Sensemaking – something one learns from experience
Luisa Melo NU’00 and Jim Stellar
Luisa was an undergraduate who worked on a senior honors project with me in behavioral neuroscience. After graduation she worked in academic biochemistry research for years, pursued a Master’s in International Relations at the Fletcher School and has wound up in the Bentley University PhD program in Business. It was there she came across a concept in one of her business classes that begins our conversation and is taken from one of her papers.
Karl Weick, a professor at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, developed the action perspective in Organization Studies. It is relevant to experiential education and came out of his interest with cognitive dissonance. The idea is that the human mind requires consistency when aware of conflicting results, and is flexible and resourceful in obtaining that consistency (Kogut & Zander, 1996; Weick Sensemaking in Organizations, 1995). Accommodating his psychological work to the business organization, Weick noted that “organizations begin to materialize when rationales for commitment become articulated.” He defined sensemaking as “committed interpretation” and as the “infrastructure of organizational inertia” (1977). Sensemaking in his view, the ability to accommodate cognitive dissonance, kept organizations from changing and highlighted a ‘reality’ of organizational life.
I would add that sensemaking sounds a bit like someone I have cited before, Barry Schwarz, who talked on TED about practical wisdom and with Kenneth Sharpe wrote a book in 2010 about the subject. Practical Wisdom seems a bit like sensmaking.
Weick (1995) outlined the process of sensemaking as constituted by enactment, justification, selection and retention. Enactment is the action part of sensemaking, which by definition requires committed action. Weick pointed out that managers (or actors we believe to be important in an organization) acted first, then evaluated their action as to whether it was socially acceptable. Enactment (Weick 1977) “brackets raw data” and generates it, and is made up of four components: self-fulfilling prophecies, commitment, social information processing and retrospective sensemaking. Self-fulfilling prophecies capture the idea that people interpret things that happen as inevitable but actually bring them about through their actions. Commitment involves choice, irreversibility and public awareness of a decision. Weick quotes Pfeffer & Salancik who described commitment as “binding individuals to their behavior” (1978). Public awareness leads to evaluation and justification of an action socially acceptable. Retrospective sensemaking refers to the idea that action happens first, then is interpreted as having happened for a reason. Selection and Retention complete the cycle of sensemaking, and refer to the idea that interpretations of action are infinite. Actors ‘select’ those interpretations that they can accommodate, and retain via codification so that the “meaning of enactment is preserved in organizational memory.”
OK, enough with the professional speak. You went to Northeastern University, a co-op school, and had plenty of work experiences. A lot of us regard you as having a high level of wisdom even as a college student that perhaps you gained from your experiences immigrating to the United States from Colombia as a child. But to focus, what did you learn that you could call sensemaking from your experiences, particularly back in the day when you were an undergraduate.
Well, this is a really tough question! I would say there are a few ways to answer it. On one level, Weick’s greater point was that our chosen organizations are entities that do not function in the way we think. In a way, we create them based on our enactment. You can argue that a university education prepares us (i.e. socializes) for professional life and that suggests we enact based on whatever we have learned. However, the reality is that sometimes our education does not prepare us for how we behave as professional or how we have to adjust our behavior.
The opportunity for experiential education can challenge this expectation of rationality, or one-to-one correspondence very early on. My first co-op experience was one reason why I changed to behavioral neuroscience. I chose biology as the standard way to achieve a pre-med degree. My experience working in a community health center in pediatrics showed me that maybe there was a connection to be made between mental health and general health.
Another concept that Weick explores is that of improvisation. It comes out of Claude Levi-Strauss’ work on bricolage. Weick saw all of us a bricoleurs, or jacks-of-all-trade. He argued that working on your craft helped to build your tool box, and that the more fine-tuned this box was, the greater the ability to improvise. There is a tendency to use the concept of improvisation as building something out of nothing, but Weick and the jazz greats really improvise based on ‘something’. In that sense, sensemaking requires improvisation and experiential education is one way that we keep fine-tuning our tools.
When I worked in academic research after graduation, there were problems I faced that I instinctively improvised to solve. A coworker who had done exceptionally well at another Boston-area school once asked me how I was able to address so many issues. Who, she asked, had taught me, and why wasn’t she being taught. At the time I said I was “making it up as I went along because you have to solve these problems, you have to be creative”. In retrospect, I think my experiences working had fine-tuned the toolbox I took for granted at the time.
Way back in this blog’s history, is a post calling for industry and academics to partner to “co-create” the next generation of educated citizens that are work ready, who can sensemake out of their experiences at the moment and get to a goal when there is no path. Classical Higher Education today is said to be out of step with what is needed in the workplace generating graduates who cannot sensemake (our words). We believe that this is situation can be fixed if colleges and universities would not only educate the cognitive lobes of the brain with facts and theories that establish knowledge and thinking ability, but also educate the “other lobe of the brain” which is more instinctive, cunning, sensemaking. This is done with unstructured experience in a real world setting where what the student does matters to someone whether it is getting an experimental protocol right in a lab as an undergraduate research assistant or working in a business where if money is not made, people do not get paid. Internships, service-learning, undergraduate research, and even abroad experiences in different cultures all do that. Then, even in a struggling economy, a job awaits … but so does graduate, law, medical, or even business school.
Our references:
· Daft & Weick, (1984), Toward a Model of organizations as interpretation systems. The Academy of Management Review, 9:284-95.
· Kogut & Zander (1996) What firms do? Coordination, Identity, Learning. Organization Science, 7:502-18.
· Weick, Karl. (1995). Sensemaking in organizations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
· Weick, K. (2001) Making sense of the organization, Blackwell Pubs. This is a collection of Weick’s works, organized by him, with introductions for each section. From this collection, I cite: “Sensemaking in organizations”, 1993; “Sources of order in underorganized systems”, 1985; “Organizational redesign as improv”, 1993; “Enactment Processes in organizations”, 1977
