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Abstract

In this article I aim to provide a critical review of how sensemaking has featured in Management Learning and beyond, with wider reflections on productive tensions and unrealized possibilities for guiding future contributions to management research and practice. Relationships between learning and sensemaking have generally been considered as involving various processual tensions, but often conceptualized as productive tensions whereby they mutually inform, complement and rebalance each other. I argue that renewed engagement with these tensions in management can reveal unrealized possibilities for exploring what it means to be a knowing, learning, sensemaking subject in contemporary organizational environments. I organize my reflections based on the relationships between sensemaking and four other areas: (1) critical management studies, (2) reflexivity, (3) learning and (4) education. Going forward, sensemaking contributions in management may be best served by continuing to explore more diverse traditions and projects alongside and beyond the estimable contributions of Karl Weick.

Keywords

Critical management studies learning reflexivity sensemaking

Introduction

The ‘sensemaking perspective’ deployed in fields of organizational and management inquiry – inextricably bound up with the writings of Karl Weick – has grown into quite an intimidating body of work for scholars to confront. There has been an ongoing series of expansive reviews (e.g. Brown et al., 2015; Maitlis and Christianson, 2014; Sandberg and Tsoukas, 2015; Whittle et al., 2023), as well as many anniversary articles, essays and commentaries, including from Weick himself (e.g. Weick, 2016, 2020).

What does it mean at this juncture to go on learning with or about a sensemaking perspective, or to conceptualize ourselves as knowing, learning sensemaking subjects in relation to contemporary organizational – or, more properly, ‘organizing’ – environments? In this Management Learning anniversary article, I sketch out some brief responses to these questions, thinking through how sensemaking might be developed further or afresh via certain productive tensions and unrealized possibilities underlying some of the wider literature.

Interest in sensemaking shows little sign of abating. To the extent that there is a Weickian sensemaking ‘style’, it tends to involve heady, imaginative mixtures of psychology, philosophy, metaphor and even poetry, along with vivid case studies – almost always qualitative, narrative and interpretive – of organizational crisis and change (Czarniawska, 2005; Maitlis and Sonenshein, 2010). Sensemaking appeals to the relatable, universal, human and existential experience of encountering surprising or confusing events, trying to figure out what to do and what is going on, thereby creating meaning and action (or failing to do so) through intersubjective interactions with others.

Sensemaking emerged in the later decades of the 20th century to disrupt the rationality assumptions of organization theory, building on social constructionist and interpretivist views of reality (Kudesia, 2017). Its history is one involving many elaborations describing the processes by which actors organize their world, with major implications for organizational change, learning and identity (Kudesia, 2017). Sensemaking addresses interplays between actions and interpretations, instigated in situations that feel ‘different’ somehow (Sutcliffe, 2018). Sensemaking is a capability based on at least seven properties – socially-interactive, identity-based, retrospective, cue-extractive, ongoing, plausibility-based and environmentally-enacting (Weick, 1995). Organizations that more fully rehearse and enable these sensemaking properties and capabilities in their practices can be described as engaged in high reliability and mindful organizing to deal with unexpected and equivocal circumstances, constructing plausible stories of what is happening and beliefs about what to do next (Sutcliffe, 2018).

At the time of writing, Management Learning has published 11 articles with ‘sensemaking’ in the title. Considering these contributions alongside wider management and organization studies (MOS) literature on sensemaking, I present below brief reflections on further developing relationships between sensemaking and four other interrelated areas relevant to this journal and beyond: critical management studies, reflexivity, learning and education.

Sensemaking and Critical Management Studies (CMS)

There is arguably a tension between sensemaking and critical management studies (CMS), in that sensemaking perspectives can be applied to power, politics and ethics in organizations, and combined with relatively critical theories and methodologies, but without being fully incorporated into CMS traditions and normative commitments (Adler et al., 2007; Calvard, 2020). Indeed, Kudesia (2017) acknowledges this difficulty by asserting that sensemaking can only make descriptive claims about what organizational actors do, and not prescriptive claims about how they should behave. Yet at the same time, the ‘potentially harmful influence’ of sensemaking is emphasized, if we do not ‘participate responsibly’ with ‘commitment to our values and beliefs’ and ‘courage to doubt’ (Kudesia, 2017: 31).

