CONCEPT
Sensemaking
Weick's foundational concept — the ongoing, social, retrospective process through which organizations construct plausible interpretations of ambiguous situations, distinct from and prior to decision-making.
Sensemaking is the continuous interpretive process by which people and organizations figure out what they are doing and why, under conditions of ambiguity where multiple plausible readings of the situation coexist. It is not decision-making, which presupposes that options and criteria are already defined. It is the upstream activity through which the situation becomes intelligible enough that decision-making becomes possible at all. Weick identified seven properties: sensemaking is grounded in identity, retrospective, enactive, social, ongoing, focused on extracted cues, and driven by plausibility rather than accuracy. Each property overturns a commonsense assumption about organizational cognition. Together they describe how interpretation actually proceeds in the face of equivocality — not through the orderly survey of alternatives that management textbooks describe, but through the messy, iterative collision of partial interpretations with unfolding events.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The canonical statement of the framework is Sensemaking in Organizations (1995), though the concept had been developing across Weick's earlier work on organizing as a process rather than a structure. The move was