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xi The topic on which this book is focused, sensemaking, is best described as a developing set of ideas with explanatory possibilities, rather than as a body of knowledge. This means that the topic exists in the form of an ongoing conversation, which is just how this book is written.
xi I have tried to write this book so that, if you read it intensely, lay it aside, and then immediately think about a topic of your own choosing, you will be thinking about that topic for at least a short while, as if it were a topic that involves sensemaking. [JLJ - Ok, let's read this book, lay it aside, then think about computer chess, and see what happens...]
xii The sensemaking perspective is a frame of mind about frames of mind that is best treated as a set of heuristics rather than as an algorithm.
p.4 The concept of sensemaking is well named because, literally, it means the making of sense. Active agents... "structure the unknown"
p.4 When people put stimuli into frameworks, this enables them "to comprehend, understand, explain, attribute, extrapolate, and predict" (Starbuck & Milliken, 1988, p. 51).
p.4-5 Meryl Louis (1980)... views sensemaking as a thinking process that uses retrospective accounts to explain surprises. "Sense making can be viewed as a recurring cycle comprised of a sequence of events occurring over time. The cycle begins as individuals form unconscious and conscious anticipations and assumptions, which serve as predictions about future events. Subsequently, individuals experience events that may be discrepant from predictions..." ...sensemaking is partially under control of expectations. Whenever an expectation is disconfirmed, some kind of ongoing activity is interrupted. Thus to understand sensemaking is also to understand how people cope with interruptions.
p.8 Action is based on a sequence in which "individuals attend to cues in the environment, interpret the meaning of such cues, and then externalize these interpretations via concrete activities."
p.8 The process of sensemaking is intended to include the construction and bracketing of the textlike cues that are interpreted, as well as the revision of those interpretations based on actions and its consequences. Sensemaking is about authoring as well as interpretation, creation as well as discovery.
p.9 When we set the problem, we select what we will treat as the "things" of the situation, we set the boundaries of our attention to it, and we impose upon it a coherence which allows us to say what is wrong and in what directions the situation need to be changed. Problem setting is a process in which, interactively, we name the things to which we will attend and frame the context in which we will attend to them. (Schon, 1983b, p.40)
p.17 Sensemaking is understood as a process that is
- Grounded in identity construction
- Retrospective
- Enactive of sensible environments
- Social
- Ongoing
- Focused on and by extracted cues
- Driven by plausibility rather than accuracy
p.24 I derive cues as to what the situation means from the self that feels most appropriate to deal with it... The more selves I have access to, the more meanings I should be able to extract and impose in any situation.
p.27 The problem faced by the sensemaker is one of equivocality, not one of uncertainty. The problem is confusion, not ignorance. I emphasize this because those investigators who favor the metaphor of information processing... often view sensemaking, as they do most other problems, as a setting where people need more information. That is not what people need when they are overwhelmed by equivocality. Instead, they need values, priorities, and clarity about preferences to help them be clear about which projects matter.
p.32 Throughout this book, I assume that action is crucial for sensemaking. In doing so, I take my lead from Follett (1924), whose work I quote at length because it is not well known and captures subtleties that most people, including myself, often miss.
p.33 Follett (1924) argues that rather than talk about "results," we should talk about "relatings"
p.34 People create their environments as those environments create them... People create and find what they expect to find.
p.34-35 it takes a complex sensing system to register and regulate a complex object. That is about as realist as one can get.
p.36-37 mind develops from the "enacting of a competitive group"... Perception of these enacted cues... alters the mental model, which then guides subsequent strategic choices.
