Abstract
The process of organizational sensemaking initially attracted empirical attention as a tool for retrospectively assessing organizational decision-making during critical incidents (Weick, 1988, 1993). However, recent advancements in multilevel theory design have created an opportunity to re-envision organizational sensemaking not only as an individual and retrospective process but as a broader macro-cognitive and multilevel organizational system. The identification and intentional design of organizational sensemaking systems can potentially facilitate present and future decision-making processes and organizational change management. Using the organizational sensemaking systems paradigm proposed by Hughes, et al. (2022), this study builds on the inductive assessment of a significant organizational change effort to extract novel theoretical propositions of the emergent properties of organizational sensemaking systems. Results include the identification of properties of organizational sensemaking systems and a series of theoretical propositions about the nature of sensemaking emergence. The potential implications for change management practice and future empirical work are discussed.
Introduction
Philosophers from Heraclitus to Benjamin Franklin have noted throughout history that change is a universal constant. For the world of industry and work, this is just as true. How organizations manage change – both change which is expected and planned and change which is unexpected and unpredictable – can often dictate the success or failure of a firm. But how does an organization come to make decisions about change? How can both people and organizations determine what is changing, let alone what needs to change?
One proposed way individuals consume the world and make decisions is through sensemaking. Sensemaking, first proposed by Weick (Weick, 1993; Weick et al., 2005), is defined as a dynamic and retrospective process by which individuals and organizations assess their internal and external environments for critical cues regarding change, organize those cues into a structured narrative, and use that structured narrative to inform future decision-making. When conventionally applied, sensemaking has emphasized the plausibility over the accuracy of the structured narrative, with the resulting principal value of the sensemaking process being how it can inform decision-making (Weick, 1988, 1993). Since its inception by Weick, organizational sensemaking theories have been used widely in the management literature to inform various case studies and incident reports to help determine the root causes and contributing factors for both individual and organizational decisions (Boyatzis et al., 2017; de Graaff et al., 2019; Hayes, 2012; Kilskar et al., 2020; Kroon & Reif, 2023; Roberts, 2018; Weick, 1988).
In the time since Weick first proposed his theory of organizational sensemaking, management theorists have become increasingly more concerned with the promotion and development of theories that address variables interacting between different organizational levels (i.e., individuals, groups, and macro-organizational) (Luciano et al., 2018; Mathieu & Chen, 2011; Pettigrew, 2006; Yammarino & Dansereau, 2011). These researchers argue that theories that embrace multilevel constructs have greater external validity, are more likely to reflect actual phenomena, and may yield better practical outcomes (Pettigrew, 2006; Yammarino & Dansereau, 2011). Despite Weick’s original conception of organizational sensemaking being proposed as an individual-level process, others have already attempted to conceptualize sensemaking as a joint, meta-cognitive process.
Ultimately, the theoretical basis for making a distinction between individual-level and organizational-level constructs rests on the now widely accepted concept of emergence – where novel traits, characteristics, properties, and behaviors can be expected to appear as systems become more complex (Gao & Xu, 2021; Georgalos & Hey, 2020; Walsh & Brady, 2019). The concept of emergent properties is also a significant aspect of systems theory, which is a theoretical perspective that upholds that the properties of the totality of a system offer far more variety than the properties of any single component of the system (Gao & Xu, 2021; Scott, 2001; Waterson, 2015). While a variety of attempts have been made at conceptualizing sensemaking at the team level (Duffy et al., 2013; Hod & Twersky, 2020; Klein et al., 2010; Powers et al., 2010), there still currently exists a need to develop a more holistic understanding of sensemaking at the broader organizational level (Brown et al., 2015). Brown et al. (2015) conducted a review of the sensemaking literature and concluded that more research and theory development were needed to better understand how sensemaking progresses from individual-level behaviors and constructs to organizational-level constructs. More specifically, Brown et al. (2015) ultimately concluded that the empirical literature on organizational sensemaking was generally "conservative" regarding micro-to-macro issues.
Inspiration from other related fields may guide the development of broader, multilevel theories. For example, mesoergonomics is investigated as an open systems approach that evaluates the interaction between variables at least two different system levels (Karsh et al., 2014). In particular, various models of human performance regarding safety and endorsing mesoergonomic linkages explain how external factors like countries, industries, organizations, departments, and units can affect people's performance directly or indirectly (Karsh et al., 2014; Murphy et al., 2014). An illustration of a mesoergonomic study is safety climate, which explains how variables are carefully monitored at the organizational, unit, and individual levels to identify cross-level correlations (Karsh et al., 2014).
