CONCEPT
Retrospective Sensemaking
The principle — captured in Weick's famous recipe "How can I know what I think until I see what I say?" — that understanding follows action rather than preceding it.
Retrospective sensemaking names the temporal structure of interpretation: people cannot make sense of events in real time because events in real time are too complex, too fast, and too saturated with information to be organized into coherent accounts as they unfold. Interpretation requires the slight temporal distance that allows the mind to select cues, organize them into narrative, and construct a plausible account of what happened and why. The account is always constructed after the fact, always selective, and always shaped by the outcome that the interpretation is attempting to explain. This is not a bias to be corrected; it is the fundamental way human cognition handles complex situations. For the AI discourse, retrospective sensemaking is diagnostic: the triumphalist, elegist, and silent-middle narratives are all retrospective constructions whose internal coherence derives from the outcomes they are shaped to explain, and whose omissions are therefore structural rather than accidental.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Weick borrowed the phrase "How can I know what I