SensemakingWhat Karl Weick Meant, and What Organisations Did With It

On 5 August 1949, fifteen smokejumpers parachuted into Mann Gulch, Montana, to fight what they took to be a routine grass fire, the kind crews called a ten o’clock fire because it would be out by ten the next morning. Less than two hours later, thirteen of them were dead. As the fire came up the slope behind them, their foreman, Wagner Dodge, lit a second fire in the grass ahead, stepped into its ashes and lay down. He called to the crew to join him. They ran on. What he was doing made no sense to them, and the organisation that had brought them there had nothing left to make sense with.

Forty-four years later, the organisational psychologist Karl Weick published an analysis of that afternoon that became one of the most cited papers in the study of organisations. Its subject was sensemaking: the way people construct meaning from events, and what happens when that construction fails. The smokejumpers did not lack courage or training. The story of the afternoon they were living inside stopped working, and nothing arrived to replace it in time.

Sensemaking has travelled a long way since then. It now appears in leadership frameworks, strategy offsites and job descriptions, usually alongside complexity and ambiguity. Somewhere between a burning hillside and the capability model, the idea changed shape, and the change tells us a good deal about how organisations handle what they do not know.

What Karl Weick Meant by Sensemaking

Weick’s sensemaking is stranger and less comfortable than the version that circulates in leadership programmes. It describes how people give meaning to experience, especially experience that is confusing or interrupts what they expected. The detail is where the discomfort lives.

Sensemaking is retrospective. People do not understand a situation and then act. They act, and then construct an understanding of what they did. Weick often returned to a line he had borrowed from elsewhere: how can I know what I think until I see what I say? Meaning arrives after the doing. We look back over a stream of events, extract a handful of cues and assemble them into something that coheres.

It is social. That story is built with and against the people around us, shaped by what they notice, what they say and what can be said in this particular room.

It is grounded in identity. What we notice depends on who we believe we are. A crew that understands itself as firefighters sees a fire to be fought. The same crew struggles to see a fire that should be fled, because fleeing belongs to a different identity.

It is enactive. This is the property most often left out, and it matters. People do not just read their environment; they help produce it. An organisation that believes its market is hostile behaves defensively, provokes the responses it expected, and then reads those responses as confirmation. The environment it makes sense of is partly an environment of its own making.

And it is driven by plausibility rather than accuracy. Sensemaking aims at a version good enough to act on. Accurate versions are often unavailable, too slow to assemble, or too frightening to hold. Plausible ones let people keep moving together. Every organisation runs on a set of plausible stories its members have agreed to act on, and most of the time this works well enough that nobody notices it is happening.

This is why sensemaking sits so close to Meaning. The plausible stories an organisation runs on do more than coordinate action. They tell people why their work matters, what the organisation is for and where they stand in it. Questioning one of them can feel, to the people who depend on it, like questioning the point of what they do each day. The resistance that follows has less to do with evidence than with what the story was holding together.

At Mann Gulch the plausible account was a ten o’clock fire. When the fire crossed the gulch, the story failed, and with it went the roles, the chain of command and the shared sense of what the crew was for. Weick called this a cosmology episode, the moment when people feel that the world is no longer a rational, orderly place and that the ground of their understanding has gone. Dodge’s escape fire was an act of improvised sense, made on the spot from the remains of the old story. To the men running past, it looked like madness, because the only sense available to them was the sense that had just collapsed. Weick later built a whole paper around wildland firefighters who kept hold of their heavy tools when told to drop them, and died carrying them. People hold on to the tools of an identity long after the situation that justified them has gone.

How Sensemaking Became a Leadership Competency

In 1991, Dennis Gioia and Kumar Chittipeddi studied a university president leading a strategic change and introduced a companion term, sensegiving. Sensemaking describes how people construct meaning. Sensegiving describes the attempt to shape how others construct it: a leader forms an interpretation of what is happening and then works to have that interpretation adopted.

The distinction was precise and useful. It has since been quietly lost. In 2007 an influential Harvard Business Review article, In Praise of the Incomplete Leader, named sensemaking as the first of four leadership capabilities. Its authors argued that no single leader could hold all four, and that leadership should be distributed, which is close to Weick’s own spirit. What spread through the development industry was the capability without the argument. Leaders were asked to make sense of a changing world on behalf of their people. Read closely, most of what the capability describes is sensegiving. The leader reads the situation, forms the interpretation and distributes it. The rest of the organisation receives it.

There is nothing wrong with leaders offering interpretations. People want them. Ambiguity is tiring, and a leader who can say what seems to be happening, even provisionally, gives others somewhere to stand. The loss is quieter than that. When sensemaking becomes a competency held by individuals, the social, retrospective, argumentative work of making sense together turns into a transmission. The interpretation arrives finished. The people who might have contributed cues, disagreed with the framing or noticed what the leader missed are repositioned as its audience.

The pressure runs in both directions. Once sensemaking is a leadership capability, a leader who says they do not yet know what is happening appears to be failing at part of the job. Their standing depends on producing an interpretation, and producing it quickly, often before the cues that would make it reliable have had time to surface. So the leader supplies a plausible version early, the organisation acts on it, and enactment begins to make it true. The leader who waits, asks around and admits the picture is unclear is doing something closer to what Weick described, and is frequently read by those above and below as indecisive. The competency framing turns the honest condition of not knowing into a performance risk, and people at every level learn to hide it.

Retrospection makes this more consequential than it sounds. If sense is always made looking back, then whoever assembles the version of the past decides what the organisation believes happened, and so what it believes it learned. The post-project review is the clearest case. Within weeks of a failure the official account appears, usually tidy: conditions changed, assumptions proved wrong, lessons have been captured. It is plausible, it lets everyone move on, and it is almost always assembled by the people with most to lose from a different account. The mythology of learning from failure depends on this: the organisation makes sense of its failures in public, with the conclusions settled before the session begins.