Building on these styles of mesoergonomic frameworks, Hughes et al. (2022) proposed a macro-cognitive, open systems theory for organizational sensemaking, arguing that organizational sensemaking is a dynamic and macro-cognitive system that contains novel emergent properties beyond that of individual, team, or group sensemaking. Hughes et al. (2022) described Organizational Sensemaking Systems (OSS) as supporting multiple aggregated cognitive and social behaviors centered on compressing, aggregating, and reconciling distal organizational information. These OSS result in producing a dynamic, running “narrative” (Weick, 1993; Weick et al., 2005) that serves to build individual, team and organizational situation awareness (Endsley, 2017; Endsley & Robertson, 2015) as well as a dynamic mental model (Mohammed et al., 2000) that can be used to help coordinate actions among multiple participants (Hughes et al., 2022). This lecture aims to build upon Hughes et al.'s (2022) organizational sensemaking systems paradigm by assessing several major organizational change initiatives within a complex, dynamic, and multiple-stakeholder organizational environment. The use of several innovative ethnographic, qualitative, and grounded theory techniques (Charmaz, 2006; Charmaz & Thornberg, 2020; Glaser & Strauss, 1967) has yielded several theoretical propositions regarding the emergent properties of organizational sensemaking systems. This lecture intends to discuss the importance of these novel theoretical propositions and their implications for the practice of organizational change management.
Method
Project Context
This study was conducted as a part of a broader organizational change effort within the Health Improvement Through Employee Control (HITEC) Project. The HITEC Project is a participatory ergonomics program conducted jointly between the Center for the Promotion of Health in the New England Workplace (CPH-NEW) and the Connecticut Department of Corrections (CTDOC) (Namazi et al., 2021; Punnett et al., 2009). Within The HITEC Project, front-line corrections officers collectively design, implement, and evaluate workplace ergonomics interventions in coordination with management, labor unions, and academic partners through a structured process known as the IDEAS Tool (Robertson et al., 2015). Beginning in 2020, CPH-NEW and CTDOC conducted a series of organizational assessments of HITEC to determine the long-term viability and sustainability of the project. Simultaneously, a significant organizational change began in which leadership of the project transferred from being primarily led by CPH-NEW to being formally operated entirely with the CTDOC structure.
Data Sets
The current study draws on three interrelated data sources related to The HITEC Project. The first of three datasets consisted of semi-structured interviews conducted during a significant project leadership transition between CPH-NEW and DOC. Twenty semi-structured interviews were conducted with current and former members of DOC from Nov 2020 – March 2021 to determine barriers and facilitators of the sustainability of The HITEC Project. Interview topics included funding, resource allocation, quality and nature of supervisor and front-line worker relationships, perceived organizational support, policy formation, and decision-making procedure adaptations. The second of three datasets consisted of semi-structured interviews conducted between Jan 2022 – Mar 2022. The interviews aimed to determine best practices for training senior leaders at correctional institutions supervising participatory ergonomics teams within their facilities. Interview topics included sources of motivation, learning techniques, critical information analysis, spokesperson selection, learning management systems, and analysis of critical incidents. The third of three datasets consisted of field notes, meeting minutes, and observational data from the primary researchers’ direct involvement with The HITEC Project from January 2020 through October 2022. Ethnographic observations have been widely used by grounded theorists with the expectation that when researchers make observations, they can adequately focus on relevant and appropriate behaviors, constructs, and environmental cues (Baym, 1994; Gibbs, 2009; Gioia & Chittipeddi, 1991b).
Grounded Theory
Grounded Theory (GT) techniques were employed to analyze each dataset and derive critical theoretical contributions (Charmaz, 2006; Glaser & Strauss, 1967). GT is an inductive approach in which observations undergo a structured, iterative qualitative coding process. Those codes undergo further iteration and abstraction before being used to construct generalizable propositions and theories.
Open & Axial Coding
In open coding, “data are broken into discrete parts, closely examined, compared for similarities and differences, and questions are asked about the phenomenon as reflected in the data. We compare incident with incident as we go along so that similar phenomena can be given the same name.” (Strauss & Corbin, 1990, p.63) The next step is axial coding. The open codes go through a constant-comparison process during axial coding, which classifies the open codes into higher-order constructs and relationships (Charmaz, 2006; Corbin & Strauss, 1990). Axial coding is focused less on discrete behaviors or phenomena and more on abstraction and interpretation. The open and axial coding processes are iterative, dynamic, interactive, and ongoing. The GT process does not assume that the open and axial coding processes are conducted in separate, distinct phases. In contrast, the development of axial codes may illuminate or necessitate the introduction of new open codes or dictate future theoretical sampling, which then generates new open codes, which then iterate into new axial codes, and so on.
