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This chapter shows how sensemaking and group learning lead to flexible, expert decision making. It presents the concept of the “expert organization” that can group effectively to both anticipate and deal with a crisis. The concept of the expert organization has affinities with Choo's (2001) “knowing organization”: one that synthesizes sensemaking, knowledge, and decision making in a cycle that leads to effective learning and adaptation.

The conceptual framework that this book gradually develops across the various chapters — I-Space — has been used on numerous occasions as conceptual aids both in research and in consulting interventions. It has proven its worth as a sensemaking device in complex situations. But does it have any predictive value? At present, it helps to understand rather than predict. To develop a capacity to predict, the framework would have to be further researched. This chapter therefore first briefly recapitulates the key points presented in the book's previous chapters, and then looks ahead at the kind of research agenda that these points imply. It then identifies several possible avenues of research, from mapping knowledge, cultural and institutional structures, and learning processes to further developing the agent-based simulation model that implements the main provisions of the theorizing underpinning the framework. The research agenda keeps growing. To engage with it, the I-Space Institute whose mission is to carry out I-Space-related research and consulting, has been founded.

This introduction to the first volume of Perspectives on Process Organization Studies first explores the relationship between process and sensemaking, offering a brief genealogy of process thinking in order to locate sensemaking as it is conceived in organization studies. It suggest four distinctions which have unfolded over the centuries and through which we can understand sensemaking as an integral part of organization as process. Second, it introduces the papers that make up the volume. These include three pieces exploring organization process theorizing from the perspectives of philosophy, psychology, and communication, three papers from long-standing process organizing scholars, and five contributions representing new empirical or conceptual explorations of a variety of different organizational processes, including learning, change, and sensemaking. Together, the collection portrays the polyphony that characterizes Process Organization Studies, offering perspectives from different disciplines and insights from diverse theoretical traditions and contexts.

This chapter argues here for the poetics of process—the imaginative process of creating forms out of “airy nothing”. Managerial work, it further notes, is akin to the work of a poet. Process thinking helps us pay attention to concrete details and the constitution of things. Through gerund forms of thinking we recover some of the process that generates nouns and gives us apparent stability. Nouns and verbs are best seen as co-evolving. Scholars who practice process theorizing accept reluctantly the ineffability underlying the stabilization of differences and reaffirm their commitment to draw attention to indications of nouns being unwound and set in motion as verbs, as well as verbs being wound into slower motion as nouns. The naming and the winding are the work of process theorizing just as they are the work of everyday life as organizing.

This qualitative study explores the relationship between time and organizational change, a recently emerging area of scholarly interest. Through the narrative analysis of managers' own stories of change, this chapter discerns five distinct ‘worlds’ of organizational change within the ‘same’ significant government mandated organizational change in the ‘same’ organizational context. The analysis provides evidence that managers temporally make sense of their experiences of change, actively configuring the relationship between the past, present, and future in different ways. In doing so, managers construct the organizational change and their enacted reality of that organizational change in different ways. This research augments recent work linking time and agency, demonstrates a broader temporal basis than retrospection for sensemaking, and contributes to our knowledge of researching and implementing organizational change.

This chapter seeks to relate sensemaking and sensegiving processes to their social and institutional context by describing and explaining the effects of diverse metaphors of change used by organizational members during the implementation of lean production and TQM in an internationally operating manufacturing company. We explore how organizational members made sense of these strategic changes in terms of their understanding of the process as an incremental or rather a radical organizational change. We analyze what kind of “conceptual metaphors” are associated with these divergent understandings and explain the relative power of certain conceptual metaphors of change as compared to others by analyzing the social and institutional context of these metaphors‐in‐use. Adopting a “contextualized metaphor” analytical approach which expands Lakoff and Johnson's conceptual metaphor theory with the discourse analysis of linguist Jürgen Link, we analyze the link of dominant metaphors‐in‐use to institutionalized meanings as represented in “collective symbols” apparent in “interdiscursive” charts. Conceptual metaphors were particularly powerful when they referred to institutions that enable identification by virtue of taken‐for‐granted favorable connotations and by means of interpretive flexibility.

Sensemaking is the process by which people construct, interpret, and recognize meaningful features of the world. Although retrospective sensemaking is a key property of the Weickian approach, sensemaking can also orient to the future. This chapter explores the social processes and practices of future‐oriented sensemaking to understand how it is accomplished, how it relates to other temporal dimensions, and how it legitimates institutions. To do so, we discuss five sensemaking perspectives relevant to temporality: Weickian sensemaking, post‐Weickian sensemaking, institutional rhetoric, agentivity, and ethnomethodology. We use the ideas in these perspectives as a means to conceptualize future-oriented sensemaking and to understand the potential influence that temporal modalities of sensemaking hold for legitimation. Next, we conduct an ethnomethodological investigation of future‐oriented sensemaking in a public hearing where future‐oriented sensemaking was a primary focus. Our investigation of inquiry discourse finds that the construction of plans, expertise, hypothetical entities, institutionalized sequences, and conventional histories are important practices in future‐oriented sensemaking that produce and sustain institutional legitimation.

This chapter introduces an information-based view of organizations — a model of how people and groups in organizations work with information to accomplish three outcomes: (1) create an identity and a shared context for action and reflection (sense-making), (2) develop new knowledge and new capabilities (knowledge creation), and (3) make decisions that commit resources and capabilities to purposeful action (decision making). The chapter illustrates the dynamic of the organizational knowledge cycle with a discussion of scenario planning at Royal Dutch Shell.

