Sensemaking: Decide What Situation You Are Actually In

Communication · Executive Insight Brief · 016

The label chooses the response

Before executives choose an action, the organization must construct—and remain willing to revise—a workable interpretation

Premise

Formal decision processes often begin too late. Before leaders compare options, people have already selected cues, named the problem, linked events into a story, and decided what kind of situation they face. Karl E. Weick’s organizational sensemaking perspective makes that prior work visible, especially when routines fail and events are surprising, ambiguous, or open to competing interpretations.

The executive consequence is significant: more data may not resolve equivocality when groups disagree about what the data mean. A stabilized label such as “quality problem,” “resistance,” or “emerging crisis” assigns attention and responsibility and makes some actions reasonable while excluding others. Leadership must govern how interpretations become actionable organizational facts.

The essential model

Weick’s work treats organizing as an ongoing accomplishment rather than a fixed structure. Sensemaking is grounded in identity construction, retrospective, enactive of environments, social, ongoing, focused on extracted cues, and driven by plausibility. These seven properties describe an intertwined process, not independent checklist items.

Plausibility does not make accuracy irrelevant. In ambiguous settings, people may need a coherent provisional account before complete evidence exists, but later findings must be able to revise it. Enactment adds that organizational action partly creates the environment later interpreted. Controls imposed on a supposedly unreliable supplier may create delay that then appears to confirm the original diagnosis.

Why this matters

Consider customer complaints rising after a software migration. Technical staff call it a temporary synchronization defect; service teams see an unmanageable workflow; senior leaders label it resistance to change. Each group selects real but different cues and connects them to its identity and experience.

A sensemaking intervention surfaces competing frames, reconstructs the sequence, identifies each group’s cues, and tests interpretations through action. A data audit may reveal synchronization errors; a workflow adjustment may change complaint volume. New action produces new evidence. Responsible sensegiving explains what is known, what remains uncertain, why one account is currently plausible, and what observations would require revision.

Risks and limits

Sensemaking is broader than storytelling. It includes identity, emotion, material constraints, institutions, embodied action, and non-narrative cues. “Plausibility over accuracy” must never become permission for convenient fiction; safety, finance, science, and law may impose nonnegotiable factual standards even when working interpretations remain provisional.

The perspective is difficult to bound and measure, while retrospective accounts can reconstruct the process they describe. Power determines whose labels, dashboards, and narratives become official. A forum that appears collective may exclude critical cues or fragment into incompatible interpretations. Sensemaking should expose that production of meaning, not legitimize the loudest story.

Executive takeaway

Executives should examine the interpretation before approving the decision. What interruption triggered attention? Which cues entered, which disappeared, whose identity shaped the frame, and what actions have already enacted part of the environment? Leadership should stabilize an account only enough to coordinate the next test—and specify the evidence that could overturn it. Intelligent action requires a plausible springboard with disciplined revision, not manufactured certainty.

Key questions

• What expectation was violated, and which competing accounts currently define the situation?
• Which cues and stakeholder observations are included, excluded, or discounted in the dominant frame?
• How have our prior actions helped create the conditions we are now interpreting?
• What next action would generate evidence capable of confirming, refining, or overturning the current account?

Selected sources

• Weick, K. E. (1979). The Social Psychology of Organizing (2nd ed.). Addison-Wesley.
• Weick, K. E. (1995). Sensemaking in Organizations. SAGE Publications.
• Weick, K. E., Sutcliffe, K. M., & Obstfeld, D. (2005). “Organizing and the Process of Sensemaking.” Organization Science, 16(4), 409–421.