Arrested Sensemaking: Typified Suppositions Sink the El Faro

Abstract

When a perceptual order is turned into a conceptual order a disjunction between continuity and discontinuity is created. Sensemaking to manage this disjunction often consists of attributions of typicality formed intuitively or through deliberation. The details lost during this process can lead to further breakdowns. This process of “arrested sensemaking” is illustrated with a disaster at sea when a 790-foot container ship, the El Faro, sailed into the eye of a category 3 hurricane and capsized. All 33 crew members perished. The prevailing sense was that the rough seas were a “typical” storm, arresting sensemaking in the face of a looming disaster.

A thread among many discussions of sensemaking is that the process boils down to managing interruptions and recoveries, discontinuity and continuity, differences and sameness across situations. All three dualisms are connected by an ambiguous “and”, an ambiguity that sensemaking tries to address. John Dewey provides a frame for this “and”:

In every waking moment, the complete balance of the organism [system] and its environment is constantly interfered with and as constantly restored. Hence the ‘stream of consciousness’ in general, and in particular that phase of it celebrated by William James as alternation of flights and perchings. Life is interruptions and recoveries. . . (A)t these moments of a shifting activity conscious feeling and thought arise and are accentuated. (Dewey, 2008, p. 125)

Moments of shifting activity are moments of sensemaking. Dewey treats them as “habits turned inside out that exhibit both the onward tendency of habit and the objective conditions which have been incorporated within it” (Dewey, 2008, p. 127). Continued involvement with the interrupted activity occurs simultaneously with detached efforts to understand what needs restoring (Sandberg & Tsoukas, 2020). The outcomes of this deliberation often differ from the original activity that was interrupted, a disjunction that is easy to overlook. But when sensemaking itself is turned inside out, patterns in the disjunction become apparent, as do potential turning points where recovering can become even more difficult.

In the following analysis I examine sensemaking as an ongoing attempt to reconcile the continuity of experience with the discontinuity of understanding. Attempts at such reconciliation are illustrated with reference to the El Faro’s efforts to make sense of the relentless experience of unforgiving conditions. The El Faro is a representative anecdote (Burke, 1945, pp. 59–61) of how sensemaking may arrest the flow of continuous experience when the ship sailed into the eye of a category 3 hurricane named Joaquin. The continuity of Joaquin, the discontinuous supposition that they were sailing in a “typical” Alaskan storm, and an increasingly implausible effort to reconcile the two, sank the ship. The progression between these two and the arresting of sensemaking that happens – that is, of ongoing experience being stopped from doing further work – illustrates the dual role of typifications as both harbors and harbingers of sense, as well as non-sense.

At the root of the El Faro tragedy is a relation between a discontinuous thought (e.g., a typical winter day) and a continuous circumstance (e.g., a ship and hurricane converging toward a collision). Thinking of the circumstance in a particular way; i.e., typifying it, turned the “circumstances into a situation that is comprehensible and that serves as a springboard for action” (Taylor & Van Every, 2000, p. 40). But by making the circumstance more comprehensible in this way, many of its unique details were overlooked when “typical” became the dominant “engaged abstraction” (Sandberg & Tsoukas, 2020, p. 13). I examine the concept of sensemaking and the particulars of the El Faro disaster side by side, to suggest how typification and the abstracting it involves can generate arbitrary positions of arrest that further reduce adaptation and increase vulnerability. Such arrested sensemaking may be a form of “involved deliberation” or “practical coping” (Sandberg & Tsoukas, 2020), but feeds back on the process of experience itself, interrupting its continuity. Building on Sandberg and Tsoukas’s analysis of “involved deliberation,” I show how such a detached, discontinuous form of sensemaking can misdirect recovering from an interruption. The unfolding of that misdirection on the El Faro is chronicled in the next section.

Chronology of a Disastrous “Typical Day”

I begin with a brief summary of the El Faro incident.

