Prospective Sensemaking: Constructing Meaning About Futures

Definition

Prospective (or future-oriented) sensemaking is the social process through which organizational and institutional actors construct meaningful interpretations of future possibilities. While Weick's classic sensemaking framework emphasizes retrospection—making sense of what has already happened—prospective sensemaking addresses the equally important but less-studied process of imagining and legitimating futures. It involves the intersubjective construction of plans, expertise, hypothetical entities, and institutionalized sequences through which actors persuade one another that certain futures are both possible and desirable.

In the Book

Gephart, Topal, and Zhang's chapter "Future-oriented Sensemaking: Temporalities and Institutional Legitimation" develops this concept through both literature review and ethnomethodological study. They distinguish prospective sensemaking from Weick's dominant retrospective focus, noting that "although retrospective sensemaking is a key property of the Weickian approach, sensemaking can also orient to the future." The chapter identifies key practices of prospective sensemaking: constructing plans (which function as "fantasy documents" that persuade audiences of organizational control over uncertainty), mobilizing expertise (which manufactures credibility through esoteric knowledge), creating hypothetical entities (projective scenarios), and invoking institutionalized sequences and conventional histories (patterns of expected action).

Their empirical study examined a public hearing about energy projects, where prospective sensemaking was primary. They found that actors used these five practices to create plausible images of future worlds and to legitimize institutions' claims to manage that future. Plans and experts do rhetorical work: they shield organizations from responsibility, stifle objections, and shape contexts so critics appear extreme. Prospective sensemaking thus serves both meaning-making and institutional power functions.

Why It Matters

Prospective sensemaking reveals that the future is not a neutral space awaiting discovery, but something actively constructed through social processes. It explains how organizations gain legitimacy by convincing stakeholders they can control uncertainty, and how rhetoric masquerades as technical competence. The concept also illuminates the gap between planning (as rhetoric and meaning-making) and planning as prediction—organizations make futures real not by accurately forecasting them but by getting others to believe in and act toward the futures they describe.