08/11/2022 19:00 Sensemaking in Organizations: Reflections on Karl Weick and Social Theory - EPIC

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Sensemaking in Organizations: Reflections on Karl Weick

and Social Theory
March 24, 2015

by LAURA A. MCNAMARA, Sandia National Laboratories

[this is one of two posts on sensemaking; see also the companion piece Sensemaking
Methodology by Peter Jones]

Sensemaking is a term that gets thrown around a lot without much consideration about where the
concept came from or what it really means. If sensemaking theory is democratizing, that’s good
thing. Most anthropologists recognize that ethnography is a joint co-creation with our
interlocutors. Our accounts, as well as the theory, framework and methods underlying those
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accounts, should be accessible to the people who help us create them. Sociologists recognize this
principle, too: in his gorgeous essay Social Things (which you should read if you haven’t already),
Charles Lemert reminds us that social science articulates our native social intelligence through
instruments of theory, concepts, methods, language, discourse, texts. Really good sociology and
anthropology sharpen that intelligence. They’re powerful because they enhance our
understanding of what it means to be human, and they really should belong to everyone.

Which brings me back to sensemaking: it’s one of those terms that lends itself to rapid adoption
and application. It seems so easy to understand. It’s about making sense. Okay, that’s a tautology.
How about this: sensemaking describes the negotiation and creation of meaning, or
understanding, or the construction of a coherent account of the world. Right?

All of that is true, but there’s so much more. Over the past couple of decades, a small number of
psychologists, communication theorists, and organizational scientists have articulated ideas of
sensemaking into theories, frames, and methods that we can and probably should incorporate
into our work. Sensemaking is more than a term of art: it’s an elegant, subtle, and richly descriptive
body of thinking about human perception, cognition, and action, as well as social interaction,
institutional reproduction and change, and human agency. I’m no social theorist, so take this with a
grain of salt – but I think sensemaking is right up there with Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus or Jean Lave
and Etienne Wegner’s communities of practice (both of which are consonant with sensemaking
theory, but that’s a more complicated story). Sensemaking has tremendous implication for how
we design and manage institutions, organizations, teams, programs, technologies. It’s also
relatively accessible – at least, compared to my painful memories of slogging through Outline of a
Theory of Practice.

One of my favorite books about sensemaking is Karl Weick’s, Sensemaking

in Organizations. I owe a debt of thanks to the nuclear engineer who
suggested I read it. This was back in 2001, when I was at Los Alamos
National Laboratory (LANL). I’d just finished my dissertation and was
starting a postdoctoral position in the statistics group, and word got around
that the laboratories had an anthropologist on staff. My nuclear engineer
friend was working on a project examining how management changes
were impacting team dynamics in one of LANL’s radiochemistry bench
laboratories. He called me asking if I had time to work on the project with
him, and he asked if I knew much about “sensemaking.” Apparently, his officemate had recently
married a qualitative evaluation researcher, who suggested that both of these LANL engineers take
the time to read Karl Weick’s book Sensemaking in Organizations.

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My nuclear engineer colleague thought it was the most brilliant thing he’d ever read and was
shocked, SHOCKED, that I’d never heard of sensemaking or Karl Weick. I muttered something
about anthropologists not always being literate in organizational theory, got off the phone, and
immediately logged onto Amazon and ordered it. I still have that same copy – it’s beat up, as all
beloved books tend to be. I do enjoy rereading it because my lines, scribbles, and post-it notes
remind me what I was thinking about at different points in my career.

Sensemaking in Organizations consists of a preface and eight chapters that set out the origins,
principles, and applications of Weick’s sensemaking concepts. It’s worth reading just for the
preface, which is delightfully welcoming for a volume of organizational theory. Weick advises
novice sensemaking acolytes to expect some confusion: “You are being thrown into the middle of
a sensemaking conversation with only a vague idea of how it constitutes a perspective,” he
observes. Fortunately, sensemaking is nothing more than a scholarly articulation of something that
comes quite naturally to us: we recognize, act upon, create, recall, and apply patterns from the
material of our lived experience to impose order on that lived experience. Think of sensemaking as
a “frame of mind about frames of mind,” Weick advises his reader. If this sounds recursive, it is:
Weick tells us to learn about sensemaking by thinking about how we are learning about
sensemaking. Read some of the text, he says. Set it aside. Consider it. Observe how you
apprehend and integrate the ideas into what you already know. Articulate what you think you
know about your learning. See that? That’s it. What you are observing and articulating is
sensemaking in action.