One key development I would suggest has considerable unrealized potential in management is that of a ‘critical sensemaking’ approach (Aromaa et al., 2019; Helms Mills et al., 2010). Critical sensemaking extends Weick’s original theorizing to foreground the ways in which sensemaking may not be a democratic process and re-engages it with the emphasis of critical and poststructural theories on power, rules, knowledge, structures, discourses and past relationships. Critical sensemaking ‘positions sensemaking within a broader economic, political, societal and cultural context . . .[of] institutional frameworks, organizational premises, plans, acceptable justifications, and cultural traditions’ (Nardon and Hari, 2022: 22). Here, sensemaking contexts involve ‘structures that limit what can be imagined and done’ (Helms Mills et al., 2010: 189), and agency reflected in ‘how and why some, and not other, experiences become subjectively meaningful for people, particularly in relation to the notion of identity’ (Tomkins and Eatough, 2010, cited in Aromaa et al., 2019: 360).

Drawing these developments further into the mainstream of management contributions and establishing them there should help ensure productive tensions between sensemaking and critical theoretical perspectives on organizations, making possible more explicit normative links between sensemaking and inequality, power, conflict, ethics and sustainability. There is arguably unrealized potential in continuing to explore ‘sense-’ variants as part of a more critical sensemaking terminology and lexicon – acts of ‘sensebreaking’, ‘sensedemanding’ or ‘sensehiding’, for example (Maitlis and Christianson, 2014). In addition, whether we can link the epistemology of such sensemaking processes and activities to ethical judgements about the relative praiseworthy or blameworthy status of such actors and stakeholders (Baird and Calvard, 2019).

One relevant Management Learning study here is Fan and Dawson’s (2022) observational study of gossip and sensemaking in a British media firm. The findings emphasize the secretive and evaluative sensemaking properties of gossip on an informal, everyday basis, linking it to forms of learning and resistance about people, issues and events that can serve to paradoxically both challenge and reinforce existing organizational power relations (Fan and Dawson, 2022). Other more critical sensemaking research has focused on diversity discourses and narratives, showing how struggles for control over meaning and legitimacy unfold across the cultural and ethnic diversity represented in teamworking and hierarchical structures (Mikkelsen and Wåhlin, 2020; Tomlinson and Egan, 2002). More broadly, some management perspectives highlight how sensemaking can involve more deviation, conflict and fragmentation than previously assumed, where ‘sense’ in organizations is more fundamentally contested and destabilized (Alvesson and Jonsson, 2022; Vaara and Whittle, 2022).

Sensemaking and reflexivity

A second productive tension proposed here concerns the relationships between sensemaking and reflexivity. This relates back to the broader CMS project, in that reflexivity can be understood as a critical raising of awareness around how meaningful accounts of management arise from conditions associated with actors’ social positions and language, with some meanings becoming more dominant, while others are excluded (Adler et al., 2007).

At times, sensemaking processes may be reflexive to an extent, as actors are trying to understand and shape situations in which they are embedded (Brown et al., 2015). However, certain forms of self, social, relational, moral or critical reflexivity are clearly far from guaranteed (Hibbert and Cunliffe, 2015). Ironically, the sensemaking perspective itself, if used as a grand concept with broad application, risks closing off reflexivity and the reflexive use of other counter-concepts and perspectives (Alvesson and Jonsson, 2022).

In complex knowledge economies, the importance of being aware of how our viewpoints–and those of others – are socially situated and acting accordingly has arguably never been greater, our motives and subjectivities serving as an important reminder about how we interpret the world (Burke, 2012). Sensemaking is not always mentioned explicitly with reflexivity, but there are significant links in terms of intersubjectivity and understanding situations with diverse others in ways that allow us to think, act and create meaning together. The tension or challenge is that progressing ongoing accomplishments in practice with others ‘always involves multiple interpretations, plausible meanings, and competing interests’ (Hibbert and Cunliffe, 2015: 180).

I would suggest there is potential value in further developing these links between reflexivity and sensemaking. The critically reflexive paradox at the heart of sensemaking exists because, in trying to make more objective sense of something, we are inevitably constrained by the subjectivity our own sensemaking. Two ways to address this, proposed by Allard-Poesi (2005), are the postmodern route of deconstruction that accepts the contested nature of our sensemaking, and the pragmatist (or participative) route that adopts participative action research to recognize an array of socially constructed positions from organizational members and stakeholders.

