The art of thinking · 6 · Judgment, action and error

Sensemaking

Also known as: Sense-making, Organizational sensemaking, Sensemaking theory

In organizational and work psychology, sensemaking is the ongoing process by which people turn an ambiguous, unexpected or confusing situation into an account they can act on: they notice and bracket cues, label them, build a plausible story and test that story through action. The concept was developed by Karl E. Weick, who analyzed its breakdown in the 1949 Mann Gulch fire and set out seven properties of organizational sensemaking in his 1995 book — identity, retrospect, enactment, social contact, ongoing events, extracted cues and plausibility. A core claim of the perspective is that sensemaking runs on plausibility rather than accuracy, because an account only has to be good enough to support the next action. Related work in naturalistic decision making models the same process as a cycle between data and frames.

sensemaking
work psychology
judgment
uncertainty
crisis response

In one sentence

How people turn ambiguous or unexpected situations into a plausible account they can act on: Weick's sensemaking concept, evidence and limits.

Example

After an unexplained line stop with no matching alarm, the shift team assembled scattered cues — a changed material batch, a warm drive, an operator's remark — into a plausible account that let them restart production, and the service writer later turned that account into a troubleshooting topic with the cues named explicitly.

What the research shows

Origin and classic case. Weick's 1993 article in Administrative Science Quarterly analyzes the Mann Gulch smokejumper disaster as a collapse of sensemaking, and introduces the notion of a cosmology episode — a situation in which people's assumptions break down so badly that they doubt their own capacity to act.
Seven properties. In Sensemaking in Organizations (Sage, 1995), Weick describes sensemaking through seven properties: identity, retrospect, enactment, social contact, ongoing events, extracted cues and plausibility. Reviews of the book quote this list from page 3 and note that in practice plausibility matters more than accuracy.
Process definition. Weick, Sutcliffe and Obstfeld, writing in Organization Science in 2005, describe sensemaking as involving "the ongoing retrospective development of plausible images that rationalize what people are doing". The guiding questions of the perspective are usually rendered as what is going on here? and what do I do next?
Noticing, interpreting, acting. Maitlis and Christianson's 2014 review in The Academy of Management Annals defines sensemaking as the process through which people work to understand events that are novel, ambiguous, confusing or otherwise violate expectations, and organizes the literature around the interweaving of perceiving cues, interpreting and acting.
Data and frames. Independently of the organizational literature, Klein, Moon and Hoffman presented a data/frame model in IEEE Intelligent Systems (2006): a frame works as a hypothesis about how data connect, frames define what counts as data, and data in turn can force a frame to be elaborated, questioned or replaced. This strand comes from naturalistic decision making and macrocognition research rather than from organizational psychology.
Enactment. Because people act on their provisional account, their actions change the situation they are trying to understand. Sensemaking is therefore not pure interpretation of a fixed world; the account and the situation co-evolve.

Evidence status

Sensemaking is a perspective and a process theory, not a quantified laboratory effect. Its empirical base consists largely of interpretive field studies, interviews and retrospective case analyses of crises, change programs and high-risk work.
The literature is heterogeneous: Sandberg and Tsoukas, in a critical review in the Journal of Organizational Behavior (2015), work out what the perspective actually consists of and name its limitations, among them the loose use of "sensemaking" as concept, lens and theory at once.
The seven properties are a conceptual list, not independently measured factors. Different authors group them differently, and the relative weight of social, discursive and embodied aspects is still debated — Maitlis and Christianson explicitly call for more work on macro-level discourse.
Retrospective case studies carry a known risk of hindsight: an account reconstructed after an accident can look more coherent than anything available to people at the time. Read such case material as illustration, not as proof of a causal mechanism.
The organizational strand (Weick) and the macrocognitive strand (Klein and colleagues) share a name and overlap in substance, but they rest on different methods and traditions; do not cite one as evidence for the other.

How it applies

Write for the "what is going on?" moment. Troubleshooting and recovery information is read by people whose expectations have just been violated. Name observable cues (sounds, smells, codes, timing, what changed last) before offering explanations, so readers can anchor an account in something they can check.
Support reframing, not just lookup. Where several causes produce the same symptom, say so and give a discriminating test. A list that silently assumes one frame invites readers to keep confirming the wrong one.
Make the account testable. Structure diagnostic steps so each step yields an observation that either strengthens or breaks the current hypothesis, and state what the result means in both directions.
Carry the account across handovers. Shift logs, service reports and incident notes are sensemaking artifacts; templates that ask for cues observed, hypothesis held and actions already taken preserve more than a free-text field does.
Expect plausibility-driven reading. Users stop at the first explanation that lets them act. Put the consequential warnings and the stop conditions where that stopping point is, not only in a general safety chapter.
Review with post-incident material. Field reports, support tickets and accident findings show which cues people actually extracted and which frames they defaulted to; that is primary input for the next revision of a topic.
Keep the boundary clear. Designing information around sensemaking can make documentation easier to use under pressure. It does not make a product safe or an organization compliant, and it never replaces the risk assessment, the protective measures or the safety information that the applicable rules require.

Sensemaking vs. situation awareness

Both concepts describe how people understand an unfolding situation, but they come from different traditions and answer different questions. Situation awareness, as developed in human factors research, describes a state — what an operator currently perceives, comprehends and projects forward — and is typically measured by probing that state during a task. Sensemaking describes the process by which an account is built, often socially and after the fact, when existing expectations fail; its yardstick is plausibility and the ability to act, not correspondence with a measurable ground truth. In documentation work the two lead to different moves: supporting situation awareness means getting the right status information in front of the right person at the right time; supporting sensemaking means helping people assemble, question and revise an explanation.

External references

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