Of course, there’s a great deal more to sensemaking than that – some two hundred pages worth of
ideas in just one of Weick’s books; and Weick is just one of a dozen or so people that I can think of
who are affiliated with the idea of “sensemaking.” Within organizational theory, Weick was the first
to articulate sensemaking as a coherent framework for perception, cognition, action and memory,
but he locates his ideas in nearly a century’s worth of scholarship (see pp. 65-69 in particular).
Weick’s achievement is to take a breathtakingly broad array of ideas – Emily Dickinson, Anthony
Giddens, Pablo Neruda, Edmund Leach – and craft these into a set of seven properties that we can
use to understand how we create order from the flood of sensation we experience every waking
moment of every day.

Chapter Two of Sensemaking in Organizations contains what is perhaps Weick’s most cited
sentence, the recipe for sensemaking: “How can I know what I think until I see what I say?” This
rubric captures the seven constituent ideas of sensemaking as emergent interpretation, which I’ve
put into my own words below. I’ve italicized the key terms that Weick uses to represent his
heuristics:

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Sensemaking is matter of identity: it is who we understand ourselves to be in relation to the world

around us.
Sensemaking is retrospective: we shape experience into meaningful patterns according to our
memory of experience.
How and what becomes sensible depends on our socialization: where we grew up in the world, how
we were taught to be in the world, where we are located now in the world, the people with whom we
are currently interacting.
Sensemaking is a continuous flow; it is ongoing, because the world, our interactions with the world,
and our understandings of the world are constantly changing. You might also think of sensemaking as
perpetually emergent meaning and awareness.
Sensemaking builds on extracted cues that we apprehend from sense and perception. Cognition is the
meaningful internal embellishment of these cues. We articulate these embellishments through
speaking and writing – the “what I say” part of Weick’s recipe. In doing so, we reify and reinforce cues
and their meaning, and add to our repertoire of retrospective experience.
Sensemaking is less a matter of accuracy and completeness than plausibility and sufficiency. We
simply have neither the perceptual nor cognitive resources to know everything exhaustively, so we
have to move forward as best as we can. Plausibility and sufficiency enable action-in-context.

Let me reflect on how I put these ideas into action in relation to my own lived experience.

What I’ve just written above is an articulation of my identity as a researcher and thinker, as an
organizational anthropologist raised in a family of teachers and social scientists. Right now, I’m
conscious of writing for an audience of ethnographers, some of whom I know quite well and
others whom I have yet to meet. I’m aware that I’m only scratching the surface of sensemaking
theory. My readers are in my mind as I write; what I put on the page is shaped by my expectations
about how you might interpret what I’ve written down. This account is a necessarily incomplete,
inaccurate, and fixed representation of my own embellishment of concepts and ideas extracted
from a book I’ve been rereading on and off since 2001. I’ve thought about Weick’s ideas in my
own peregrinations since first reading Sensemaking in Organizations and my current
understanding of his work, and how it should be articulated for a blog post, are shaped by what I
know about organizations, ethnography, and blogs – among other things. As I write, I am trying to
deploy language, grammar, syntax to convey my felt sense of these ideas. In doing so, I’m learning
for myself what I believe to be true about Weick’s work.

In terms of my ethnographic practice, I find sensemaking theory to be a tremendously powerful

guide for structuring my approach to qualitative data collection, particularly when I’m trying to
figure out how an organizational initiative is (or isn’t) making the impact that its proponents have

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envisioned. For example, back in 2008, my colleague Nancy Dixon and I did a brief study—just a
few weeks—examining how intelligence analysts were responding to the introduction of
Intellipedia, a wiki platform intended to promote knowledge exchange and cross-domain
collaboration across the United States Intelligence community.1 All seven of the themes I’ve
described above were salient in the observations we collected from our interlocutors, but the one
that really jumped out for me was identity, the idea that social media in the context of the
intelligence community was catalyzing thoughtful consideration of practice, knowledge, and
professional self among Intellipedia’s early adopters. As we analyzed our interview and
observational data, we came to believe that Intellipedia and other forms of social media were
disruptive not because they facilitated domain knowledge sharing per se, but because Intellipedia
was enabling its contributors make more effective sense of themselves and their expertise vis-à-
vis the massive, complicated organizations in which they work.