These issues also continue to be reflected in how critical management scholars make sense of and performatively engage in dialogues and interventions associated with polarizing public, political and ethical issues (Parker and Racz, 2020). ‘Difficult conversations’ about topics like identity, diversity and justice can be navigated by mobilizing specialized forms of sensemaking that aim at enacting ‘productive disagreement’ (Yoshino and Glasgow, 2023). Regarding interactions between different types of organizational researchers and participants, there are also parallel discussions around how to engage in alternative, reflexive ways of theorizing and conversing with one another (Cutcher et al., 2020).

Situations of critical self-reflexivity can test people’s sensemaking capacity to its limits, but space can also be created to explore possibilities for empathy, perspective-taking and forgiveness (e.g. Calvard et al., 2023; Śliwa and Prasad, 2022). Ultimately, making better sense of reflexivity itself may require more cyclical, integrative movements, where we try to strike a balance between not becoming too inwardly self-absorbed, on the one hand, and not becoming too detached at the level of meta-positioning or process, on the other (Tomkins and Eatough, 2010). In a Management Learning article on big data (Calvard, 2016), I placed a similar broad emphasis on balancing forms of reflexivity within sensemaking processes to mitigate against careless or harmful misinterpretations arising from changes in data-driven organizational practices.

Sensemaking and learning

Learning and sensemaking have been described as existing in a close but oxymoronic relationship characterized in part by contradiction, because where sensemaking seeks to organize and reduce variety, learning tends to seek to disorganize and increase variety (Weick and Westley, 1999). From work to date, it seems that there are very productive tensions between sensemaking and learning, and still more unrealized potential in exploring how organizational actors experience the co-existence and iterative mediations between the two as they are conditioned in different forms and in different ways under different conditions.

Learning is, in some ways, a provocation to sensemaking because sensemaking collapses or failures in organizations relate to potential learning (or lack thereof) from rare events, disruptions and subsequent inquiries. To the extent that contemporary organizational contexts involve more complex, dynamic uncertainties and discontinuities, a stronger perspective emphasis on process and becoming also recasts sensemaking and learning in more dynamic terms, involving more movements, encounters, and ‘repunctuating’ shifts of attention (Colville et al., 2016).

Over long organizational timeframes, organizing frames seek to preserve order based on experience but are nevertheless continuously affected by cues entering the present, interacting with frames in ways that puncture sensemaking and invite doubt and anxiety, but also the possibility of improvement, accountability, culture change and learning (Colville et al., 2014). Similarly, but distinctively, as the period after a traumatic crisis or disastrous incident extends over time, post-incident sensemaking is tested through complex and emotional public inquiries, often involving many organizations, surfacing what was novel about the experience and shifting attention towards cues for single loop and double loop learning (Dwyer and Hardy, 2016).

Phenomenologically, sensemaking is linked to learning through continuous reenactment of sense and moments registered between episodes of different Heideggerian modes of being, coping and engagement with the world (Guiette and Vandenbempt, 2016). In other words, to truly learn from or about sensemaking tendencies requires a more holistic understanding of how actors experience mindful, metacognitive shifts between intersecting modes of reflection and engagement over time and in practice (Guiette and Vandenbempt, 2016; Kudesia, 2019).

In addition to more cognitive and practice-based forms of engagement, the sensory and affective qualities of the sensemaking-learning nexus also merit further research. In this regard, a Management Learning study of workplace meetings in a UK housebuilding firm explored how affective atmospheres could transform or constrain the potential for bodies to sense, act, and learn (Vitry et al., 2020). While some episodes were more confident but reductive (‘making sense to learn’), they were also co-existent with other episodes that involved more transformative atmospheres of doubt, surprise, shock and joy (‘learning to make sense differently’).

Sensemaking and education

A final productive tension in sensemaking research concerns its relationship with (management) education, as well as organizational training and managerial development more broadly conceived. Clearly, sensemaking is heavily implicated in adults’ educational experiences and developmental processes, but literature on such topics seems to be quite fragmented and not particularly explicit within management. It seems rare for direct or challenging questions to be asked about how people vary in their sensemaking capabilities and what types of interventions and experiences help or hinder the development of such capabilities. It may be that some of these issues can be captured to an extent using different terms or concepts, such as mindfulness, meaning-making and experiential learning.