As his container ship the El Faro wallowed inside the eyewall of hurricane Joaquin in the Atlantic Ocean, Captain Michael Davidson said: “This is a typical winter day in Alaska. We’re not pounding. . .I mean we’re not even rolling. We’re not even pitching” (Slade, 2018, p. 179). Having said this, Captain Davidson kept his 790-foot ship on his planned course from Jacksonville, Florida to San Juan, Puerto Rico even though that route took them close to a developing storm. Davidson reaffirmed this routing after he had been away from the bridge for 8 hours (8 pm to 4:09 am).

When he re-entered the bridge in the dark early morning of October 1, 2015, Davidson couldn’t tell wind direction or strength (the wind gauge was broken), and couldn’t explain the ship leaning to the right (starboard). At 4:09 am these are simply potential cues that can be assembled in multiple ways using frames, categories, and narratives or ignored. That patchwork of cues was made sensible when the situation was labeled “typical” and the activity became running the storm.

The attribution of “typical” became more and more suspect until the real problem was discovered, water filling up the hold of deck 3. Shortly after that discovery the engine, starved of oil that was sloshing around, shut down, which put the ship at the mercy of Joaquin. In this unforgiving context the ship turned over and sank, and with its 33-member crew came to rest 15,400 feet (2.9 miles) below on the sea bed.

To develop the chronology of the last 3½ hours that led to the sinking in more exact detail, I studied five authors – Slade (2018), Foy (2018), Frump (2018), Langewiesche (2018), and Korten (2018) – each one having written detailed accounts of this incident based on conversations captured on the recovered voice recorder, conversations I also reviewed. The authors also incorporated investigations by the coast guard and National Transportation Safety Board, attendance at post-incident hearings, and interviews with specialists who had expertise in specific aspects related to the sinking. I treat Captain Davidson’s sentence above of a “typical day,” consisting of one thought and one circumstance in one disaster, as a proxy for the experience of making ongoing sense under pressured conditions of engagement and detachment.

Before leaving Jacksonville on the night of September 29 (Foy, 2018, p. 51) Davidson knew that weather forecasters were having trouble predicting the path of the tropical disturbance that was to become hurricane Joaquin the next day. The storm seemed to be moving southwest whereas most disturbances move northeast. Davidson plotted his route to San Juan on the basis of the following misleading information. Data from the National Weather Service are 3 hours old, they are then crunched for 9 more hours by a commercial firm, Bon Voyage Graphics, before being sent to customers such as El Faro’s owner, TOTE. By mistake, Davidson was sent an out-of-date forecast which meant that he was plotting his route under the presumption that the disturbance was 21 hours further away from his route than it actually was (Frump, 2018, p. 84). The problem was even bigger than this because the National Weather Service later realized that their initial estimates were off by 500 miles and placed the path of the storm too far north too soon (Frump, 2018, p. 84).

Two routes were open to Davidson. First, a direct route through open sea for an entire trip of 1,265 miles. His heading would be 130 degrees. Second, he could take a longer route where islands would give him more protection from winds and seas. This longer route down the Old Bahama Channel would add 6 hours and 184 miles to his journey. Earlier in his experience, Davidson had chosen to sail a longer escape route to avoid hurricane Erika. This disturbance turned out to be a dud. He lost time (arriving 6 hours late) and 504 gallons of fuel. Loss of time and fuel is costly for contracts and profits and is remembered when the owners promote “less cautious” officers to newer ships (Slade, 2018, p. 24).

Joaquin became a named hurricane by 8:00 am the next morning on September 30, then rapidly intensified. By 11:00 pm that night, the storm had reached category 3 intensity with maximum sustained winds of 115 mph. That night Captain Davidson was away from the bridge in his stateroom for 8 hours (8:00 pm to 4:09 am). Before he left at 8:00 pm he changed course slightly “to avoid the low.” Slade (2018, p. 153) interprets this phrase as evidence of Davidson’s continuing refusal to call the disturbance a hurricane.

