Sensemaking

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Making Sense (Engl.) Or meaningfulness describes man's on the process, meaning lane stream of experience unarticulated taken into meaningful units. Depending on the classification of the experience , a different meaning and thus a different explanation for the recorded experiences can result.

Examples

example 1

Let us assume that a person observes an accident, then a lot of data flows into him at the same time: a passer-by on the sidewalk, a blossom on a bush, a car moving away from the scene of the accident, a motorcycle lying on the ground, etc. This raw material The recorded information is mostly subconsciously divided into one or more stories that appear meaningful to the respective person. People literally "make" sense out of their stream of experiences. The meaning constructed by the observer is not a property of observation, information or data. Meaning is a construction that is applied to the disordered data stream from the environment.

Example 2

Another example is the well-known oracle of the Oracle of Dodona , which a young Roman received when asked about his fate when he was called to arms:

Ibis redibis nunquam per bella peribis
"Go you will return you will never die in war you will"

The oracle had delivered the sentence orally, thus without punctuation marks. The young man understood it this way:

you will go
you will return
you will never die in war

With these good omens he went to war. When the news of his death reached Rome, the family critically examined the oracle. Now the classification has been changed slightly and it was said:

you will go
you will never return
in war you will die

This example shows some insights into sensemaking. The original oracle is the stream of experience. The punctuation marks are the division of the flow of experience ( chunking ). This classification is arbitrary. It is also not contained in the flow of the sentence, but happens in the mind of the reader, is communicated and thus shared with others. So a social reality emerges from the stream of experience. Once the classification has been made, it is treated as a reality. The sensemaker's behavior reflects the way in which he made the division. This makes this reality representational. Weick calls this “realization through action”, enactment .

The moment of rupture only arises when the message of death is transmitted. Now the stream of experiences has to be sorted again (or the commas have to be redistributed).

Analysis of the process

Sensemaking is generally so fast that there are few opportunities to observe it. Only when a flow of information is so incomprehensible that the process can only run slowly can it be observed more closely. The American organizational psychologist Karl E. Weick examined sensemaking as a central part of organizing . It is based on well-documented incidents, such as a bush fire in the American Mann Gulch ( Montana ), the poisonous disaster at the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, or the collision of two planes on Tenerife .

In all cases, the actors' experience failed and the information flowing into them "made no sense" anymore. So they then acted “senselessly” and caused a disaster or fell victim to a disaster.

Weick's approach is a mentally constructed environment that people create and maintain in a dialogue with their environment. According to this idea, there are ideas and opinions on an individual level that are as little questioned as thinking in one's mother tongue ( inner monologue ). The determinations made are so much part of your own self and your own thought patterns that they are difficult to question. Since many of these ideas result from interaction with other people (i.e. socially), sensemaking describes the process by which such ideas are shaped and changed. If the outer world can no longer be brought into agreement with the inner world, then one must find a new way of explaining the world rationally again. This process is sensemaking. Weick names the following seven criteria for distinguishing sensemaking from other activities such as interpreting, classifying, etc.

