Temporal Sensemaking: Configuring Past, Present, and Future

Definition

Temporal sensemaking is the act of configuring (and reconfiguring) the relationships between past, present, and future to make sense of organizational experience. Rather than experiencing time as an external, objective container (clock time), actors construct time through their interpretations of their situations. Managers engaged in temporal sensemaking draw on the past (through memory and precedent), engage the present (through immediate perception of contingency), and project the future (through imagination and commitment). The configuration they create shapes how they understand organizational change.

In the Book

Elden Wiebe's empirical study "Temporal Sensemaking: Managers' Use of Time to Frame Organizational Change" develops this concept directly through narrative analysis of 21 managers implementing government-mandated health care reform. Wiebe defines temporal sensemaking as "the act of configuring (and reconfiguring) the relationship of past, present, and future," building on Emirbayer and Mische's (1998) conception of agency as "temporally embedded." Wiebe's analysis discovered five distinct "worlds" of change within the same organizational change initiative: "Now = Then" (perceiving no real change, dominated by cynicism), "We'll See" (evolutionary incremental progress), "Hitting a Wall" (breakthrough followed by barriers), "A Rocky Road" (chaotic turbulence), and "It Never Stops" (overwhelming relentless change). Each world exhibited its own temporal construction—different ways of relating past, present, and future that generated different meanings, emotions, and actions.

The book notes that clock time (objective, linear, a-contextual) obscures processes of change, while lived time reveals them. As Wiebe argues, understanding organizational change requires attending to "time as it is lived" rather than abstract temporal metrics. The research demonstrates that "time is not singular, nor is it an invariant constant"—different managers in the same organization lived different temporalities.

Why It Matters

Temporal sensemaking explains why managers exposed to identical organizational change often construct radically different understandings and take different actions. It reveals that time perception and emotional response to change are not individual traits but outcomes of the temporal frameworks people construct in dialogue with their contexts. For leaders and change agents, this concept suggests that managing change involves managing the temporal narratives through which people make sense of what is happening—creating space for different temporal orientations to emerge and become conscious.