. 269). Leaders define reality for others—‘‘leadership actions attempt to shape and interpret sit- uations to guide organizational members into a common interpretation of reality’’ (Smircich & Morgan, 1982, p. 261). Managers influence the sense- making processes of organizational members through creation of vision, through management of symbols, and by setting policies and rules about how, what and when they communicate (Smircich & Stubbart, 1985, p. 730).
‘‘The cognitive approach to the study of organizations, then, appears to be fruitful for examining the process by which the management of meaning is accomplished’’ (Pfeffer, 1981, p. 8).
Sensemaking scholars are interested in encouraging ‘‘a more informed, more reflective, more self-conscious practice of organization’’ (Smircich &
Stubbart, 1985, p. 733). Ultimately it is hoped that a better understanding of
sensemaking will make better leaders. Sensemaking ‘‘primes people to be more self-conscious about some of the things they and their associates do automatically when they are puzzled,’’ and thus may lead, according to Weick (1995, p. 182), to more subtlety, and richness of practice. We might hope that a leader’s awareness of his/her own sensemaking would alter the dialectic between thought and action, that reflection on sensemaking will improve sensemaking.
Nature of Sensemaking Research
Weaver and Gioia (1994)pointed out that, while theorists sometimes strug- gle with bridging theoretical views to daily life, ordinary people ‘‘manage to succeed tolerably well at it on a fairly regular basis’’ (1994, p. 572). Sense- making scholars generally seek to make their work accessible to practition- ers, and to write in ways that retain the natural rhythm and feel of their participants’ words. Weick described the ways in which sensemaking schol- ars
‘‘rely on what participants say and do,’’
‘‘make an effort to preserve action that is situated in context,’’
consider ‘‘density of information and vividness of meaning’’ to be as cru- cial as precision, and
produce findings that are ‘‘described in terms of patterns rather than hypotheses’’ (1995, p. 173).
‘‘[T]he richness of one’s language is a crucial resource in sensemaking,’’
(Weick, 1995, p. 90).
Weick’s sensemaking concept is most compatible with what is known as
‘‘interpretative’’ social science research, according to Hatch and Yanow (2003, p. 75). Interpretivism seeks
to understand the fundamental nature of the social world at the level of subjective experience. It seeks explanation within the realm of individual consciousness and sub- jectivity, within the frame of reference of participants as opposed to the observer of action (Burrell & Morgen, 1979, p. 28).
Social scientists from this paradigm seek to ‘‘understand the social world from the point of view of those living within it, using constructs and ex- planations, which are intelligible in terms of the common-sense interpreta- tion of everyday life’’ (Burrell & Morgan, 1979, p. 246). ‘‘Interpretive research explores what strategists were thinking, why they acted as they did,
what they wanted to accomplish. Interpretive studies seek to understand the strategists’ thoughts and actions at a personal level’’ (Smircich & Stubbart, 1985, p. 733).
Interpretivism was a reaction against the emphasis on objectivity in re- search, believing instead that the human element is important—‘‘what is meaningful to people in the social situation under study’’ (Hatch & Yanow, 2003, p. 66). ‘‘[I]nterpretive research is not a quest for ultimate truth, but for a plausible, authoritative, verisimilitudinous and interesting analysis that enriches our understanding of social phenomena’’ (Brown, 2000, p. 50). It is representative of what Thayer (1988, pp. 232, 238) referred to as more relevant, more humane, more grounded, and non-hegemonic approaches to the study of leadership.
Therefore, the most compatible research methodologies for studying sensemaking fall into the qualitative rather than the quantitative tradition.
Sensemaking scholars tend to use more case studies and life story accounts than surveys and data sets (Weick, 1995, p. 172). Weick noted that sense- making work tends to focus on a small number of cases that are ‘‘chosen more for their access to the phenomenon than for their representativeness’’
(1995, p. 173). Sensemaking is not about proving hypotheses, generating propositions, or creating causal explanations, but more about real life set- tings (Weick, 1995, p. 173), partially because ‘‘cognitive variables are dif- ficult to measure in the field’’ (Porac et al., 1996, p. xix).
Qualitative research has several oft-cited strengths for the study of or- ganizations. Qualitative research has a unique ability to address the dy- namics of situations, and the perceptions of organizational members. It is also good for studying inductive, incremental, emergent, or iterative proc- esses. Qualitative research allows one to look at aspects of leadership that are not readily accessible to quantification, and is more sensitive to organ- izational context (Bryman, 1996, pp. 288, 289). As Thomas, Gioia, and Ketchen put it: ‘‘the strategic sensemaking process has a significant sub- jective component that only qualitative methods are well-suited to assess’’
(1997, p. 322). Qualitative research is generally seen as providing a more holistic, in-depth, and localized look at management.