At 11:00 pm that night the latest forecast from the National Hurricane Center showed that, at 4:00 am, the El Faro would be 20 miles from the center of Joaquin with winds in excess of 100 mph. Officers on the bridge awakened the captain with this news. He presumed that the ship would be past the hurricane by that time, did not change course, and presumably went back to sleep (Slade, 2018, p. 156). Those who sail regularly in the Caribbean stay 300 miles away from hurricanes, but El Faro’s route would in this case come not much more than 40 miles from the eye (Korten, 2018, p. 89).

At 12:41 am later that night (now October 1) the second mate, even more worried about the converging paths of the ship and the storm, worked out a possible solution to avoid a head-on collision with the eye. She calls the captain at 1:20 am (Slade, 2018, p. 163). He again refuses to change course, assuming that they would pass Joaquin’s west side, a judgment based on an outdated weather forecast. They continue toward the eye. The course is 116 degrees “which is the worst possible course.” “He said to run it” (Slade, 2018, p. 165).

The engine slows at 2:15 am (Foy, 2018, p. 167).

At 2:47 am an officer on the bridge is surprised that the captain is not yet up there with them since Joaquin’s seas are beginning to control the ship. The other officer says, “I’m surprised – he said he was gonna come up” (Slade, 2018, p. 166).

At 3:45 am, in the opinion of author George Foy, himself holding a coastal captain’s license, “a mariner would not find much amiss except perhaps her heading: a big ship moving strong, confidently steered into darkness” (Foy, 2018, p. 170).

At 4:09 am Davidson enters the bridge and says, “there’s nothing bad about this ride. I’ve been sleeping like a baby. . .well, this is every day in Alaska, this is what it’s like” (Foy, 2018, pp. 174–175). Chief mate Steven Schultz (also a Master) says, “that’s what I said when I walked up here.” Davidson repeats that it is a typical winter day. “I mean we’re not even rolling. We’re not even pitching. We’re not pounding.”

Schultz then adds that he didn’t sleep as well. “The ride of the ship bothers me a little” (Frump, 2018, p. 99). Davidson adds that it’s just like “wind gusts” in Alaska (p. 100).

At 4:12 am Schultz mentions a slight tilt to starboard that is attributed to wind blowing against the stacks of containers, rather than to an imbalance in weight (Korten, 2018, p. 112).

At 4:22 am Davidson says, “it sounds a lot worse up here.” He says this again at 5:03 am (Frump, 2018, p. 101). And again at 5:16.

There is growing confusion on the bridge about what should be happening. The winds are blowing against the port side (left) which means that the El Faro is entering the northern eyewall of a hurricane that is circling counterclockwise. However, Davidson thinks that they are on the south side of a hurricane that is circling away from them. But, if they were on the south side, then winds should be blowing against the starboard side and tipping them in the opposite direction (Korten, 2018, p. 113).

To add to this confusion, there are conflicting weather forecasts (Slade, 2018, p. 185). The forecast that Davidson had used all night in his stateroom “was off by at least 6 hours” compared to the forecast from a different source that was printed on the bridge (Korten, 2018, p. 114) and put them much closer to the eye. This suggests that Davidson’s claim of a “typical” day, uttered in complete darkness without a wind direction gauge, would be based on the assumption that a weaker Joaquin was located at least 6 hours farther away from the ship.

At 5:10 am Davidson repeats the “typical day” comment (Korten, 2018, p. 115), suggesting that he’s still unclear about what the wind discrepancy means.

At this point, the eye of the hurricane is 40 miles straight ahead of them, which means that they are on the northern edge of the eyewall, which is the more dangerous part (Korten, 2018, p. 115).

There is now a noticeable shift in Davidson’s comments about this being a “typical day.” He poses the phrase “typical day” as a question. Davidson asks, “This is what it’s like every day in Alaska?” Schultz answers: “Yeah, you get 70 days of this up there” (Frump, 2018, p. 102).

They are now joined by Jeff Mathias (supervisor of a five-person Polish welding crew on board) who says, “I’ve never seen it list [i.e., lean over] like this. Never seen it hang like this.” A short while later Mathias again says, “I’ve never, ever seen it hang like this” (Frump. 2018, p. 102). What he means is that when the ship rolls to the right, it isn’t coming back up to center. Davidson asks, “Never?” and adds that there is enough sail area to cause such a list (Slade, 2018, p. 187).