[JLJ - perhaps mind develops from anything that is capable of modeling and scenario-based simulating the low-level or high-level conflict of "being", resulting in actions which best-position the mind-bearing-thing for maneuvers in a 'habitus'. This usually requires playing with self-generated musings related to 'how might I proceed?', as well as physical actions such as mobility, group-participation, and offensive/defensive motions related to perceived opportunities.]
p.44 The effects of action cannot be predicted: The dynamic nature of social conduct precludes accurate prediction.
p.50 Extracted cues are simple, familiar structures that are seeds from which people develop a larger sense of what may be occurring.
p.51 A seed is a form-producing process that captures much of the vagueness and indeterminacy of sensemaking.
p.51 Actions create the conditions for further action (Shotter, 1993, p. 156), the course of which remains vague prospectively, but clearer in retrospect.
p.51 What an extracted cue will become depends on context
p.52 Noticing determines whether people even consider responding to environmental events. If events are noticed, people make sense of them
p.53 regardless of the cues that become salient [JLJ - most noticeable or important] as a consequence of context, and regardless of the way those extracted cues are embellished, the point to be retained is that faith in these cues and their sustained use as a reference point are important for sensemaking.
p.54 Because extracted cues are crucial for their capacity to evoke action, processes of sensemaking tend to be forgiving. Almost any point of reference will do, because it stimulates a cognitive structure that then leads people to act with more intensity, which then creates a material order in place of a presumed order (Weick, 1983)... An extracted cue is used to prophesy the nature of the referent [JLJ - the thing that a symbol (as a word or sign) stands for] from which it was extracted. When the person acts confidently, as if that malleable referent has the character inferred from the cue, the referent often is shaped in directions consistent with the prophecy. But the prophecy itself is also "adjusted". Each element, the prophecy and the referent, is informed by and adjusted to the emerging picture of the other. As a result, almost any old point of reference will do as a start.
p.54-55 when you are lost, any old map will do. For example, extended to the issue of strategy, maybe when you are confused, any old strategic plan will do. Strategic plans are like maps. They animate and orient people. Once people begin to act (enactment), they generate tangible outcomes (cues) in some context (social), and this helps them discover (retrospect) what is occurring (ongoing), what needs to be explained (plausibility), and what should be done next (identity enhancement).
p.55 The soldiers were able to produce a good outcome from a bad map because they were active, they had a purpose (get back to camp), and they had an image of where they were and where they were going. They kept moving, they kept noticing cues, and they kept updating their sense of where they were. As a result, an imperfect map proved to be good enough. The cues they extracted and kept acting on were acts of faith amid indeterminacy that set sensemaking in motion.
p.56 A reasonable position to start from in studies of sensemaking is to argue that accuracy is nice, but not necessary. Isenberg's (1986) studies of managerial thinking show the importance of plausible reasoning, which he describes this way:
Plausible reasoning involves going beyond the directly observable or at least consensual information to form ideas or understandings that provide enough certainty... There are several ways in which this process departs from a logical-deductive process. First, the reasoning is not necessarily correct, but fit the facts, albeit imperfectly at times. Second, the reasoning is based on incomplete information. (pp.242-243)
p.57-58 sensemaking is about plausibility, pragmatics, coherence, reasonableness, creation, invention, and instrumentality... The criterion of accuracy is secondary in any analysis of sensemaking for a variety of reasons. First, people need to distort and filter, to separate signal from noise given their current projects, if they are not to be overwhelmed with data... Second, sensemaking is about the embellishment and elaboration of a single point of reference or extracted cue... accuracy is meaningless when used to describe a filtered sense of the present... a third reason why accuracy is secondary is that speed often reduces the necessity for accuracy in the sense that quick responses shape events before they have become crystallized into a single meaning... A fourth reason why issues of accuracy do not dominate studies of sense-making is that, if accuracy does become an issue, it does so for short periods of time and with respect to specific questions.
p.59 Judgments of accuracy lie in the path of the action.
p.59 The unknowable is what I cannot react upon.
p.60 stimuli that are filtered out are often those that detract from an energetic, confident, motivated response.
p.60-61 If accuracy is nice but not necessary in sensemaking, then what is necessary? The answer is, something that preserves plausibility and coherence, something that is reasonable and memorable, something that embodies past experience and expectations, something that resonates with other people, something that can be constructed retrospectively but also can be used prospectively, something that captures both feeling and thought, something that allows for embellishment to fit current oddities, something that is fun to construct. In short, what is necessary in sensemaking is a good story.