Enactment adds a further turn. A strategy is sensemaking projected forward, a reading of the world confident enough to act on. Once it is acted on, it begins to produce the conditions it predicted. The organisation commits to a reading of its market, reorganises around it, recruits to it and measures against it, then treats the results as evidence that the reading was right. The reading and the environment reinforce each other until it becomes very hard to see either one from outside.

Some of the most useful work since Weick has tried to keep sensemaking from collapsing into a single authored story. Dave Snowden describes the Cynefin framework as a sense-making device rather than a categorisation model: its value lies in a group arguing about which kind of situation it is in, and the argument surfaces cues that one person’s reading would have smoothed away. Once that argument is skipped and a leader announces the domain, the device becomes one more way of handing down a finished story. The tools of sensemaking are easily turned into tools of sensegiving, and the turn is rarely noticed by the people making it.

Who Gets to Make Sense in an Organisation

If sensemaking is social and driven by plausibility, the question of who takes part in it is central, and in most organisations the answer is uneven. Some people’s cues count as signal. Other people’s cues count as noise. When a senior leader notices something unusual, they have spotted an emerging issue. When someone on the front line notices the same thing, they are being negative, or failing to see the bigger picture. The cues that make it into the organisation’s shared picture are, for the most part, the cues noticed by people whose noticing is authorised.

This is where sensemaking meets power. The capacity to decide what is noticed, which cues are extracted and how they are framed is among the most consequential forms of power in organisational life, and it rarely appears on an organisation chart. It shows up in whose observations are minuted, whose concerns are escalated, whose version of last quarter becomes the version.

It is also where sensemaking meets belonging. To be inside an organisation is, in large part, to accept its plausible stories and act on them. The person who keeps pointing to cues that do not fit is offering information, and they are also threatening the coherence that lets everyone else keep moving. Colleagues feel this as friction before anyone names it. Over time the person learns to report less, or is moved to the margins, where their noticing disturbs nothing. The organisation experiences the result as agreement. What has taken place is a narrowing of what anyone is willing to see out loud.

Identity tightens the circle further. An organisation that has built its sense of itself around being innovative will struggle to notice evidence that it has stopped innovating, for the same reason the smokejumpers struggled to see a fire they should run from. The cue contradicts the identity, so the cue is reinterpreted, discounted or missed altogether. People who raise it are heard as questioning who we are, which is a far heavier charge than questioning a plan.

Weick spent much of his later work, with Kathleen Sutcliffe, studying organisations that cannot afford to get this wrong: aircraft carrier flight decks, nuclear power plants, wildland firefighting crews. What they describe in these high-reliability organisations is a different distribution of sensemaking. Such organisations are preoccupied with small failures, reluctant to simplify their interpretations, and sensitive to what is happening at the front line rather than to what the plan says should be happening. When something unexpected occurs, decisions migrate to whoever has the relevant expertise, regardless of rank, and move back once the moment passes. The deck hand who sees a problem can stop the operation. That arrangement treats noticing as a shared responsibility, and it treats the discomfort of hearing an unwelcome cue as the price of staying alive. It also shows how unusual that arrangement is. Most organisations are not built to let authority travel towards the person who sees the fire, and most of what passes for devolved decision-making leaves the question of who is allowed to redefine the situation exactly where it was.

All of this matters most in moments that resemble Mann Gulch: when the plausible story begins to fail and nobody is sure what is happening. These are exactly the moments when the organisation most needs the cues it has trained people to keep to themselves. The people closest to the fire usually see it first. Whether what they see enters the organisation’s sense of its situation depends on whether they are allowed to see it, and whether, having seen it, they can say so without paying for it.

Sensemaking Under Uncertainty: Why the Escape Fire Goes Unheard

Weick never offered a technique for better sensemaking. He offered a description of how sense gets made, and inside that description sits a demand most organisations find hard to meet: to treat their own accounts as provisional.

If every account is plausible rather than accurate, then the confident strategy, the post-mortem, the values statement and the story the organisation tells about its own culture are all sensemaking that has hardened into something treated as fact. Each was built by particular people, looking back, choosing some cues and leaving others on the ground. Seeing an organisation clearly begins with remembering that its facts were assembled. That is the territory of Unknowing: the space between what an organisation claims to know and what it has understood, and the effort it puts into keeping that space out of view.

Weick admired Dodge for something other than knowing the answer. What Dodge showed was the capacity to make new sense when the old account collapsed, to put down the tools of an identity that no longer fitted and improvise from what was left. Organisations talk a great deal about wanting that capacity. They build training programmes around it.

Improvisation needs room, though, and room is expensive. It needs people who can say “I don’t know what this is” without losing standing. It needs agreed stories that can still be reopened. It needs a way for a cue from the edge of the organisation to reach the centre before the fire does. Most organisations are designed for the opposite. They reward the confident account, promote the people who give it, and treat the unsettling observation as a performance problem. The competency framework asks leaders to make sense for others. It rarely asks who else was making sense, what they saw, or where their accounts went.

At Mann Gulch, a new reading of the afternoon was offered. Dodge lit it, stood in it and called out. The crew had no way to take it in, because nothing in how they had organised themselves allowed a sense that came from outside the shared story to register as sense at all.

Every organisation has people standing in some version of that burned ground, holding a reading of the situation that does not fit the one everyone else is running on. They are almost certainly there. What, in the way your organisation makes sense of itself, would let what they are saying sound like anything other than madness?