In sensemaking, people seek answers to the questions: what is going on in the environment? What does it mean for us as an organization? According to Weick, organizations make sense of their environments through the processes of enactment, selection, and retention. Sensemaking is driven by organizational beliefs and actions that direct attention and frame the interpretation of information. The result of sensemaking is an enacted environment that is has been rendered meaningul and understandable. A central problem in sensemaking is how to reduce ambiguity and develop shared meanings so that the organization may act collectively.

The WHO Smallpox Eradication Program (1967-77) showed how cycles of sensemaking, knowledge creation, and decision making supported by a matrix of information management practices enabled the organization to innovate and adapt effectively. This chapter discusses how the knowing organization model relates to other models of organizational learning. The chapter also summarizes the practical implications of the model, drawing examples from new cases and cases presented earlier in the book.

This book explores theoretically sound and practically implementable ideas for effective knowledge management and how knowledge can be converted into increased organizational competence. It draws on a number of management perspectives, including strategy, technology management, marketing, information systems, innovation, accounting and control, and general management, to clarify the processes through which people create and use knowledge in organizations. Case studies and other action-oriented research methods are used to derive practically implementable ways to support, improve, and stimulate the creation and use of knowledge that can enhance organizational competences and bring strategic benefits to organizations. This chapter introduces a model of the five learning cycles of the competent organization: organization learning cycle, group/organization learning cycle, group learning cycle, individual/group learning cycle, and individual learning cycle. Several terms that represent the essential building blocks of organizational sensemaking processes are introduced, namely, data, information, knowledge, learning, sensemaking, and interpretive frameworks. The chapter concludes by proposing a set of basic principles for managing knowledge and organizational learning in each of the five learning cycles.

The importance of dynamism, regeneration, change, and innovation is often emphasized in ‘competing for the future’. Recent literature on competence-based competition and dynamic capabilities highlights the role of knowledge management and organizational learning in strategic competition. This chapter discusses the cognitive infrastructure of an organization that underpins the development and leveraging of organizational capabilities in dynamic markets. An ‘information lens’ is employed to develop a cognitive congruence framework for looking at issues of organizational learning, knowledge creation, and the leveraging of capabilities. The model is based on the concept of an action-perception cycle, and is used to represent an important element in the ‘sensemaking’ processes of organizations engaged in transformational processes. Its usefulness as a descriptive and explanatory device is demonstrated through three case studies. This chapter also elaborates on the importance of achieving cognitive congruence in the cumulative action-perception cycles that underpin transformative processes in organizations.

This chapter presents a case for considering the psychological contract as a process. First, it argues why we should study the psychological contract as a process and what we mean by a process. It then considers existing theoretical approaches and empirical studies examining the psychological contract as a process, along with their limitations. It presents qualitative data from a study illustrating the psychological contract as a process and offers two frameworks (self-narratives, sensemaking) that could be used to think about the psychological contract as a process. The chapter focuses largely on understanding psychological contract breach. The proposed frameworks could, however, also be applied to other areas such as ongoing reciprocation, negotiation, and development of psychological contracts.

This chapter provides an overview of the book, its arguments and themes, its subjects and methods, and its broader contributions to understanding education policy and the perpetuation of racial inequity in school districts. Through school district officials’ own words, this chapter begins with a rare glimpse into in two school districts that are becoming more racially diverse and more unequal and school district administrators’ and school board members’ everyday struggles, particularly the contradictions they feel between pursuing equity and maintaining support of local elites and majorities. This chapter highlights the contributions of the book to the study of school districts and inequality, including illuminating the racial sensemaking and discourses shaping district education policy, situating district policy making and inequality in contemporary macro- demographic, economic, and political contexts, and offering a broader framework for understanding race and class inequity in school districts. Using theory on racial projects, the chapter outlines three contested racial projects of educational leadership and governance, including the color-blind managerialism that is the focus on this book. In addition, the chapter presents the two study districts; describes the motivations, methods, and challenges of this research, particularly as they relate to race; and previews subsequent book chapters.

This chapter illuminates the ideological context of color-blind managerialism and school district policy making by analyzing district administrators’ and school board members’ racial sensemaking about the challenges (described in chapter 1) of growing enrollments of students in poverty and students of color, declining achievement on tests, budget crises, and attacks on public education in these two districts. It argues that district leaders came to understand these changes in terms of discourses of urban pathology and urban decline, which tap into common, highly racialized notions of post-World War II urban transformation. These ideas were the foundation for education policy, leadership, and color-blind managerialism; they focused Milltown and Fairview district leaders’ concerns and fears on racist “white flight” and the arrival of people of color. A discourse of urban cosmopolitanism was sometimes evoked as district leaders charted futures for their more racially diverse and unequal school systems. However, the framing of school district problems and possibilities in terms of demographic change, culture, and individualized pathology (or virtue) bypassed a more comprehensive and radical critique of the policy shifts and broader political and economic structures that were at the root of their challenges and foreclosed alternative visions for future directions.

Turning to the temporal dimensions of meteorological decision-making, this chapter identifies two principles underlying the logic of weather forecasting practice: risk and scale. The former rests on a demarcation between routine and non-routine operations, while the latter is driven by the fact that the more global the reach of a weather phenomenon the earlier its detection. The joint influence of risk and spatial scale on weather forecasting practice yields four temporal regimes of decision-making: emergency, extended alert, near-term, and longer-term. This rudimentary framework is elaborated through an analysis of its empirical manifestation in summer weather forecasting, winter weather forecasting, short-term forecasting, and long-term forecasting respectively. The analysis complicates dual-process models of cognitive processing by establishing that, in practice, deliberation and heuristics are combined across disparate temporal regimes to produce organizationally sanctioned, skilled decisions.

This chapter explains how sensemaking works, and how it plays a role in shaping the point of view a designer brings to a problem. This informed intuition is described in the context of patterns, illustrating how designers draw on their previous experiences with similar problems.