p.286 Organizations must make interpretations. Managers literally must wade into the ocean of events that surround the organization and actively try to make sense of them. Organization participants physically act on these events, attending to some of them, ignoring most of them, and talking to other people to see what they are doing (Braybrooke, 1964). Interpretation is the process of translating these events, of developing models for understanding, of bringing out meaning, and of assembling conceptual schemes among key managers.
 The interpretation process in organizations is neither simple nor well understood. There are many interpretation images in the literature... These concepts can be roughly organized into three stages that constitute the overall learning process... The first stage is scanning, which is defined as the process of monitoring the environment and providing environmental data to managers. Scanning is concerned with data collection... Interpretation occurs in the second stage... Data are given meaning... Learning, the third stage, is distinguished from interpretation by the concept of action. Learning involves a new response or action based on the interpretation (Argyris & Schon, 1978).

p.288 The enacting mode [of interpretation] reflects both an active, intrusive strategy and the assumption that the environment is unanalyzable. These organizations construct their own environments. They gather information by trying new behaviors and seeing what happens. They experiment, test, and stimulate, and they ignore precedent, rules, and traditional expectations.

p.290 [Data Sources] Managers in enacting organizations... will use personal observations to a large extent, although this information often will be obtained through experimentation and from trying to impose ideas on the environment.

p.290 [Data Acquisition] The enacting organization... will use data that are somewhat irregular and will reflect feedback about selected environmental initiatives.

p.291 Interpretation pertains to the process by which managers translate data into knowledge and understanding about the environment. This process will vary according to the means for equivocality reduction and the assembly rules that govern information processing behavior among managers.

p.291 [Equivocality Reduction] The enacting organization... will experience high equivocality, which will be reduced more on the basis of taking action to see what works than by interpreting events in the environment.

p.292 [Assembly Rules] The equivocality in interpreting the success of initiatives in the enacting organization will be associated with the moderate number of assembly rules and information cycles.

p.292 [Strategy Formulation] The prospector strategy reflects a high level of initiative with regard to the environment. The environment is seen as changing and as containing opportunities. The organization develops new products and undertakes new initiatives. This is consistent with the enacting mode of interpretation.

p.292 [Decision Making] In enacting organizations... a more assertive decision style will appear. The enacting organization does not have precedent to follow. A good idea, arrived at subjectively, may be implemented to see if it works. Enacting organizations utilize the trial and error incremental process described by Mintzberg et al. (1976). When organizations decide on a course of action, they design a custom solution and try it. If the solution does not work, they have to recycle and try again. Enacting organizations move ahead incrementally and gain information about the environment by trying behaviors and seeing what works.

p.293 The purpose of this paper is to present a model of organizations as interpretation systems and to bring together a number of ideas that are related to interpretation behavior. The two variables underlying the model are (1) management's beliefs about the analyzability of the external environment and (2) organizational intrusiveness. These variables are consistent with empirical investigations of interpretation behavior (Aguilar, 1967; Wilensky, 1967), and they are the basis for four modes of interpretation - enacting, discovering, undirected viewing, and conditioned viewing.

p.294 Interpretation is the process through which information is given meaning and actions are chosen.