I’m at the end of this post. In my next post about sensemaking, I’ll write about the failures of
sensemaking that Weick documents in his retrospective accounts of the 1949 Mann Gulch fire and
the 1977 Tenerife airline disaster. They’re chilling, sobering, and richly scholarly case studies—if you
ever needed an argument for the value of qualitative research, these two essays are a great start.

In the meantime, spend the twenty bucks on Karl Weick’s book, if you haven’t already. If you’re
another fan of sensemaking theory, I’m sure my friend Jennifer would be thrilled if you’d write your
own blog posting about sensemaking. I’m most familiar with Weick, but Gary Klein, Peter Pirolli,
and Brenda Dervin are all associated with sensemaking as well. Perhaps we can collectively
engage in making sense of sensemaking for ethnographic practice in science, technology, and
industry. It’s wonderful stuff.

Note

1. Dixon, N. and McNamara, L. 2008. “Our Experience with Intellipedia: an Ethnographic Study at
the Defense Intelligence Agency.” Albuquerque, NM: Sandia National Laboratories, SAND 2008-
2187.   More information about Intellipedia is available at the CIA’s website:
https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-archive/intellipedia-celebrates-third-
anniversary.html. You can also check out Nancy Dixon’s portfolio of work on social media, the
intelligence community, and organizational sensemaking at http://www.nancydixonblog.com/.

Image: Color Blocks by zoom in tight (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) via flickr.

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Laura A. McNamara, PhD, is an organizational anthropologist and Principal Membe

Staff at Sandia National Laboratories. She has spent her career partnering with
computer scientists, software engineers, physicists, human factors experts, I/O
psychologists, and analysts of all sorts. Most of her projects involve challenges in
analytic technology adoption. She enjoys working with computer science and
software teams in design strategies that enhance the future usability, utility, and
adoptability of analytic software. She is co-editor of Anthropologists in the SecurityScape and
Dangerous Liaisons: Anthropologists and the National Security State, and lead editor of the
Elsevier Science Publications series Studies in Multidisciplinarity.

 organizational theory sensemaking social theory

 
6 comments for “Sensemaking in Organizations: Reflections on Karl Weick and
Social Theory”

Alexandra Mack says:

March 24, 2015 at 12:58 pm

Laura, you have convinced me…just ordered! Can’t wait for your next post.

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kim erwin says:

March 24, 2015 at 6:59 pm

Your post must have driven book sales enough to trigger Amazon’s pricing algorithms–I just
paid $53 for my copy!

I’ve read some of Weick’s work in the past, but your writing connects it in a fresh way to
emerging theories of embodied cognition and grounded cognition that are likely to transform
the way we think about communication and “knowing.” I’m really excited to read this. Thank
you for a great post.

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Frank Romagosa says:

March 25, 2015 at 6:55 pm

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This is fantastic, thank you for such a terrific and welcoming overview! Like you when I think of
sense-making I also remember those days of Bourdieu, inscrutable to be sure, and this not just
because of the ever-diminishing fonts in the Outline’s pages! I appreciate so much that making
useful sense of it all has been Wieck, and love that he brings up such a diverse array as poets,
sociologists, and anthropologists, all to suss out sensation.

I took a different turn (though am convinced they lead to the same place), and read John
McPhee’s ‘A Sense of Where You Are’ in an English class long ago, all about how a basketball
team’s center made sense of space without looking at his immediate surroundings as he played
the game – his place on the court was always with his back to the backboard, his arms held
high imagining the rebound. I think of sense-making when I consider a rower on the water, or
our sense or non-sense when we are in liminal moments (knock over a coffee cup by accident)
or those in-between places (a train station, an airport). Perhaps overly phenomenological!

I really appreciate the overview you have offered, and the photograph of well-worn book to be
sure! I will get the Wieck, thank you!

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Laura McNamara says:

March 30, 2015 at 1:36 pm

Hey all! I’m so glad you enjoyed the post. It’s easy to write about work you really admire.

And I can’t quite believe that Weick’s book is $53 – Holy Hannah. If I could share my copy with
you I would.

I highly recommend Charles Lemert’s book ‘Social Things,’ too. My sociologist father gave it to
me for my birthday just after I’d defended my dissertation. Sadly, we lost him a few months
later and it’s precious to me for that reason, but it’s also a beautiful, humane book about
knowledge, compassion, and empathy.

Looking forward to your future posts too.

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