To a New Understanding of Sensemaking: Tools and Techniques for Organizations

In recent decades, organizations and their environments have become increasingly complex and volatile. They can no longer be adequately understood as stable structures or systems; rather, they must be seen as dynamic and complex processes of sensemaking and organizing. In such conditions, no one—not even leaders—can determine or control what emerges from the interactions between organizational members. To navigate this uncertainty, organizational members, including leaders, require new tools that help them cope with the complexity and fluidity of organizational life. Sensemaking, as developed by Weick, provides a valuable resource. Yet, as noted in Chaps. 1 and 3 , in the absence of broader philosophical ideas, the sensemaking perspective has often collapsed into conventional, entitative modes of thinking. The inquiry developed in this book has sought to counter this tendency by introducing a range of philosophical ideas that enrich and extend the sensemaking perspective. The chapter presents these ideas as ‘tools and techniques for organizations’. Such an overview, however, can only be partial, given the inherently unfinished and dynamic movement of thought. The closing section therefore calls on organizational scholars and practitioners alike to remain critical of common-sense assumptions, valuations, and normalized ways of working and understanding. Sensemaking, in this view, is less about restoring stability than about cultivating responsiveness to the flux and precarity of organizing.