At 5:16 for the third time Davidson says, “It sounds so much worse up here” (Frump, 2018, p. 103).

Davidson then asks Schultz another question: “Are the seas like this in Alaska?” Schultz answers: “Not exactly the same. The seas stack up high in Alaska, you run more or less straight into the seas. You don’t have the confusion of hurricane conditions, the chaos. You know where the waves are. You can meet them straight on.” “Yup,” says Davidson (Frump. 2018, p. 103).

At 5:18 Davidson says, “It’s only going to get better from here on, we’re on the back side of it.”

At 5:43 there is the first realization that water is collecting in the third deck and is causing the listing of the ship (Foy, 2018, p. 185).

At 5:59 someone mentions that “a scuttle between decks 2 and 3 popped open and water is pouring from deck 2 into the 3 hold.”

At 6:13 there is sudden silence as the engine shuts down. “I think we just lost the plant” (Foy, 2018, p. 191). At this point the eye of Joaquin is 25 miles southeast of the ship.

At 6:31 Davidson says, “We have a flooding list and are disabled and adrift.”

At 7:08 the second mate tells Davidson “It’s 48 miles to San Salvador which is our closest point to land.”

At 7:18 Davidson tells the second mate to “push the S-S-A-S button.” This is the ship security alert system and is an appeal for rescue intended to contact forces and dispatchers. The basic use is as an alarm in piracy zones. The second mate calls it a “distress button.”

By this time the crew had all left their rooms and were standing on the starboard side of the ship which was now horizontal, awaiting the order to launch lifeboats and abandon ship. That order came at 7:29 am. “Alright, let’s go ahead and ring it – ring the abandon ship.”

The last remarks on the voice recorder were those of Captain Davidson telling his helmsman that he was not going to leave him and that the helmsman should keep trying to climb upward from the corner in which he had become wedged because the bridge was now vertical. The captain and the helmsman are still on the bridge when the recording stops.

The ship turned over and sank 46 nautical miles southeast of San Salvador. One of the containers that was dislodged during the sinking broke open. It was filled with dolls and left a 20-mile trail of floating dolls near the site of the sinking (Langewiesche, 2018, p. 11).

Conceptualizing the Chronology

A dramatic conceptual rendering of the preceding chronology is Robert Chia’s observation that “Human decisions and actions are therefore not so much deliberate choices as they are arbitrary ontological ‘incisions’ made. . .to temporarily stabilize an ever fluxing and changing world in order to render it more predictable and hence more livable” (Chia, 2014, p. 20).

Arbitrary incisions on the El Faro were made by a captain who had sailed between Tacoma, Washington and Anchorage, Alaska for 15 years, close to a shoreline that buffered winds. The attribution of “typical” concealed non-typical details such as the persistent lean to the starboard side. These neglected details became more salient when an experienced mariner (Mathias) confirmed that the starboard leaning was sustained, real, and extreme and could not be explained away by wind blowing against the containers.

Davidson’s supposition of a “typical” storm substitutes an abstract conceptual order for the current perceptual order of torrential rain, noise from winds, and repeated auto-pilot alarms as the seas push the ship off course. The seas spun within Joaquin’s counterclockwise eyewall, are made less troublesome because Davidson never called them a “hurricane.” Instead, he kept referring to them as a “system,” “low,” “disturbance,” “storm,” but never a “hurricane” (Slade, 2018, p. 41) These alternative names reduce the gravity of the situation and its threat to the original planned route. So, it “makes sense” to run the storm.

Sandberg and Tsoukas (2020) suggest that sensemaking shifts among absorbed coping where cognition is incarnate in immanent practice to a more deliberate involvement when coping is interrupted and momentarily made sense of. My focus on involved deliberation assumes that immanent and detached are derivative from it. “Being-in-the-world” is treated as “Being-in-a-world” which changes into “Being-around-a-world.” When Davidson describes their present condition with the alternative names mentioned he also continues to steer a moving vessel. He now is both performing an activity and paying specific attention to it from the outside. His situation is one of being involved in both pressing ahead and looking back to see what the situation has become (Sandberg & Tsoukas, 2020, p. 12). It is this attending to activity, now turned inside out, where forecasts, perceptions and remembrances are pragmatically examined amid practical coping.