However, Schwandt (2005) has sought to make more explicit connections between sensemaking, learning and managerial development. Complementary, symbiotic relationships between sensemaking and learning relate to how managers struggle with ‘learning to learn’ in their social contexts and how they deal with continuous challenging of their assumptions, testing their philosophical skills for ‘[c]reating, changing, or discarding sensemaking frameworks’ (Schwandt, 2005: 186). In management education and business schools, sensemaking that is too reductive, conformist, expedient or superficial risks, ironically, becoming relatively dehumanized and nonsensical, where engaging with a more humane sense of the absurd becomes an important sensemaking capability in its own right (Starkey et al., 2019).

In educational settings such as postgraduate business courses on coaching, improving individuals’ sensemaking capabilities involves exploring how adult learners respond to uncertainty and complexity, mediated by relationality and reflexivity, and to what extent they can meaningfully expand their professional identity across multiple contexts (Moore and Koning, 2016). When working in culturally diverse project teams, improved sensemaking also requires time for reflection–on stereotypical framings, conflict avoidance, and how cultural diversity affects performance–to better restore agency in the development of cross-cultural skills (Means and Mackenzie Davey, 2023).

Educational sensemaking experiences are inherently likely to involve anxiety and shock to some extent, when confronting alternative framings of a situation previously held to make sense differently. However, carefully facilitated conditions such as training simulations can make salient how individuals and teams might be stuck on a problematic or misleading sensemaking trajectory, without adaptive or resilient updating of their mental models in response to an evolving situation. While plausibility has traditionally been emphasized in sensemaking for helping people mobilize into action, in some contexts, accuracy and a ‘right answer’ may need to be salvaged from competing, plausible ‘good enough’ answers to prevent serious harm or accumulating negative consequences (Christianson, 2019).

A final point concerns the influential tradition of case studies, critical incidents and crisis management related to teaching with sensemaking materials. This has been seen as something of a bias or limitation in sensemaking research – a focus on dramatic breakdowns in sensemaking over more prosaic discrepancies and everyday moods pertaining to our openness to the unknown (Holt and Cornelissen, 2014). However, the two foci need not be mutually exclusive and could represent important areas of sensemaking capability that teach us to look at the same case in distinct ways, asking different questions about it (Holt and Cornelissen, 2014). It remains an open question how sensemaking might still be used in novel and valuable ways to describe evolving forms of crisis and incident cases, including, for example, disruptive experiences involving sophisticated technological developments in automation and artificial intelligence (e.g. Barros et al., 2023; Oliver et al., 2017).

Conclusion

In this article, I have sought to offer brief reflections on four interrelated areas where sensemaking research on management and organizations can further explore productive tensions and unrealized potentials – CMS, reflexivity, learning and education. Going forward, I perceive that sensemaking research will necessitate exploring and establishing further streams and projects alongside and beyond the estimable contributions of Karl Weick. Based on much of the literature considered in this article, I am also confident that future submissions to Management Learning can continue to play a significant role in shaping these endeavours.

Sensemaking research is evolving through different authors and philosophies, some tending towards a more phenomenological emphasis (e.g. Sandberg and Tsoukas, 2020) and others towards a more discursive, linguistic emphasis (e.g. Whittle et al., 2023). There is value in mining various Weickian roots of sensemaking in psychology and philosophy, but also in branching out to challenge, consolidate and refine the types of contributions that might be made. I would suggest the complex interplay between brain, body and world points to additional potential links between sensemaking and cognitive science, hermeneutics, epistemology, ideology, pragmatism and critical theory. A real challenge will be to show that sensemaking brings or adds something of its own to such areas that they might otherwise be lacking, although sensemaking has proved a robust and versatile descriptor of organizing phenomena to date, so there is no reason to believe it will not continue to shape and frame agendas.

Hopefully, this article has arranged some notable ideas in its own spirit of consolidation and connection, rather than more fragmentation, though it necessarily bears the imprint of the author’s own sensemaking efforts and preoccupations.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Thomas Calvard

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Sensemaking and Management Learning : Productive tensions and unrealized possibilities

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Sensemaking and Critical Management Studies (CMS)

Sensemaking and reflexivity

Sensemaking and learning

Sensemaking and education

Conclusion

Footnotes

Funding

ORCID iD

References