This website contains thoughts, material and guidance on sense-making that all are outcomes of a PhD project on strategic environmental assessment.

 

I hope you will be inspired by reading the pages and that you will send me your thoughts and comments on the relation between impact assessment and sense-making

 

The site is updated November 9 2011 with descriptions of sense-making theory and its implications for impact assessment.

Updated poster on Sense-making and IA!

Karl Weick's writing on sense-making is my main source of inspiration. Weick emphasises the social processes of making sense, and within his framework I am most interested in how people notice and bracket cues and signals as part of creating meaning on the flux they are faced with:

 

"When people in an ongoing social setting experience an interruption, they often enact something, retrospectively notice meaningful cues in what they previously enacted, interpret and retain meaningful versions of what the cues mean for their individual and collective identity, and apply or alter these plausible meanings in subsequent enactment and retrospective noticing." (Weick, 2001, Original emphasis)

 

For elaboration see this page.

The paradigm for Impact assessment is very different from the world of sense-making - so why combine these two 'worlds'?

 

I see possibilities within the sense-making theory that may help us be more aware and reflective about our practice on IA. IA is a result of sense-making, a formulated sense, and input to sense-making process among other actors.

 

What we notice, how we label cues, and how we create a plausible story of impacts determine the quality of IA reports. And sense-making theory focus on precisely these aspects.