Theory Generation
The final process within the GT technique is to generate a cohesive theory constructed through the interaction between the researcher and the data. The theory generation process intends to create a holistic, parsimonious paradigm centered on core categories and themes firmly grounded in the data. Within the scope of this study, the results are intended to reflect the outcomes of identifying core emergent patterns and properties related to organizational sensemaking systems and to put forward a series of theoretical proposals related to those emergent system properties. These theoretical propositions are meant to encapsulate potentially generalizable phenomena that extend beyond the scope of the current work and are intended to serve as a basis for future organizational scholarship efforts.
Theoretical Propositions
Collective Sensemaking Systems
The GT analysis determined that novel sensemaking behaviors consistently emerged across The HITEC Project at the individual, team, facility, stakeholder, and broader organizational levels. We observed naturally occurring sensemaking systems emerging natively from their local organizational environments (such as at the team or facility level) and semi-structured sensemaking approaches that span across multiple organizational levels. Notes from interviews, field settings, and organizational documents indicate that project members simultaneously held personal understandings of the project and a global understanding of the broader project. These initial findings have independently corroborated evidence from other sensemaking theorists regarding the emergence of higher order sensemaking and its importance for broader organizational action and organizational change. For example, Klein et al. (2010) have advocated in their research on sensemaking at the team level that multi-level sensemaking theories may provide a more crucial understanding of how sensemaking may influence organizational action. Stigliani & Ravasi (2012) and Introna (2019) have also argued that the meta-cognitive sensemaking process has more critical connections to organizational objectives and outcomes than individual-level behaviors.
Given our analysis, we propose the following for theoretical consideration:
Proposition 1a: As organizational complexity increases, novel and higher order sensemaking behaviors naturally emerge.
Proposition 1b: The emergence of organization-level sensemaking phenomena does not inherently indicate optimal organizational outcomes.
Proposition 1c: The organizational sensemaking system can be intentionally designed to facilitate positive organizational outcomes.
Organizational Sensemaking & Time
Reviews of sensemaking literature by Sanberg & Tsoukas (2015) and Stigliani & Ravasi (2012) have determined that sensemaking theories, frameworks, and implementations have generally fallen into two perspectives. The traditional perspective advocated by Weick (Weick, 1993; Weick et al., 2005) and others have firmly argued that sensemaking is a retroactive process; sensemaking aims to determine a common understanding of events as they unfold and pass. However, other sensemaking scholars such as Gioia & Mehra (1996) have argued that the utility of sensemaking lies in a prospective direction. Sensemaking as an activity is not limited to understanding current or past events and scenarios but rather about building towards a plausible future path for action. Prospective sensemaking theorists have argued that the utility of sensemaking is to optimize planned or unplanned organizational change efforts and direct current and future actions toward desired outcomes rather than leveraging sensemaking to retroactively assess organizational successes, accidents, or other critical events.
The current study also independently identified prospective sensemaking as a vital mechanism for organizational change. Sensemaking behaviors by individuals and teams within The HITEC Project were most commonly leveraged to project plausible future paths rather than solely determining plausible reasons for previous behaviors. While a retrospective element of sensemaking certainly existed in The HITEC Project, it was merely the initial phase in a broader sensemaking system where the retroactive perspectives would be used to project and assess the viability of different action plans and determine possible outcomes of change efforts. The current study's focus on organizational change efforts differs from previous work in that it assesses sensemaking behaviors linked to organizational change efforts that require leveraging sensemaking behaviors over months and years rather than on daily operations or temporally bound incidents. This assessment represents a substantial departure from the timescales found in previous research, providing opportunities for significant theoretical exploration and expansion.
When stretched over extended periods and operating at higher organizational levels, novel dynamics within the sensemaking process emerge that represent threats and pathways for adverse outcomes and opportunities for structural interventions. This temporal element often served as a crucial element for emergent behavior and phenomenon at the higher orders of sensemaking. Issues relating to system dissonance or maladaptive functioning, cultural dissonance, organizational readiness for change, and sense-giving influence required a minimum threshold of time to emerge within the sensemaking systems.
