There are some organizations that distinguish themselves consistently with the currency of their analysis and the strategic accuracy of their practice. These are sensemaking organizations and they and their staffs function in ways that reflect a distinct but undervalued set of characteristics.
This series by senior editor Cyndi Suarez offers an overview of four key aspects of this approach that, we hope, will serve as an introduction to the concepts and practices that take advantage of new arrangements as they emerge.
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It can be said that a founding concept of the civil sector is the idea that when people come together, great things can happen. Solutions to social challenges, opportunities to build civic capacity, and cultural creation are just a few. Underlying this is the organizational capacity of groups—how do people come together (in association groups, social movements, or nonprofit organizations), often across difference, to accomplish mutual goals? It is particularly important to consider this right now because we are in what anthropologist Victor Turner might call an anti-structure moment, with social movements and everyday people challenging increasingly untenable power arrangements.
Turner posits that society is a “structure of positions,” or temporary fixed states, with other possible arrangements subordinated. (Turner 1967, 93) However, between these periods of order are other periods when we reconnect to untapped possibilities in order to imagine more relevant future structures. These are transitions between states, when an order that has held for some time no longer works.
A core idea in the sensemaking approach to organizational change is that the sensemaking process is kicked off by action. To expand on this, Karl E. Weick, the organizational theorist who advanced the approach, focuses on the process of enactment. He writes, “The term ‘enactment’ is used to preserve the central point that when people act, they bring events and structures into existence and set them into motion” (Weick 2001, 225)...
To be successful, the sensemaking organization must capture the learning from the past, but not be controlled by it, in order to meaningfully engage with generally unforeseen events.
The experience of the individual in the work setting is not generally an area of focus in academic research or the workplace. Work narratives are from the viewpoint of the work that must get done through individuals, not from how the individual develops through the work, or in concert with the work. In sensemaking organizations, these divisions collapse and who the individual is and how the individual orients determine what gets attention, the work that gets done, and how. Karl E. Weick, the organizational theorist who advanced the sensemaking approach, articulates the career of the sensemaking worker as “a story of shifting identities” (Weick 2001, 207). The individual changes the environment through action, and, through reflection, is, in turn, changed by the experience.
In traditional organizations structure is defined as the lines of authority, or decision-making, and communications. The core function of these structures is management of resources towards stated goals. However, in sensemaking organizations, those that cannot rely on clear cause-and-effect relationships, the core function is, according to Karl E. Weick, its key proponent, to “convert a world of experience into an intelligible world.” (Weick 2001, 9)
Weick notes, “the terrain keeps changing and the task is to carve out some momentary stability in this continuous flow.” (Weick 2001, 9) Thus, the sensemaking organization is in a constant state of iteration. Because of this, Weick asserts that “the main product of an organization is interpretations rather than decisions.” (Weick 2001, 238)
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