Organizational Sensemaking: Creating Intersubjective Meaning in Organizations

Definition

Organizational sensemaking is the fundamental social process through which organizational members construct shared interpretations of events, actions, and identities. Unlike individual cognition, sensemaking in organizations is inherently intersubjective—it emerges through conversation, interaction, and the ongoing negotiation of what things mean. The book distinguishes between retrospective sensemaking (making sense of what has already happened) and prospective sensemaking (constructing meaning about future possibilities), both of which are crucial to organizational life.

In the Book

The introduction frames sensemaking as central to organizing itself, citing Weick's insight that "organizing is the process of reducing differences among interacting actors. Organization is an emergent outcome of the process of sensemaking through which equivocality is progressively removed." The book then develops multiple dimensions of sensemaking through its chapters. Gephart, Topal, and Zhang's chapter on "Future-oriented Sensemaking" notes that sensemaking is "the process by which people construct, interpret, and recognize meaningful features of the world," emphasizing that organizational members use "five sensemaking practices": reciprocity of perspectives, normal forms, etcetera assumptions, retrospective-prospective sense-making, and descriptive vocabularies as indexical expressions. These practices operate simultaneously to create an intersubjective world "known and held in common by some collectivity of persons."

The empirical studies in the book (particularly chapters 11-13) ground this in real organizations: Wiebe's managers narrative-analyze their lived experience of change; Jordan and Mitterhofer show how metaphors shape sensemaking within institutional contexts; Gephart et al. demonstrate how future-oriented sensemaking through plans, expertise, and hypothetical entities legitimates institutions during public hearings.

Why It Matters

Organizational sensemaking explains how coordinated action emerges without requiring everyone to share identical thoughts. It also reveals that change is not something imposed on a passive organization, but something constructed through how members talk about, interpret, and react to events. This concept is actionable: recognizing sensemaking as the engine of organizing means leaders can intervene in meaning-making processes (through language, narrative, metaphor, and discourse) rather than only in structures and incentives.