There are several key sensemaking models and theories that have attracted a lot of attention among researchers and practitioners. The adaptation and application of sensemaking has varied by field of study, organizational type, and industry. Sensemaking has been acknowledged as the catalyst for shifting research focus from a system-centered to user-centered phenomena in the field of information sciences. Sensemaking has also shifted the focus away from sender and receiver transactions in communications studies to constructions that are entangled with time, places, and perspectives.
“The sense-making moment is the point in time-space when a person experiences a gap while moving through time-space. The situation and outcome, as experienced, are informed by the nature of the situation, its history, its constraints, its relevant external power structures and other situational, contextual, and personal factors. The person bridges this gap by experiencing questions and muddles that lead them to construct bridges consisting of ideas, thoughts, emotions, feelings, hunches, and memories. Sometimes these ‘bridges’ are repetitions from the past; sometimes they are entirely new; sometimes they are deliberate and planned; sometimes capricious; sometimes unconscious at the time of action but brought to consciousness in interviewing talk; sometimes tactic and unarticulated but alluded to in examples and stories.”(p. 3)
Discipline/Theory | Definition |
---|---|
Oxford Bibliographies | The process through which people interpret and give meaning to their experience [4]. |
The Learning Power of Listening (Sensemaker Guide) | The process of describing, summarizing, analyzing, making sense of, and communicating data and emerging knowledge to make decisions and act on the findings [10]. |
General (Individual) | Sensemaking is defined as meaning creation based on current and prior interpretations of thoughts generated from three sources: external stimuli, focused retrieval from internal memory, and seemingly random foci in working memory; such sense making is constructed on cultural pilings held unconsciously in long-term memory [11]. |
General | Sensemaking is related to acquisitions, interpretations, understandings, and actions, which are a result of processes on the cognitive level [7]. |
General (individual, group, societal) | A communicative process that occurs through social interaction and relies not only on interpretations but emerges in conversations and dialogues on different levels-internal and external as well as on individual, group, and societal level [7]. |
General | Sensemaking is the process through which people work to understand issues or events that are novel, ambiguous, confusing, or in some way violate expectations [3]. |
General | A process, prompted by violated expectations, that involves attending to and bracketing cues in the environment, creating intersubjective meaning through cycles of interpretation and action, and thereby enacting a more ordered environment from which further cues can be drawn [3]. |
General | Sensemaking refers to processes of meaning construction whereby people interpret events and issues within and outside of their organizations that are somehow surprising, complex, or confusing to them [3][12]. |
General | Sensemaking is a constant process of acquisition, reflection, and action. It is an action oriented cycle that people continually and fairly automatically go through in order to integrate experiences into their understanding of the world around them [9]. |
Dervin | Focuses on how messages are understood by receivers of information and communicated in their life contexts recognizing that there are differences in people’s understandings, expertise, social positions, situations, and other factors that impact sense-making [1]. |
Dervin | Understand ambiguous and puzzling issues and events [7]. |
Dervin | Sense-making is related to the processes by which humans attempt to understand ambiguous and puzzling issues and events or to bridge the gaps of realities [7]. |
Dervin | To find a way of thinking about diversity, complexity and incompleteness that neither drowns us in a tower of babel nor composes homogeneity, simplicity and completeness [6]. |
Klein | Sensemaking is motivated, continuous effort to understand connections (which can be among people, places, and event) in order to anticipate their trajectories and act effectively [8]. |
Klein | How people make sense out of their experience in the world [13]. |
Klein | A means of achieving a “state-of-knowledge, or, in other words, some kind of mental model representation of the state of affairs in the world [7]. |
Klein | Sense-making is both a backward-looking (forming mental models that explain past events) and forward -looking process (forming mental simulations on how the future event might unfold) [7]. |
Russell | Sensemaking is the process of searching for a representation and encoding data in that representation to answer task-specific questions [14]. |
Russell | Sense-making is about choosing, using, and shifting between different cognitive and external resources that are available and with which a sense-maker is able to reduce the costs of information processing [7]. |
