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Sensemaking - Michael W Kramer - Coggle Diagram
Sensemaking - Michael W Kramer
Assigning meaning to experiences
Process of individuals collectively creating reality in their everyday life organizations
Seven general principles by Weick
Sensemaking is grounded by indentity construction
Sensemaking is retrospective
It is enactive of sensible environments
It is social
It is ongoing
Sensemaking is focused on cues
It is driven by plausibility rather than accuracy
Reasons for equivocality and sensemaking
The experiences typically involve changes or discrepancies from what is routine or normal or expected
Sensemaking occurs because organizational experiences are constantly changing
Changes
Internally: these happen within the organization
Externally: affect the organization’s environment
Basis for sensemaking
The experience of equivocality and the effort to make sense of the experience are both driven by expectations of previous experiences
Sensemaking as a complex social process
It is an oversimplification to think that sensemaking means that individuals always reach a shared understanding
Individuals within the social system may have common understandings of certain aspects of their experiences , but have differences of interpretation in other areas
Whether the meanings are equivalent, overlapping, or distributed, the experience of collective action is shared and so the experience is social.
Outcomes of sensemaking
sensemaking leads to four important outcomes
the commitment and identification involved by making sense generally leads to certain actions consistent with the interpretation of the experiences
sensemaking is that it leads to justifications for past and future actions
Because sense- making influences action, it creates new experiences
sensemaking can be the development of cognitive short cuts that allows individuals to take action with less conscious effort
The general process of sensemaking
The general process of sensemaking involves ecological change, enactment, selection, and retention
Ecological changes, internal or external to the organization, create a discrepancy between expectations and experiences.
Enactment is a necessary condition for sensemaking to occur.
Selection occurs when a particular interpretation of the ecological change experience is accepted as more plausible than others through a social process.
Retention occurs if the idea is solidified in the organizational memory. When it is retained, it becomes part of the past experiences that creates expectations for future experiences.
The communicative process of sensemaking
The sensemaking process often involves both sense- breaking communication and sensegiving communication.
Sensebreaking is communication in which one individual attempts to convince or persuade others that their current understanding of experience is inappropriate, or, in other words, not plausible.
Sensebreaking undermines and destabilizes previous sense- making efforts; it creates a need for a new meaning or new sensemaking by creating a meaning void
Sensebreaking may be particularly easy when an experience creates equivocality and calls into question previous sensemaking
Successful sensebreaking creates a need or drive to find new meaning or to make sense of the equivocal situation. Once sensebreaking occurs, either as a result of expe- riences that create equivocality or specific sensebreaking communication, various indi- viduals will provide sensegiving communication to help others create meaning in the situation