About sense-making

I regard sense-making as a more than a theory; it has character of being a meta-theory or even a paradigm within which to understand the world. Within this sense-making world of Weick's you will find interrelated theories on structures, on enactment, on noticing, on organisations, etc. Sense-making is related to theories like learning, power, politics, decision-making, and many more. This is both a strength and a weakness in communication and application of sense-making in practice.
 
When people ask what is the difference between sense-making and interpretation or communication, I refer to Weick's interpretation of the Mann Gulch Disaster (see the reference page), in which Weick explain the disaster as a defect in the sense-making among the firemen. How they made sense of the situation were the cause of the disaster - they did not recognise the alarming signals!
 
My interest in sense-making stem from observations of decision-making that relates to communication, effectiveness and individuals' understanding of topics: Situations, ideas, and impacts seem to give rise to very different understandings depending on who, when and where they are communicated. Part of these differences may be due to habits, beliefs, and mental capabilities, however, the way people notice and label the material seem to be very important for understanding how decisions are made.
 
Sense-making theory may give some of the answers!
 

Several authors have contributed to the development of sense-making theory. Therefore a range of definitions of sense-making are put forward, each emphasising specific parts of sense-making processes:

• Organisation perspective: "To make sense is to organize, and sensemaking refers to processes of organizing using the technology of language – processes of labeling and categorizing for instance – to identify, regularize and routinize memories into plausible explanations" (Brown et al. 2008. p. 1055).
• Deliberate perspective: "[S]ense making as the way that humans choose between multiple possible explanations of sensory and other input as they seek to conform the phenomenological with the real in order to act in such a way as to determine or respond to the world around them" (Snowden 2005, p. 46).
• Communication approach perspective: "Sense-Making is an approach to thinking about and implementing communication research and practice and the design of communication-based systems and activities. It consists of a set of philosophical assumptions, substantive propositions, methodological framings, and methods" (Dervin 2005).
• Action-interpretation perspective: "Sensemaking is about the interplay of action and interpretation rather than the influence of evaluation on choice. When action is the central focus, interpretation, not choice, is the core phenomenon” (Weick et al. 2005, p. 409).
• Process perspective: "… sense making is a continuous, social process in which individuals look at elapsed events, bracket packets of experience, and select particular points of reference to weave webs of meaning" (Choo, 1998, p. 70).
• Meta-theoretical perspective: Sense-making "is best described as a developing set of ideas with explanatory possibilities, rather than as a body of knowledge" (Weick 1995, p. xi) and "[t]he sensemaking perspective is a frame of mind about frames of mind that is best treated as a set of heuristics rather than as an algorithm" (Weick 1995, p. xii)