Many theoretical foci exist within the study of sensemaking, and there is an attendant variety of methodological technique used (Porac et al., 1996, p. xiii–xiv).
[M]ethodological breadth indicates that no single method is sufficient to capture the full range of sensemaking within and between organizations.yAn important aspect of the modern attitude toward cognitive research in organizations is the willingness of
researchers to explore multiple methods to triangulate the complexity of sensemaking process and structures (Porac et al., 1996, p. xiii).
Given the importance of language to sensemaking, it is not surprising that interviews, conversations, and texts are the most important data sources for sensemaking research. In-depth, open-ended interviewing is by far the most common form of data collection for sensemaking scholars. Interview proto- cols are used to elicit people’s accounts of events and their interpretations of what events mean. People are asked to describe how situations came to be and why they evolved the way they did.
Second to interviews, the most common methodologies involve partici- pant observation and other ethnographic techniques. Ethnography involves
‘‘immersion in the social context being studied’’ as the researcher ‘‘enters a new cultural (organizational) domain with little familiarity about its inner workings’’ and then strives to understand that social world (Gioia & Chit- tepeddi, 1991, p. 435). Ethnographic techniques allow researchers to exam- ine interactions, performance, and communications that reflect managerial sensemaking (Hannabuss, 2000, p. 406).
There has also been some use of organizational texts such as transcripts, corporate reports/memos, media accounts of events, diaries, and archives (for example, Balogun & Johnson, 1988; andGephart, 1993). Texts allow the researcher to trace the real-time progress of sensemaking processes rather than relying on the kind of retrospective accounts that interviews do (Gephart, 1993, p. 1467).
A write-up of sensemaking research is likely to include one or more of three techniques: a) narratives, b) thematic analyses, and/or c) visual model building. I will discuss each of these in turn.
People think narratively; in stories, they share an ongoing flow and se- quence of experience (Weick, 1995, p. 127). The sensemaking scholar wants readers to share directly how people reconstruct and make meaning of events (Weick, 1995, p. 127). Narratives are ‘‘one of the natural cognitive and linguistic forms through which individuals attempt to order, organize and express meaning’’ (Mishler, 1986, p. 106). Jonas, Fry, and Srivastva (1989) encouraged examination of ‘‘the raw materials of the sensemaking process by taking seriously the words that executives use to convey meaning’’ (1989, p.
213). Narrative analysis asks questions such as ‘‘How do stories tie togeth- er?,’’ and ‘‘How do they relate to each other?’’ (Mishler, 1986, p. 100).
In drawing out the similarities between individual stories, qualitative re- searchers, including sensemaking scholars, look for themes and patterns that hold true for many of the participants in the study. They go beyond
description of individual cases to look for insights that apply across cases and which might add to our theoretical understanding of sensemaking. In data analysis, scholars look for connections, shared elements of sensemak- ing, as well as differences between participants. Typologies and charts are frequent means by which such patterns are expressed in the literature.
In addition to text, visual depictions of various kinds are used in sense- making research. One approach is the use of cognitive maps. ‘‘Organizations exist largely in the mind, and their existence takes the form of cognitive maps’’ proclaimedWeick and Bougon (1986, p. 102). A cognitive map is a graphic representation of a person’s or group’s knowledge structure – ‘‘the concepts and the relations a participant uses to understand organizational situations’’ (Weick & Bougon, 1986, p. 106). It shows the spatial relation- ships between concepts, how the person classifies things, and how the person abstracts and simplifies a chaotic world (Weick, 1990a, pp. 1, 8). Cognitive maps may be gleaned from questionnaires, interviews, documents, or tran- scripts (Weick & Bougon, 1986, p. 113), or the researcher might ask par- ticipants to render their own. Maps are particularly useful for studies of sensemaking, because they can capture socially constructed realities, tacit values, metaphorical thinking, inconsistencies, and non-rational elements of thought (Weick & Bougon, 1986, p. 124). Maps can trigger memory, reveal gaps in thinking, highlight key factors, categorize, show the scale of various priorities, and show routes to change (Fiol & Huff, 1992, pp. 275–277).
‘‘Studying sensemaking is by no means unproblematic as it involves dealing with context-specific, evolving, and often contradictory interpreta- tions’’ (Vaara, 2003, p. 868). It is not for the faint of heart, for those with tight research production deadlines, or for those who prefer the clarity of unambiguous methods and outcomes. Given this brief overview of some methodologies used in sensemaking research, let us now look at what has been learned from these literatures so far.