One of the many radical ideas of Weick is Organisational Sensemaking.

When you read his work, Weick doesn’t refer to ‘social sensemaking’ but rather ‘organisational sensemaking’. The key question is: what is the organising Mind in how it makes sense?

In Weick’s first book he only mentions sensemaking (p.13) once:

Most efforts at sensemaking involve interpretation of previous happenings and of writing plausible histories that link these previous happenings with current outcomes.

In his first book Weick is much more concerned with laying down his philosophy of social organizing.

It is only later 1995 that Weick makes clear his idea of the seven properties of ‘organisational sensemaking’ (Sensemaking in Organisations). But you really need to understand Weick’s first book before launching into the second.

In book two, Weick refers to ‘collective sensemaking’ once but mostly refers to ‘sensemaking in organisations’. This is not about how we make sense of something individually or about so called ‘common sense’. Weick’s understanding of the organisation is archetypical. The organisation has a life and energy to itself. It thinks and has its own Mind. This conditions the thinking of individuals in the group. This is the essence of interpreting Weick through the lens of Social Psychology. You can’t bring the lens of safety to Weick, otherwise you distort what Weick means.

Weick comments (p.3):

Although all of this organizing facilitates coordinated action, it also imposes an “invisible hand” on sensemaking. This was clear in Westrum’s fallacy of centrality, which is a direct by-product of nets of collective action. If we extend Westrum’s observation, it is conceivable that heavily networked organizations might find their dense connections an unexpected liability, if this density encourages the fallacy of centrality.

Of course, the push for centrality is also the same push for tight-coupling.

Weick then points us in the direction of semiotics and linguistics (p.3):

Organizations also have their own languages and symbols that have important effects on sensemaking.

Where in safety will you find attention given to the language of symbols and symbolic language? (Halliday) This is where Weick starts in understanding what Organisations believe. The symbols and language to which your organisation commit, says so much of what its culture is.

Whenever I hear someone state that they are a ‘HOP organisation’, I already know they stopped thinking critically. In just this brief symbolic phrase we know the organisation is seduced by slogans and nothing of substance will change. Nothing will be learned. There will be no ‘organisational sensemaking’ in such organisations.

Weick states (p.4):

The concept of sensemaking is well named because, literally, it means the making of sense. Active agents construct sensible, sensable (Huber & Daft, 1987,p. 15) events. They “structure the unknown” (Waterman, 1990, P. 41). How they construct what they construct, why, and with what effects are the central questions for people interested in sensemaking.

We see here the focus on ‘active agents’ that construct ‘sensible and sense-able events’ This is Weick’s understanding of ‘enactments’. Weick understands that organisations enact events into being. That is, they don’t know what outcomes will be until they see them. Weick certainly doesn’t believe in forecasting or prediction.

As Weick states: ‘how do I know what I believe, until I see what I do?’

In SPoR, we use the metaphor of the lens to understand Weick’s seven properties of sensemaking (Chapter 2, p.17ff). Interestingly, Weick starts this chapter with a poem. Weick often turns to Poetics (https://www.humandymensions.com/product/poetics-and-risk-feeling-into-being) to help us better understand meaning. You can see how we use the metaphor of the lens to make sense of organisational sensemaking in Weick (Figure 1. The Lens of sensemaking)

Figure 1. The Lens of sensemaking

We also discuss this metaphor and how perception works in Envisioning Risk, Seeing, Vision and Meaning in Risk (for free download) (https://www.humandymensions.com/product/envisioning-risk-seeing-vision-and-meaning-in-risk/). In this book we discuss how the eyes work (not anything like a camera) and how the brain works (not anything like a computer).

Yet, we use the metaphor and semiotic of the lens to understand how we ‘capture’ an image and excite our attention before that image is interpreted. Cameras don’t interpret the images they capture. In SPoR, we build in to our lens, the seven properties of organisational sensemaking in order to know how organisations interpret what they see. The seven properties of sensemaking are listed here (Weick p. 17).

Yet, this list of seven properties really doesn’t help enough in understanding the difference between the capture of an image and its interpretation (hermeneutic).

So, Weick’s understanding is that in organising, Organisations interpret their enactments by these seven properties simultaneously. For example, if language and symbols are about ‘performance’ in its safety sense, then all that follows will be characterised by a fixation on measurement.

Weick has no understanding of performance in this way.

There is nothing in Weick’s work that gives any focus on measurement. Weick’s understanding of performance is about enactment, not measurement.

Weick’s question is: how, why and what has been enacted? Not, what data is associated with an enactment.

Indeed, the obsession with measurement is what Weick associates with tight-coupling. Tight-coupling makes organisations more fragile and less adaptable to risk.

The seven properties of organisational sensemaking are best fostered by loose-coupling and are characterised by what Weick calls ‘bricolage’. Weick states (p.181):

What I have argued up to this point are largely variations on the theme that collective sensemaking uses words to construct settings and structures that have real consequences. Because people have some control over words, meanings, and actions, they can exert some control over the ways they organize themselves, the opportunities they discover, and the projects they pursue. If the sensable in times of uncertainty, ambiguity, and surprise is seldom sensible, then practices and maxims that begin to correct this imbalance should be welcome and have an impact. In this section I want to suggest something about what these practices and maxims look like (others who have done the same thing include Limerick, 1990; Peters, 1980, 1982;Pfeffer, 1981; Tiujillo, 1987).I phrase my intention this way because there is a strong element of improvisation, bricolage, making do, and resourcefulness associated with any act of sense-making that works. That being the case, I am understandably wary of recipes and routines that could undermine the very things that make narratives, plausibility, and conversations work.

This bricolage is characterised by movement away from absolutes eg. blame fixes nothing, zero or 1% safer.

Bricolage is about the flexibility for movement and adaptability in the face of risk. This is the strength of loose-coupling.

This is what HROing is all about for Weick. Not some static idea of an organisational status (there is no such thing as a HRO) but rather the active use of these seven properties to make sense of what goes on in organising.

This is the way of the positive, practical and methods of the Social Psychology of Risk.