Given this, we propose the following:
Proposition 2a: Emergent properties of organizational sensemaking systems fully develop over long periods of time.
Proposition 2b: A fundamental tendency exists for organizational alignment and sensemaking consensus to decrease over time naturally.
Macro-Organizational Sensemaking Systems
One advantage of assessing The HITEC Project is the ability to assess the interaction between what can be considered a newly introduced sensemaking system (a participatory ergonomics framework) and what can be considered the pre-existing sensemaking systems of CTDOC. The structural aspects of the nested system (The HITEC Project) and the larger meta-system (CTDOC) are noticeably different. CTDOC relies heavily on a paramilitary organizational structure and an efficient, highly entrenched, reinforced hierarchy (Chappell & Lanza-Kaduce, 2010; Cyr et al., 2020). This system, combined with many correction officers with backgrounds as military veterans, results in a culturally instituted structure of top-down management aligned with the organizational mission of maintaining order and security. In contrast, The HITEC Project is intentionally structured to empower front-line workers with greater autonomy and decision-making discretion over health interventions. The flatter, egalitarian structure of The HITEC Project is more closely aligned with academic models and encapsulates a fundamentally different way of identifying and managing problems and organizational change. As a result of the two contrasting sensemaking styles of CTDOC and The HITEC Project, the present case study can illuminate some adverse interactions when a nested sensemaking system is culturally dissonant from the meta-system surrounding it.
Actors operating within the meta-system and the nested system often find it difficult to adjust their cognitive-behavior patterns when moving between each system. At CTDOC, this is particularly true in the case of supervisors. Supervisors within the CTDOC hierarchy have near-absolute levels of executive authority, which motivates them to reinforce the strict hierarchy inherent to decision-making at DOC. Within The HITEC Project, evidence suggested that supervisors who found the new participatory ergonomics process too dissonant with their traditional working style rejected it and reverted to the default system of sensemaking and decision-making. This rejection was due to something other than maliciousness, sabotage, or lack of faith in the participatory ergonomics framework or its goals. Instead, it was a rejection due to an extreme cognitive load caused by the dissonance between sensemaking styles.
Additionally, the labor-management environment was a potential meta-cultural system that exerted significant power over The HITEC Project framework. Interviewees often reported that the strong influence of labor unions could often create an overriding effect on The HITEC Project, resulting in significant delays or outright suspension of efforts. Insights from this analysis suggest that organizational change efforts nested within a broader sensemaking and decision-making system must be appropriately aligned with more robust, culturally powerful systems. Requiring significant divergence from the existing meta-systems may cause organizational actors to experience significant cognitive load when navigating the nested system, lowering these actors' readiness for change. This lower readiness for change may endanger organizational change initiatives if it manifests systematically across stakeholders. In moments of system conflict between The HITEC Project system and the CTDOC meta-system, proponents of the nested system claimed that they sought broader institutional support (such as policies, senior advocates, and dedicated resources) to safeguard the nested system. These behaviors represented pathways for further system integration and were used to reduce cognitive and organizational dissonance.
Given this, we propose the following:
Proposition 3: The greater the misalignment between a sensemaking meta-system and a nested sensemaking system, the greater the potential for suboptimal organizational change outcomes.
Proposition 4a: There exists a point at which the sensemaking in the meta-system and the nested system are too dissonant, and the nested sensemaking system is either temporarily or permanently rejected in favor of reverting to the sensemaking in the meta-system.
Proposition 4b: Individuals operating in a sensemaking system perceived to be under threat will attempt to gain resources to protect and entrench the system if they find it more favorable than alternatives that threaten it.
Conclusion and Practical Implications
This study has built on the previous work of Weick, Hughes, Klein, and others to develop a macro-cognitive, systematic view of sensemaking emergence within organizations. Additionally, it has advanced the theoretical understanding of how macro-cognitive organizational sensemaking systems may influence the outcomes of organizational change efforts.
We consider the following to be notable practical takeaways:
Organizational sensemaking systems can be leveraged to facilitate positive organizational change outcomes. However, multiple organizational sensemaking systems may operate simultaneously, and their interactions may create conflict and adverse outcomes.
There is a temporal prerequisite for the emergence of organizational sensemaking system properties.
More empirical work is needed to determine how best to integrate nested sensemaking systems into cognitively or culturally dissonant macro-sensemaking systems.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
This study was supported by Grant Number(s) U19 OH008857 and U19 OH012299 from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of NIOSH.