Snowden | How we make sense of the world so we can act in it [8]. |
Snowden | Sensemaking or sense-making is the process by which people give meaning to their collective experiences. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensemaking (accessed on 12 July 2022) |
Weick | Sensemaking involves the ongoing retrospective development of plausible images that rationalize what people are doing [15]. |
Positions Sensemaking as |
Style of Engagement |
Effective for | Length of Engagement |
Highly Dependent on | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Hoffman, Klein, and Moon | A process of problem solving | Both personal and shared | Long-term socialization of complex problems | A long period of time | Participant’s perspective and interpretation |
Dervin | A process of education | Personal and contingent on experience | Learning | Continually and forever | Participant’s perspective and interpretation |
Russell | A process of modelling | Personal | Specific tasks | A finite period of time | Participant’s perspective and interpretation |
Snowden | A quality of an artifact | Highly collaborative | Early stages of problem solving | Formal and finite period of time | Participant’s perspective and interpretation |
Weick | A conversational process | Highly collaborative | Organizational growth and planning | Both short and long term | Participant’s perspective and interpretation |
Classification | Characteristics |
---|---|
Cognitive Processes | Acquisitions, interpretations, understandings, actions [7]. |
Translated Through Communication | Inner and outer conversations, storytelling, narratives [7]. |
Distinct Aspects | Comprehending, understanding, explaining, attributing, extrapolating, predicting [3]. |
Information-related Behaviors | Processing, retrieving, searching, gathering, foraging, using, web-browsing, rejecting, collaborating, risk-facing [8]. |
Diverse Behaviors | Internal: cognitive, emotional, spiritual. External: seeking, finding, foraging, retrieving [8]. |
Cognitive Work | Thinking: knowing, understanding, planning, deciding, problem solving. Cognitive Work: interplay between perception, cognition, action [8]. |
Cognitive Task Analysis (Klein) | Understand what goes on inside their heads, how they think, what they know, how they organize and structure information, know what they seek to understand better [8]. |
Organizational Communication (Weick) | Comprehending, constructing meaning, searching for patterns and frameworks, redressing surprise, interacting with others, common understandings, narratives, storytelling, focus on failures and successes [8]. |
Snowden | Focus on narratives, analyze narratives, naturalized sense-making (humanistic approaches), action research, story circles, knowledge discourse points, connecting frameworks, contextualizations, narrative databases, convergences, alternative histories [8]. |
Library and Information Sciences (LIS; Dervin) | Attend to: context, time, space, movement, gap, horizon, energy, power, history, experience, constraint, change (flexibility, caprice, chaos), constancy (habit, inflexibility, rigidity) [8]. |
Dervin’s Sensemaking Triangle | Changing as moving through time and space, navigating certainty and uncertainty, exploring gaps between certainty and uncertainty, confused, doubting, sure and unsure, struggling with structures, constraints, agency, being acted upon [8]. |
Individual Sensemaking | External stimuli, focused retrieval from internal memory, seemingly random foci in working memory [11]. |
Processes | Ongoing, social, retrospective, driven by plausibility (not accuracy), grounded in identity construction [8]. |
Frameworks | Frameworks, comprehending, redressing surprise, constructing meaning, interacting, mutual understanding, patterns [19]. |
7 Characteristics (Weick) | Grounded in identity construction, retrospective, enactive of sensible environments (socially constructed), social, ongoing, focuses on and accomplished by extracted cues, driven by plausibility rather than accuracy [7]. |
Verbings (Dervin) | Feel, experience, be aware, comprehend, grasp, ascribe meaning to, understand, interpret [5]. |
Experts and Decision Making (Klein) | Understanding the current situation, how it got there, where it is going [5]. |
SIR COPE (Weick) | Social, identity, retrospect, cues, ongoing, plausibility, enactment [17]. |
6 Themes (Weick) | Redoing, labeling, discarding, enacting, believing, substantiating [17]. |
Organizing Processes (Weick) | Organize flux, noticing and bracketing, labeling, retrospective, presumptions, social, systemic, action, communicative [17]. |
4 Conditions (Weick) | Stay in motion, have a direction, look closely and update often, converse candidly [17]. |
Key Principles (Snowden) | Describing, mapping, using new language, focusing, metaphor, perspective-taking, dynamic [20]. |
Sensemaking Learning Loops (Russell) | Search for representations, instantiate representation, shift representation, consume encodons [14]. |
This entry is adapted from the peer-reviewed paper 10.3390/systems11030145