A good story holds disparate elements together long enough to energize and guide action, plausibly enough to allow people to make retrospective sense of whatever happens
p.64 organizations structure and are structured by sensemaking processes.
p.81 Porac et al. are especially alert to the importance of extracted cues in sensemaking. It is these cues that are assembled into the mental model.
p.84 The study, developed by Alex Bavelas, suggests that "once a tentative explanation has taken hold of our minds, information to the contrary may produce not corrections but elaborations of the explanation" ...The explanation cannot be refuted... The ease with which delusions take hold and endure underscores the importance of being clear about the conditions under which sensemaking is initiated, and what resources are available for elaboration.
p.86 The same uncertainty occurs when people notice salient, novel, unusual, and unexpected cues... Occasionally, those cues are pursued. Usually they are not. What makes the difference? To answer that question would require nothing less than a complete description of the human condition. [JLJ - I disagree - it would only require a description of an effective scheme or strategy]
p.88 as turbulence goes up, so too does the use of intuition and heuristics... intuition is treated as compressed expertise in which people arrive at an answer without understanding all of the steps that led up to it
p.88 Smith (1988) begins by noting that the term problem usually refers to some kind of gap, difference, or disparity between the way things are and the way one wants them to be (p.1491). Right away students of sensemaking perk up when they hear the existing state described as "the way things are." That response... reflects an understanding that goals evolve and change during action, which means that both the existing and the desired state are fluid.
p.89 A problem is a relationship of disharmony between reality and one's preferences, and being a relationship, it has no physical existence. Rather, problems are conceptual entities or constructs... Essentially the term is an attention-allocation device. Marking a situation as problematic is a means of including it in one's "stack" of concerns, placing it on an agenda for future attention and solution efforts.
p.89-90 It takes a complex sensing system to register a complex object
p.99 "When confronted with an equivocal [ambiguous, confusing] event, managers use language to share perceptions among themselves and gradually define or create meaning through discussion, groping, trial and error, and sounding out. Managers organize cues and messages to create meaning through their discussion and joint interpretation" (Huber & Daft, 1897, p. 151).
p.101 In Mandler's model, stress is an interruption that signals an emergency and draws attention to events in the environment.
p.109 Typically, that idea of drawing on something suggests the implicit or explicit operation of some sort of frame (e.g., national culture) within which cues are noticed, extracted, and made sensible.
p.110 Frames and cues can be thought of as vocabularies in which words that are more abstract (frames) include and point to other less abstract words (cues) that become sensible in the context created by the more inclusive words. Meaning within vocabularies is relational. A cue in a frame is what makes sense, not the cue alone or the frame alone. Said differently, the substance of sensemaking starts with three elements: a frame, a cue, and a connection. If we set the basic situation of sensemaking up this way, then we can incorporate Upton's (1961) insight that for one thing to be meaningful, "you must have three: a thing, a relation, and another thing. The meaning of one of them is determined by your momentary awareness of the other two"... In this book, our unit of meaning has been cue + relation + frame.
p.110 [Upton quoted] The world is really a dynamic operation; only by means of symbols can the mind deal with it "as if" it were static
p.120 Firestone's analysis is also a wonderful foot-in-the-door that shows why stories are so crucial for sensemaking.
p.121 Theories of action "are for organizations what cognitive structures are for individuals. They filter and interpret signals from the environment and tie stimuli to responses. They are metalevel systems that supervise the identification of stimuli and the assembling of responses" (Hedberg, 1981, pp.7-8). Theories of action, out of all of the frames discussed here, are distinctive because they build on the stimulus-response (S-R) paradigm. People in organizations build knowledge as they respond to the situations they encounter. These trial-and-error sequences include "both the processes by which organizations adjust themselves defensively to reality and the processes by which knowledge is used offensively to improve the fits between organizations and their environments" (p.3). Individual stimuli are aggregated into compound meaningful stimuli that map the territory for action. This aggregation is driven by rules that interpret stimuli in meaningful ways (p.8). These interpretations activate other rules by which responses are assembled... "To identify stimuli properly and to select adequate responses, organizations map their environments and infer what causal relationships operate in their environments. These maps constitute theories of action which organizations elaborate and refine as new situations are encountered" (Hedberg, 1981, p.7).