  1. Sensemaking is anchored in the construction of identity : This means that the ego has to reposition itself in relation to the environment (run away, stay, be for / against).
  2. Sensemaking is retrospective : the process only starts after an event. This focuses attention on the things that were considered important before the event. So when you witness a crime, your attention before and during the event is not focused on what is subsequently identified as important or relevant. The memory is often correspondingly bad. The retrospective (retrospective) quality of sensemaking implies the need to validate one's own perception through the subsequent processes.
  3. Sensemaking interacts with a reactive environment : This means that one's own behavior changes the environment and the changed environment influences one's own behavior. These mutual influences are never completely controllable, which means that the outcome of an interaction cannot be foreseen. Weick speaks of “double interactions” as a unit of observation in organizational theory: A addresses B with the aim of B ending his current work and taking up another work (interact). The reaction of B (follow the instruction or not) concludes the process and is therefore a “double interaction”.
  4. Sensemaking is social because the observation must always be viewed socially. This can be done alone (internal dialogue) or in conversation (interaction) with the social environment.
  5. Sensemaking is an ongoing process : The two points mentioned above require a constant redefinition of one's own position. Since every interaction changes the self and the other, there has to be ongoing work on sensemaking. The effort is steadily decreasing, but with each new environmental stimulus the process can be started all over again.
  6. Sensemaking is focused on and by means of pointed out indications : This characteristic results from the limited ability to take in and take information into account ( limited rationality ). Since earlier insights restrict attention to what has been recognized as important, the necessary thought categories into which the observations can be sorted are missing in the case of unknown or unexpected events. Only after the process has been completed can a model be developed with which a similar process can be better observed.
  7. Sensemaking is driven more by plausibility than by accuracy : It is important with sensemaking that the goal is not exact reproduction or reproduction, but a plausible fitting of the observation into one's own constructed view of the world. The stranger, scary and terrifying an observation is, the more difficult it becomes to classify it in a plausible framework.

This ongoing construction of the imagined world can be interrupted by external influences. From the investigation of the Mann Gulch incident in the US state of Montana, in which a group of 16 experienced firefighters was trapped in a fire on August 5, 1949 and 13 of them perished, Weick developed a process in which the simple organization of firefighters collapsed under the unforeseen development of the fire. Since it is no longer possible to “figure out the situation” as a group, the organization collapses and panic spreads. Only the three people who maintain a group spirit - the leader Wagner Dodge, who saves himself by a counterfire, but nobody wants to join, and the two firefighters Sallee and Rumsey, who climb through a crevice together - escape the fire. Everyone else loses (thought) contact with the group and thus the skills that come from the group. The individual thought patterns that remain behind are no longer able to deal with the complexity of the fire, and those who carry them die. Weick transfers the knowledge of the simple organization of firefighters to more complex organizations, which often experience a similar shock in drastically changed environments (for example a stock market panic or a run on banks in times of crisis) and only then allow the catastrophe to break out completely.

See also

swell

  1. ↑ Edelgard Vacek (2009) How to talk about change , p. 51 ff.
  2. ↑ Hagen Habicht (2009) Universität und Image, p. 206.
  3. ↑ originally probably "Ήξεις αφήξεις ουκ εν πόλεμω θνίξεις"
  4. ^ Karl E. Weick (2001) Enactment Processes in Organizations , in Karl E. Weick (2001) Making Sense of the Organization; Blackwell Publishing, Oxford; ISBN 978-0-631-22317-7
  5. ^ A b Karl E. Weick (1995) Sensemaking in Organizations ; Sage Publication Inc. ISBN 978-0-8039-7177-6 (pbk .: alk. Paper)
  6. ^ Weick, Karl E. 1993 The collapse of sensemaking in organizations: The Mann Gulch disaster Administrative Science Quarterly; Dec 1993; 38, 4; ABI / INFORM Global pg. 628 ( available online )
  7. ^ Karl E. Weick, Enacted Sensemaking in Crisis Situations , in Karl E. Weick Making Sense of the Organization (pp. 224 to 240); Blackwell Publishing, Malden, MA, ISBN 978-0-631-22319-1
  8. ^ Karl E. Weick, The Vulnerable System: An Analysis of the Tenerife Air Disaster , in Karl E. Weick Making Sense of the Organization (pp. 224 to 240); Blackwell Publishing, Malden, MA, ISBN 978-0-631-22319-1
  9. ^ Karl E. Weick (1995) The process of organizing , suhrkamp scholarship 1194, ISBN 978-3-518-28794-1
  10. ^ Norman Maclean (1922) Young Men and Fire , Chicago: University of Chicago Press, cited in Weick, Karl E. 1993 The collapse of sensemaking in organizations: The Mann Gulch disaster Administrative Science Quarterly; Dec 1993; 38, 4; ABI / INFORM Global pg. 628