The Sensemaking Approach

The sensemaking approach is when people or an organization offer a meaning to an experience by making sense of it. It is how they structure things that they don’t know, in order to take action on it. When people experience change, they face a gap between their expectations and their counterpart experiences, and they start to communicate and act in a systematic and structured way in order to make sense of what is happening. According to Fairhurst and Sarr (1996, cited in Bean and Hamilton, 2006) “To determine the meaning of a subject is to make sense of it, to judge its character and significance.” Sensemaking allows leaders to have an enhanced awareness of what is happening in their organization, therefore enabling them to have better visioning and creates the systems and processes needed for the visioning. Thiel et al (2012) also argue that a sensemaking activity that includes “how leaders uniquely construct and make sense of ethical issues amidst complex environments” allows ethical decision making (EDM) to be better understood. They also argue that “leaders are under exceptional ethical risk that requires accurate sensemaking for EDM to be effectively executed”. (Thiel et al, 2012)
According to Palmer, Dunford and Akin (2009, p. 207) there are 8 sensemaking activities during an organizational change:
• “Sense-making and identity construction” which is how people believe and perceive who they are in their environment and how that is related to their understandings, reactions and interpretations to the change events.
• “Social Sense-making”, it is a social activity and process. Individuals in their natural environment are social and they are connected, influenced by many social factors such as their management, stereotypes and prototypes and others.
• “Extracted cues of sense-making” it is how people notice and filter different cues, in order to make sense of their decisions made. If those cues where interpreted in a wrong way, the resistance to change may