The distinguishing feature of the involved component is that, although the performance of an ongoing activity may have been interrupted, it does not come to a complete standstill. Instead, agents typically continue striving to perform their activity but are now required to “pay deliberate attention to the contextual features of the troublesome situation in order to find out how to restore the interrupted activity” (Sandberg & Tsoukas, 2020, p. 12).

Further breakdowns may occur because what is being restored is not “THE” interrupted activity” but “AN” activity. A restored activity tends to be built out of fewer cues and rejoins a streaming circumstance that has moved on. For example, Davidson singles out the rough ride from the El Faro’s noisy, less buoyant wallowing in Joaquin’s eyewall. The ride becomes the primary contextual detail that is managed conceptually into a typical rough ride that is common to storms. Since this ship has made it through other storms, there is no reason to think the current circumstance is any different. The circumstance to which this framing is linked is one where a steady loss of control, slowing speed, and reduced buoyancy is not the same world that was interrupted.

The distinguishing feature of the deliberation component is that it is detached. Detachment occurs when agents focus upon a distinct experience (e.g., the ride) from the outside in. They

thematize its temporality. . .through the retrospective–prospective temporal dimensions. Time is no longer practical. . .but pragmatically chronological. The temporal continuum is split into the familiar regions of past, present, and future in order for past patterns of action to be reflected on and future action to be envisaged and planned (Sandberg & Tsoukas, 2020, p. 14).

While such detached deliberation can be “split into familiar regions” (Sandberg & Tsoukas, 2020), it can also be synthesized into a singular figure that combines the present and what-was-then. Such a synthesis was conceptualized by Walter Benjamin as “dialectics at a standstill” (Osborne & Charles, 2021). The relation of the past to the present is clearly chronological, but what-was-then is never not present (Introna, 2019, p. 751) and is blended into the suppositions that actors make. A dialectical image creates “virtual objectivity” much like an astrological constellation creates virtual objectivity for a grouping of stars. A named constellation of stars resembles a named constellation of incised sensemaking cues. The grouping creates an outline for suppositions to be converted into sensible storylines.

Davidson’s reconfiguring of cues into the “constellation” of a typical storm, co-mingles distinctive Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Each ocean lost some of its character in this process. While agents try to stay involved during deliberation, the deliberating imposes an arrest on portions of that involvement in order to transform “an indeterminate situation into one that is sufficiently unified so that a coherent course of action can be anticipated” (Lorino, 2018, p. 103).

As the next section shows, the attribution of “typical” in this way facilitates such anticipating, which is a defining quality that holds immanent practice together but because it “arrests” sensemaking it is at the same time the site of many breakdowns.

Typifications and Abstractions

When Davidson explains their circumstance as like a “typical winter day in Alaska,” he is separating the same from different and is dwelling on his past experiences, storylines, and constellations he is familiar with. Such typifications are similarly present in cases such as the Stockwell incident (Colville, Pye, & Carter, 2013; Cornelissen, Mantere, & Vaara. 2014) where an electrician entering the Stockwell, London, tube station, was judged sufficiently similar to a photograph of a known terrorist, that he was labeled as a suicide bomber, and killed. Language may also feed such assessments, such as when “likeness” in our discourse is easily conflated with “likelihood,” or pregnant possibility (Cornelissen, Mantere, & Vaara. 2014, p. 716). A rough ride in the Atlantic Ocean that resembles an Alaskan winter storm and is then called to be like one increases the likelihood that this “is” an Alaskan winter storm.

