How to Do Things With Words

Sensemaking involves turning circumstances into a situation that is comprehended explicitly in words and that serves as a springboard into action. In this paper we take the position that the concept of sensemaking fills important gaps in organizational theory. The seemingly transient nature of sensemaking belies its central role in the determination of human behavior, whether people are acting in formal organizations or elsewhere. Sensemaking is central because it is the primary site where meanings materialize that inform and constrain identity and action. The purpose of this paper is to take stock of the concept of sensemaking. We do so by pinpointing central features of sensemaking, some of which have been explicated but neglected, some of which have been assumed but not made explicit, some of which have changed in significance over time, and some of which have been missing all along or have gone awry. We sense joint enthusiasm to restate sensemaking in ways that make it more future oriented, more action oriented, more macro, more closely tied to organizing, meshed more boldly with identity, more visible, more behaviorally defined, less sedentary and backward looking, more infused with emotion and with issues of sensegiving and persuasion. These key enhancements provide a foundation upon which to build future studies that can strengthen the sensemaking perspective.

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Organizing and the Process of Sensemaking

Mind, Self and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist

Sensemaking is the process through which people work to understand issues or events that are novel, ambiguous, confusing, or in some other way violate expectations. As an activity central to organizing, sensemaking has been the subject of considerable research which has intensified over the last decade. We begin this review with a historical overview of the field, and develop a definition of sensemaking rooted in recurrent themes from the literature. We then review and integrate existing theory and research, focusing on two key bodies of work. The first explores how sensemaking is accomplished, unpacking the sensemaking process by examining how events become triggers for sensemaking, how intersubjective meaning is created, and the role of action in sensemaking. The second body considers how sensemaking enables the accomplishment of other key organizational processes, such organizational change, learning, and creativity and innovation. The final part of the chapter draws on areas of difference and debate h...

Sensemaking in Organizations: Taking Stock and Moving Forward

Our knowledge of corporate entrepreneurship (CE) continues to expand. However, this knowledge remains quite fragmented and non–cumulative. Herein, we conceptualize CE strategy as a useful focal poi...

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm?abstractid=1321533

Conceptualizing Corporate Entrepreneurship Strategy

How to react to an unexpected and challenging situation that has never been thought of before it happened? A situation for that no checklist exists and no training could be performed? The EU-funded project Man4Gen, Manual Operations of 4th Generation Airliners, which has been successfully completed in 2016, employed human-in-the-loop simulation as an e�ective tool used to analyze the crew response in unexpected and ambiguous
situations. Based on an exploratory simulator study on the crews' behavior during these situations the so-called Risk Information System was developed to support crews in their decision-making and problem solving. The paper gives an overview of the conduction and results of the exploratory simulator study leading to the development of the Risk Information System. The system's new philosophy of displaying failures is explained and the results of its proof-of-concept evaluation are shown.

Managing the unexpected

Although managerial practices are often structured with the explicit goal of improving performance by increasing employee well-being, these practices frequently create tradeoffs between different dimensions of employee well-being, whereby one aspect of employee well-being improves but another aspect of employee well-being decreases. We call attention to the multi-dimensional nature of well-being and highlight the importance and prevalence of these well-being tradeoffs. Our review sheds new light on the effects of managerial practices on employee well-being, and offers guidelines for managing and mitigating well-being tradeoffs.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/27747391

Happiness, Health, or Relationships? Managerial Practices and Employee Well-Being Tradeoffs

The collapse of the roof of the Baltimore & Ohio (B&O) Railroad Museum Roundhouse onto its collections during a snowstorm in 2003 provides a starting point for our exploration of the link between learning and rare events. The collapse occurred as the museum was preparing for another rare event: the Fair of the Iron Horse, an event planned to celebrate the 175th anniversary of American railroading. Our analysis of these rare events, grounded in data collected through interviews and archival materials, reveals that the issue is not so much what organizations learn “from” rare events but what they learn “through” rare events. Rare events are interruptions that trigger learning because they expose weaknesses and reveal unrealized behavioral potential. Moreover, we find that three organizing routines---interpreting, relating, and re-structuring---are strengthened and broadened across a series of interruptions. These organizing routines are critical to both learning and responding because they update understanding and reduce the ambiguity generated during a rare event. Ultimately, rare events provoke a reconsideration of organizational identity as the organization learns what it knows and who it is when it sees what it can do. In the case of the B&O Railroad Museum, we find that the roof collapse offered an opportunity for the organization to transform its identity from that of a museum to that of an attraction.

Learning Through Rare Events: Significant Interruptions at the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Museum

Summary This study assessed the applicability of current theories of reliability in dynamic settings by exploring the sensemaking processes experienced by a sample of medical residents around lapses in reliability of patient care. Important differences in lapses surfaced, particularly with respect to whether actors were aware that a lapse was occurring in real-time and whether there was anything they could do or say to mitigate or prevent the lapse. In over half of the incidents recounted, the actors did not become aware of the lapse in reliability until after the consequence of the lapse had occurred or the consequence occurred simultaneously with the recognition of the lapse. In other incidents, they faced a critical moment in which they had to decide whether and how to act to intervene in real-time. In the majority of these critical moments, residents had an issue of concern to voice that could have helped mitigate or correct the lapse but instead they remained silent. Issues related to identity and relationships appeared to either inhibit or promote voice during critical moments. We end with ideas for how our findings can inform existing work on reliability in healthcare and the growing literature on voice and silence in organizations. Copyright # 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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Marlys K. Christianson

Papers

Sensemaking in Organizations: Taking Stock and Moving Forward

Managing the unexpected

Happiness, Health, or Relationships? Managerial Practices and Employee Well-Being Tradeoffs

Learning Through Rare Events: Significant Interruptions at the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Museum

A sensemaking lens on reliability