Sensemaking

Working Definition

Sensemaking is the ongoing process through which people—usually acting together and looking backward—turn an ambiguous, unexpected stream of experience into an intelligible situation that they can name and use as a springboard for action. In organizational theorist Karl E. Weick's formulation, it has seven defining properties: it is grounded in identity construction, retrospective, enactive of sensible environments (by acting, we help create the environment we then decipher), social, ongoing, focused on extracted cues, and driven by plausibility rather than accuracy. Since around 2018, a broader usage has spread through public-intellectual culture (Daniel Schmachtenberger, John Vervaeke), where sensemaking denotes a society's collective epistemic capacity to separate signal from noise and coordinate on shared problems. Both usages share a core premise: the bottleneck in a crisis is rarely a shortage of raw data, but the lack of a working frame in which those data mean something.

Genesis and Global Lineage

The concept was brought into organization studies by American social psychologist Karl E. Weick, first in The Social Psychology of Organizing (1969; 2nd ed. 1979), which urged scholars to replace the static noun “organization” with the active verb “organizing” and introduced the concept of enactment. Weick developed sensemaking in full across three landmark texts: his 1988 analysis of the Bhopal chemical disaster, his 1993 study of the 1949 Mann Gulch wildfire in Montana where thirteen smokejumpers perished (“The Collapse of Sensemaking in Organizations”), and his 1995 monograph Sensemaking in Organizations (later updated with Kathleen Sutcliffe and David Obstfeld in 2005). Weick synthesized American pragmatism (William James, John Dewey), symbolic interactionism, Harold Garfinkel's ethnomethodology, and Viennese social phenomenology. In parallel, three other fields built independent traditions under the same name: communication scholar Brenda Dervin developed her user-centered Sense-Making methodology (with a hyphen) from the 1970s onward; human–computer interaction researchers Daniel Russell, Mark Stefik, Peter Pirolli, and Stuart Card analyzed the “cost structure of sensemaking” in intelligence and information foraging (1993); and cognitive psychologist Gary Klein formulated the “data–frame” theory of expert sensemaking under time pressure (2006). After 2017 the term migrated into management consulting (Christian Madsbjerg's Sensemaking, 2017) and civilizational critique, where Schmachtenberger (“The War on Sensemaking,” 2019) and cognitive scientist John Vervaeke (Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, 2019) recast it as the collective faculty threatened by algorithmic media and the “metacrisis.”

Central European Lineage

The philosophical cornerstone of Weick's second property—that sensemaking is retrospective, because we can know what we are doing only after we have done it—comes directly from interwar Vienna. In Sensemaking in Organizations (1995, pp. 24–25), Weick derives retrospectivity from the Austrian philosopher and sociologist Alfred Schütz (1899–1959) and his treatise Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt (The Phenomenology of the Social World, published in Vienna by Julius Springer in 1932; English translation 1967). Educated at the University of Vienna under legal theorist Hans Kelsen and economist Ludwig von Mises while working by day as a banking executive in Vienna until fleeing the Nazi Anschluss for New York in 1939, Schütz combined Edmund Husserl's phenomenology of internal time-consciousness with Max Weber's interpretive sociology. While we are immersed in the ongoing flow of action (durée), Schütz argued, our experience has no discrete boundaries; it acquires determinate meaning only when we step out of the stream and cast a reflective glance backward upon an act as already completed (in the future perfect tense, modo futuri exacti). A second Viennese-rooted channel reached Weick through Schütz's students at the New School for Social Research, Vienna-born Peter L. Berger and Vienna-educated Thomas Luckmann, whose The Social Construction of Reality (1966) translated Schütz's phenomenology of the everyday lifeworld into the sociology of institutions—and later back into Central Europe when Warsaw-trained organization theorist Barbara Czarniawska translated Weick's monograph into Polish (Tworzenie sensu w organizacjach, Kraków, 2016).

Why Now

Between 2018 and 2026 sensemaking experienced a second career outside business schools. In 2019 the platform Rebel Wisdom released “The War on Sensemaking” featuring Daniel Schmachtenberger, and cognitive scientist John Vervaeke launched his fifty-part lecture series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis; together they popularized the diagnosis that liberal democracies were losing the shared epistemic infrastructure needed to agree on basic problems. Months later, the COVID-19 pandemic provided a global stress test: in February 2020 the WHO declared an “infodemic,” while hospital administrators, supply-chain managers, and citizens faced textbook Weickian “cosmology episodes” as inherited playbooks failed overnight. Then, from late 2022 onward, the mass adoption of large language models industrialized the exact trade-off Weick had identified thirty years earlier as the seventh property of sensemaking: driven by plausibility rather than accuracy. Generative AI systems are statistical engines of plausible coherence—capable of helping teams synthesize messy notes into a working frame, or seducing organizations with smooth, hallucinated narratives that mask anomalies.

Explanatory Power

Sensemaking explains why organizations and communities rarely collapse from making a wrong calculation inside a stable decision tree; they collapse when the shared frame that makes calculation possible shatters. In Weick's analysis of the 1949 Mann Gulch disaster, an elite crew of smokejumpers parachuted into what they labeled a routine “10:00 fire” (extinguishable by 10 a.m. the next morning). When the wind shifted and a wall of flame raced up the canyon, they clung to the “10:00 fire” frame too long; and when foreman Wag Dodge ordered them to drop their heavy tools and run, several crew members kept carrying their axes and shovels until overtaken by the fire—because, as Weick showed, a firefighter stripped of his tools and command chain no longer knew who he was. Identity and role structure collapsed alongside their map of the terrain. The same mechanism illuminates public deadlocks where piling up fact-checks changes nothing because opposing camps operate inside incompatible frames that dictate what counts as a cue. And in corporate life, it explains why strategic plans and post-mortems read like linear deductions: because sense is made retrospectively, organizations act first by improvising and write their “strategy” afterward to explain where their feet took them.

Axes of Debate

Underappreciated Angle

The least absorbed lesson of Weick's Mann Gulch study is that meaning and social structure stand or fall together. When the smokejumpers scattered, they did not lack raw sensory data—they could see and hear the flames. What disintegrated first was their interpersonal role system: the line of march broke, orders stopped being relayed, and each man felt utterly alone. Once the social network dissolved, their individual capacity to interpret the fire dissolved with it. Weick identified four sources of resilience against such collapse: improvisation and bricolage, virtual role systems (carrying a mental model of the whole team's roles), the attitude of wisdom, and respectful interaction (trusting others' reports and reporting honestly). That contrasts sharply with standard remedies for “information disorder,” which operate almost exclusively on propositional data as if cleaning up false claims would repair collective sense. Weick's sociology teaches the opposite order: facts regain traction only after rebuilding a high-trust social role structure in which people can revise working hypotheses together without losing face or identity.