The issue for sensemaking is that, when you call things the same, you seldom take a closer look (e.g., the Stockwell electrician purchased a Metro newspaper before getting onto the train, an unlikely act for a suicide bomber). Anomalies are easy to overlook since “Anomalies mix [the] same and different” (Macrae, 2014, p. 13). Despite anomalies on the El Faro such as the starboard lean, the wind pushing against the “wrong” side, and cargo breaking loose, these disruptions were interpreted as instantiations of a “familiar” storm. And the language used in this interpreting supported the assumption of typicality. Remember, Davidson never called his circumstance a “hurricane.”

“Typical” is generally an answer to the question, “What’s the story?” In the case of the El Faro, the story becomes “We are sailing through typical seas that are rough but livable.” Answers grounded in typicality are finite, and often recognizably so, but they can gain plausibility and persist, creating a disjunction between ongoing streaming and an arrested development in sensemaking, or stasis. Updating (Christianson, 2019) reduces the size of this disjunction, persistence increases it when circumstances are complex and fast changing. Persistence, thus, increases the likelihood of severe, irreversible breakdowns.

To call something “typical” is not just to supply a story, however. It is also a means to cope with complexity.

We cannot live meaningfully, consciously, in a world of pure becoming. The flux must be ordered and the uniqueness and diversity of life must be suppressed. We do this by seeing our experiences as typical and by taking for granted their objective status – we do not question the genesis of meanings or their objectivity (Thomason, 1982, p. 94).

When applied to El Faro’s fateful development, Thomason’s pattern of suppression fits Davidson’s effort of minimizing the diverse details of a hurricane that is moving south rather than more typically north. And, as Thomason suggests, Captain Davidson is reluctant to question the genesis or objectivity of his interpretation, despite the misgivings of the crew.

Although seeing something as “typical” smoothens sensemaking, its emphasis on “sameness” comes at a price. Concepts artificially separate the same from different and in doing so disentangle their intertwined nature. “What we call confusion is what concepts keep apart. . .(since) in reality same and different compenetrate” (James, 1987, p. 748.). Typifications, as part of practical coping or involved deliberation (Sandberg & Tsoukas, 2020), involve perceptions being converted into abstractions that interrupt the flow of experience and any alternative insights it may provide. During this conversion “A story” becomes “THE story.” A plausible sequence by which such continuous perceptions are, through typifications and abstractions converted into discontinuous “facts”, is found in Robert Irwin’s (2011, pp. 164–84) concept of “compounded abstraction.”

During this activity of compounding, perceptual flux is steadily abridged until it becomes treated as a formalized fact. The progression begins with perception (a synthesis of undifferentiated sensations), followed by conception (an initial crude differentiation into unnamed zones of focus), form (specific zones of focus are named, treated as entities, and communicated), formful (those named entities are related, compared, and preserved as patterns), formal (such patterns get reified, e.g., the pattern of above and below is reified into superior/subordinate), and finally formalism (reifications are treated as factual truths, e.g., “This IS a typical winter day”).

Irwin’s progression implies that when initial typifications (conception) of what we assume to be the case are subsequently given more definite “form,” and treated as fixed and real, we are actually dealing with an abstraction that is the farthest removed from the originating perception and concepts (Irwin, 2011, p. 193). An actual hurricane in the Atlantic Ocean is typified and undergoes increasingly misplaced abstraction when it is named, reassembled relationally, and treated as factual: “This IS a typical winter day in Alaska.” When an abstraction is compounded in the direction of formalism, however, it is both a “monstrous abridgement and a (plausible) equivalent for some partial aspects of the full perceptual reality” (James, 1996, p. 96). That word “equivalent” points to considerable leeway in the sense that is made as a result. Joaquin’s seas, consisting of warmer, uncontained, hurricane-driven, chaotic swirls, are treated as equivalent in some abstract (but flawed) sense to rough but orderly distinct waves that form in the icy seas near Alaska. That limited albeit believable equivalence normalizes and formalizes, but it also discourages further curiosity, reflection and active thought.

