The Field Guide › Paper
Weick, Sutcliffe and Obstfeld's review consolidates two decades of work on sensemaking into a single statement, and its central move is to collapse the distinction between making sense and organising: organising is sensemaking, the ongoing process by which people turn the stream of ambiguous, unfolding experience into something they can act on. Sensemaking is retrospective (people work out what is happening by looking back at what they have already done and said, captured in Weick's line that one cannot know what one thinks until one sees what one says), and it is enactive (people are not passive observers of an environment but produce part of the environment they then have to interpret, so action and interpretation loop into each other). It runs on plausibility rather than accuracy: under pressure and ambiguity, what matters is a story good enough to keep acting on, not a complete or correct account, which is efficient but also the seed of collective error when the plausible story is wrong. The paper draws these threads (identity, social context, extracted cues, ongoing updating) into a picture of how shared meaning is constructed and, crucially, how it breaks down, the reference cases being the crises where a group's sense of the situation collapses and coordinated action with it. For a corpus about psychological safety this is the cognitive-collective layer beneath voice: speaking up matters because it feeds cues into the collective sensemaking process and can revise a plausible-but-wrong story before it hardens, and silence is dangerous not only interpersonally but because it starves that process of the very cues that would correct it. The caution is that sensemaking is a broad, sometimes elastic frame that explains much after the fact and predicts less before it. (Text drawn from the 2005 Organization Science review, 16(4), pp. 409-421.)