Making Sense of it All

Chris Ansell

Professor, Dept. of Political Science

University of California, Berkeley

“Sensemaking is a diagnostic process directed at constructing plausible interpretations of ambiguous cues that are sufficient to sustain action.”

(Weick, 2007, 57).

“When assessing the severity of a disaster and the relief that is needed, people face problems of ambiguity and equivocality. Sensemaking describes the resources that influence how well people can handle these problems, which can be a starting point for designing supporting IS.”

(Muhren and Van de Walle 2009, 8)

Sensemaking is prominent when or where:

●Uncertainty or ambiguity are high

●The situation is unfamiliar or where existing routines, habits, or rules do not guide action

●Action is distributed across multiple actors and where “authoritative” interpretation is not possible.

●The situation is different than expected, or when events or situations appear unintelligible or confusing

●There is an interruption or disruption in projects or routines

FRAME OF REFERENCE

CUE EXTRACTION

“GESTALT” CONSTRUCTION

A Basic Sensemaking Model

FLOW OF INFO & EVENTS

What Shapes Frame-of-Reference?

●Professional Lenses

●Prior Experience

●Expectations

●Organizational Identity or Culture

●Projects

●Extenuating Interests

●Beliefs or Ideology

Cue Extraction

●Noticing and Bracketing (selective attention)

●Often backward-looking (retrospective), but could be forward-looking

●Extracted cues are “seeds from which people develop a larger sense of what may be happening” (Weick 1995, 50). (e.g., they define a point of reference).

●Which cues are extracted and the meaning given to them will depend on context (we tend to notice “discrepancies” in a given context).

●Cues extracted may have a symbolic or political import (e.g., they may be legitimating).

“Gestalt” Construction

●“People organize to make sense of equivocal inputs and then enact this sense back into this world to make that world more orderly.” (Weick, Sutcliffe, and Obstfeld 2005, 414).

●Pattern recognition or construction of narratives: development of “plausible stories.”

●“Sensemaking is about the embellishment and elaboration of a single point of reference or extracted cue. Embellishment occurs when a cue is linked with a more general idea” (Weick 1995, 57).

CONTEXT

“Mad Cows”

WHO GETS MOBILIZED?

“Veterinary Scientists”

FRAME OF REFERENCE

“Animal Health Problem”

GESTALT CONSTRUCTION

“Scapie in Cows”

EXTENUATING INTERESTS & IDENTITIES

“Protecting British Agricultural Interests”

CUE EXTRACTION

“Analysis of brain tissue”

Sensemaking in the UK’s Response to BSE

Context 1

“Patients with Unusual Symptoms”

Who Gets Mobilized?

CDC, NY DOH

Gestalt Construction

“St. Louis Encephalitis” (SLE)

Discrepant Cues

“Mixed Evidence”

“Birds don’t die of SLE”

Context 2

“Birds Dying”

Who Gets Mobilized?

“Zoo Pathologist”

Distributed Sensemaking: West Nile Virus

Gestalt Construction

“Animal-Human Connection”

Sensemaking and Organizational Resilience

Organizational Resilience

-Temporary team with weak mutual knowledge & trust

Sensemaking

-”10 O’Clock Fire”

Information and Decision Support for Sensemaking (Muhren and Van de Walle)

●Support conversations via real-time communications

●IS can help to support a sense of shared identify among users

●IS can help identify salient cues by providing historical data

●Continuous situational updates can provide for stable sense of what is going on

●IS can help to support an exchange of interpretations

Karl Weick. 2005. “Managing the Unexpected: Complexity as Distributed Sensemaking,” in McDaniel and Driebe (eds.), Uncertainty and Surprise in Complex Systems. UCS 4: 51-65.

Karl Weick. 1995. Sensemaking in Organizations. Thousands Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

References

Gary Klein. 1999. Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Karl Weick, Kathleen Sutcliffe, and David Obstfeld. 2005. “Organizing and the Process of Sensemaking,” Organization Science, 16, 4: 409-421.

Karl Weick. 1993. “The Collapse of Sensemaking in Organizations: The Mann Gulch Disaster,” Administrative Science Quarterly, 38, 4: 628-652.

Willem Muhren and Bartel Van de Walle. 2009. “Sensemaking and Information Management in Humanitarian Disaster Response: Observations from the TRIPLEX Exercise,” Proceedings of the 6th Annual ISCRAM Conference.