Sensemaking as Engaged Abstraction

If we recontextualize the preceding features into a singular notion of sensemaking, then sensemaking is part of the basic “phenomenological struggle to organize experience” (Holt & Cornelissen, 2014, p. 528). The nature of this struggle is suggested by William James and captures my arguments about arrested sensemaking:

The essence of life is its continuously changing character, but our concepts are all discontinuous and fixed and the only mode of making them coincide with life is arbitrarily supposing positions of arrest therein. With such arrests our concepts may be made congruent. But these concepts are not parts of reality, not real positions taken by it, but suppositions rather, notes taken by ourselves (James, 1987, p. 746).

James’ description calls attention to properties of sensemaking that include continuous change, change stabilized into discontinuous positions of arrest by arbitrary suppositions, meaning being formed in the form of suppositions that are “congruent” with the continuous change, and individual notes created by ourselves as the repository of the arresting and the arrested. Another way of framing this is that when a cue is singled out it is nonsense. It becomes more sensible when it is framed by a predicate. That predicate tends to be an idealized general type (Jeong & Brower, 2008, p. 231) that is elaborated and arrests a portion of streaming experience. The impression that continuity and discontinuity are reconciled in this way, however, does not “grasp” reality, as James puts it. This is why sensemaking is often described as a plausible approximation of streaming events.

To make sense involves contextualizing a particular cue or experience by means of “the ongoing retrospective development of plausible images that rationalize what people are doing” (Weick, 2008, p. 1403). Davidson senses ongoing noise and a rolling sea, develops those passing cues into the image of a plausible day in Alaska, and adopts that image as a sufficient reason for continuing with El Faro’s current route. He stabilizes this image by elaborating what the ship is not doing, namely, not pounding, rolling or pitching which it would be doing if the current route were truly dangerous.

A formal statement of this struggle to organize experience is suggested by Maitlis and Christianson (2014, p. 13); sensemaking is “a process prompted by violated expectations, that involves attending to and bracketing cues in the environment, creating intersubjective meaning through cycles of interpretation and action, and thereby enacting a more ordered environment from which further cues can be drawn.”

When the El Faro incident is examined with the help of this definition, it is clear that cues were noticed, bracketed, and made sensible. What is less clear are what expectations were being violated, the extent to which meanings were “intersubjective,” and whether interpretations and actions were recycled to uncover further cues. All three of these ambiguities are symptomatic of the struggle between involvement and detachment, between continuity and discontinuity, and I have argued that typifications that arrest sensemaking should not be overlooked.

To take a closer look at sensemaking and at typicality as a meaning that binds, we also need to consider Captain Davidson himself. As Colville and colleagues (2013, p. 1218) mention, “the meaning of what is going on is tied to who is going on and what action follows.” Davidson understood the experience that he was having of heavy weather to be that of a typical winter storm. That understanding, coupled with his rank, played a significant role in the disaster (Weick, 1995), but rank alone probably does not explain the sense that sank them. Nor do noted attributes of the sensemaking process (as social, identity based, retrospective, involving cues, ongoing in nature, plausibility and enactment (Weick, 1995, pp. 17–62)) fully capture the process that played out in this case. In their second-order sensemaking of the case, investigators of the disaster focused on Captain Davidson. They concluded such things as he “‘misjudged the path of hurricane Joaquin’ [so did forecasters]; ‘overestimated the vessel’s heavy weather survivability’ [known only in retrospect]; ‘failed to take adequate precautions to monitor and prepare for heavy weather’ [plausible, but he judged that heavy weather was farther away]; and that he ‘failed to understand the severity of the situation even when watch standers warned him’ [plausible, but only Mathias pressed the case and Davidson’s earlier experience with predicted hurricane Erika was that it didn’t materialize]” (Korten, 2018, p. 242). Five verbs in that summary describe activities of sensemaking: judge, estimate, monitor, prepare, understand. All five intimately depend on producing suppositions, abstractions, and positions of arrest. Typifications, the abstractions they lead to, and the positions of arrest that they create constitute sensemaking. This holds true for the crew of the El Faro as well as for Captain Davidson.