p.122 People may be said to develop theories of action to guide their behavior, to make it more manageable, to make it more consistent, and thereby to maintain their sense of being personally responsible - of being an origin of their behavior.
p.127 The fact that stories serve as "guides to conduct" recapitulates once more the point made earlier that frames guide conduct by facilitating the interpretation of cues turned up by that conduct.
p.128 The requirements necessary to produce a good narrative provide a plausible frame for sensemaking.
p.129 Sequencing is a powerful heuristic for sensemaking. Because the essence of storytelling is sequencing, it is not surprising that stories are powerful standalone contents for sensemaking. Stories allow the clarity achieved in one small area to be extended to and imposed on an adjacent area that is less orderly.
p.129 Stories, in the last analysis, may be crucial for sensemaking because they facilitate diagnosis and reduce the disruption produced when projects are interrupted.
p.145 Sensemaking is a process of making do with whatever resources are at hand. We have just seen that beliefs can be a key resource when they are embedded in arguments. When arguing is the dominant form of sensemaking, weak definitions of the situation, embedded in tentative initial proposals, gradually become elaborated and strengthened as proposers confront critics. Sensemaking occurs as this "natural dialectic" begins to produce either a synthesis or a winner.
p.148 Prophecies, hypotheses, anticipations - whatever one chooses to call them - are starting points. They are minimal structures around which input can form as the result of some kind of active prodding. That prodding is often belief driven, and the beliefs that drive it are often expectations... When a person compares an event with an expectations... noticing becomes focused.
p.153 Time pressure encourages people to seek confirmation of expectancies, to cling to their initial hypotheses, and to prefer a narrative mode of thought to one that is paradigmatic and more data driven.
p.153 People can use arguments and argue their way to sense only when the world is relatively stable and reasons can be expected to hold true for the future. Arguing in a world where no one is certain what is happening or what will happen next is fruitless, although it may be soothing. In an unstable world, what people need is some sort of stability. Behavioral confirmation allows them to enact a small pocket of stability and then to work outward from there. A small pocket of stability is a joint production of selective noticing and selective shaping, and serial self-fulfilling prophecies eventually constructs a social world where people may then be able to worry about accuracy rather than stability. Once stability is achieved, then accuracy is possible.
p.155-156 Precisely because beliefs and actions are interrelated, sensemaking can start at any point. Structures of mutual causality... invite... description of those situations where beliefs can affect themselves through the mediation of action, and situations where actions can affect themselves through the mediation of beliefs... actions pave the way cognitively to their own continuation.
p.165 Sensemaking by means of manipulation involves acting in ways that create an environment that people can then comprehend and manage.
p.166 There is a basic entrepreneurial quality to manipulation. This suggests that the ways in which entrepreneurs create sensible niches for themselves and others is a good place to start in comprehending sensemaking by manipulation.
p.168 Manipulation can create order and sensibleness incrementally... Manipulation is one of at least two sensemaking processes that begin with actions to which beliefs accommodate. In commitment, the focus is on the action itself and sense is made when beliefs justify taking that irrevokable action. In manipulation, the focus is on the meaningful consequences of the action... Manipulation generates clearer outcomes in a puzzling world, and these outcomes make it easier to grasp what might be going on... Manipulation is about making things happen, so that a person can then pounce on those created things and try to explain them as a way to get a better sense of what is happening.
p.191 the criteria of effectiveness are many and inconsistent, and perceivers usually can appraise effectiveness only in retrospect... The ambiguity and complexity of their worlds imply that perceivers may benefit by using multiple sensemaking frameworks to appraise events; but perceivers are more likely to act forcefully and effectively if they see things simply... Malleable worlds imply that perceivers may benefit by using frameworks that disclose opportunities to exert influence
p.192 sensemaking may or may not determine whether people respond appropriately to environmental events; sometimes people act first and then later make sense of the outcomes.
p.192 Starbuck and Milliken's reference to "perceivers who understand themselves and their environments" reaffirms the importance for sensemaking of complex sensors with sufficient variety to comprehend complex environments.
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