Understanding Sensemaking: For VUCA and beyond!

During a case study discussion in the Organization behavior class, I came across the importance of ‘sensemaking’. The case study was on the catastrophe at Mann Gulch, which is regularly quoted as a classic case for “loss of meaning,” “leadership under pressure,” and to explain the dynamics of small/large teams. Extending the thought to our own lives, have we ever thought about how we make sense of life and experiences? How well do we understand it and see the future so that we can fulfill it through actions?

We indeed make sense of our experiences and life events retrospectively by observing events, trying to reflect unconsciously, and negotiating what these mean to us. As referred to by Laura A. McNamara, “Sensemaking describes the negotiation and creation of meaning, or understanding, or the construction of a coherent account of the world.” While it revolves around human perception, cognition and action, upbringing, life experiences, and social interaction, it has a tremendous implication for designing and managing teams, programs, technologies, Organisations, and even nations. Further, I read about the consequences as captured by Karl Weick, Sensemaking in Organizations. In it, Weick also addresses the complexity of the term itself: “You are being thrown into the middle of a sensemaking conversation with only a vague idea of how it constitutes a perspective.” He further asks us to think of sensemaking as a “frame of mind about frames of mind.”

In his book, Weick has identified a set of seven aspects of sensemaking that we can use in our daily lives “to understand how we create order from” the series of experiences and interactions that we have every day.

• Sensemaking is a matter of identity: it is whom we understand ourselves to be concerning the world around us.
• Sensemaking is retrospective: we shape experience into meaningful patterns according to our memory of an incident.
• How and what becomes sensible depends on our socialization: where we grew up in the world, how we were taught to be in the world, where we are located now in the world, the people with whom we are currently interacting.
• Sensemaking is a continuous flow; it is ongoing because our interactions with the world and our understandings of the world are continually changing.
• Sensemaking builds on extracted cues that we apprehend from sense and perception. Cognition is the meaningful internal embellishment of these cues. We articulate these embellishments through speaking and writing – the “what I say” part of Weick’s recipe. In doing so, we reify and reinforce cues and their meaning and add to our repertoire of retrospective experience.
• Sensemaking is less a matter of accuracy and completeness than plausibility and sufficiency. We have neither the perceptual nor cognitive resources to know everything exhaustively, so we have to move forward as best as possible. Probability and sufficiency enable action-in-context.

In our current times in the VUCA world, understanding more about sensemaking can aid in decision making. With the advent of new-age businesses, a generational shift in the workforce, a rise in collaborative and facilitative leadership, making money has become a means to an end. With multiple experiences in play, sensemaking gives people meaning. Sense can be made, meaning can be given, and purpose can be set. I feel that sensemaking would be the northern star for guiding the organization through uncertainty by uniting perspectives it reduces the complexity at play and continuously pushes people to search for meaning/purpose in ambiguous situations. And for today’s leaders, one crucial skill to master is sensemaking and helping people embark on their sensemaking journeys. As quoted by C.Otto Scharmer in the book Theory U: Learning from the Future as It Emerges, “The crisis of our time isn’t just a crisis of a single leader, organization, country, or conflict. The crisis of our time reveals the death of an old social structure and way of thinking, an old way of institutionalizing and enacting collective social forms”.