Conclusion

El Faro is a story of figurative as well as literal winds. “The winds of the situation. . . [are] a potential source of surprise and novelty, fear and hope” (Lorino, 2018, p. 104). All these possibilities were present when El Faro’s environment was enacted as the southwest side of a storm that was being passed. That enactment turned out to be wrong. The cues that continued to be noticed raised increasing doubts about the accuracy of that location and the safety of the crew, but most of these cues were nonetheless assimilated into the prevailing plausible position of arrest that implied a safe passage.

“Running the storm” is a metaphorical digest of sensemaking under pressure. “Running” is the engaged continuous involvement, “the storm” is the abstract discontinuous position of arrest. Connecting the two is something more than a blunt subject–object juxtaposition. There is active substituting, coarse reconciliation, discursive justification, a resort to typification, and a synthesis into dialectical images that hold it all together.

Given the preceding analysis, it is evident that sensemaking never stops (Weick, 1995, p. 45). It is also evident that the perspective on sensemaking underlying the present analysis remains “mainly cognitive-discursive and involves engaged abstraction that generates conceptual sense of the troublesome activity” (Sandberg & Tsoukas, 2020, p. 13). That description, originally limited to descriptions of detached deliberation, has here been enlarged, supplemented, and treated as the core of an intellectual sensemaking process. That description also links with James’ assertion that “The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of a conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes” (James, 1996, pp. 49–51).

Given a perspective infused with cognition, discourse, abstraction, and conceptual sense, the El Faro case adds richness and nuance to discussions of sensemaking in the following ways. These include:

1. Sensemaking is an imbalance between continuity and discontinuity.

2. Being-in-the-world is an interruptible structure of anticipations.

3. Incisions are pragmatic efforts to stabilize change and structure ongoing experience.

4. Abstractions gather cues in a manner similar to astrological constellations.

5. Discursive suppositions are biased toward typicality.

6. Positions of arrest are prospective as well as retrospective.

7. Plausible explanations may resist updating, are grounded in perceived equivalence, and are individually affirmed which can make social construction more difficult.

8. Recovery from interruptions is approximate.

9. Materiality matters (e.g., stacks of containers act as sails).

Suggestions such as these nine are consistent with the nature of process thinking, namely that “reality is assumed to be perpetually fluxing, changing, and undifferentiated. Pattern, order, identity, and coherence are exceptional stabilizations and deemed to emerge as a consequence of human action, interactions, and interventions into the flux of reality” (Chia, 2017, p. 594). Flux mixes the novel and familiar and it remains for sensemaking to reassemble that mix into emphases, sufficiency, narratives, and common sense that are made substantive by actions intended to validate them (Weick, 2021). But these intentions do not rule out the possibility of an amplification of flux, further detached abstraction, and greater vulnerability.

Finally, positions of arrest in the El Faro disaster contributed to its destiny. “Destiny” and sensemaking are words that seldom occur together. And yet they jointly articulate a perspective on the El Faro tragedy. Alfred North Whitehead speaks to the linkage:

The essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things. This inevitableness of destiny can only be illustrated in terms of human life by incidents which in fact involve unhappiness. For it is only by them that the futility of escape can be made evident in the drama (Whitehead, 1925, p. 15).

Those are stark phrases: “remorseless working of things,” “inevitableness of destiny,” “the futility of escape.” None of these phrases are common in discussions of sensemaking. And yet the process of sensemaking itself is relentless, inevitable, and inescapable. El Faro suggests the remorseless working of winds, seas, converted vessels, and most of all, sensemaking itself. This is evident in the search for stability, the imposition of positions of arrest, the comingling of continuity and discontinuity, and the reliance on optional descriptions. Sensemaking, in other words, is a means to bring destiny into being; to bring forth what not only may but is bound to transpire.

To make the fixed coincide with the flowing may create sense for short intervals but, when extended, this imagined coincidence increases the separation between living forward into experience and understanding that experience backward, later. When positions of arrest are lengthened, they become indistinguishable from destiny itself.

Captain Michael Davidson wanted the world to add up. But that desire was not enough to override the suppositions that constrained his decisions. Finite sense is immanent in the finitude of the human condition.