drossbucket

This is a genre of post I’ve been experimenting with where I pick a topic, set a one hour timer and see what I can find out in that time. Previously: Marx on alienation and the Vygotsky Circle.

I’ve been seeing the term ‘sensemaking’ crop up more and more often. I even went to a workshop with the word in the title last year! I quite like it, and god knows we could all do with making more sense right now, but I’m pretty vague on the details. Are there any nuances of meaning that I’m missing by interpreting it in its everyday sense? I have a feeling that it has a kind of ecological tinge, group sensemaking more than individual sensemaking, but I could be off the mark.

Also, what’s the origin of the term? I get the impression that it’s associated with some part of the internet that’s not too distant from my own corner, but I’m not exactly sure which one. Time to find out…

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OK start with wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensemaking

> Sensemaking or sense-making is the process by which people give meaning to their collective experiences. It has been defined as "the ongoing retrospective development of plausible images that rationalize what people are doing" (Weick, Sutcliffe, & Obstfeld, 2005, p. 409). The concept was introduced to organizational studies by Karl E. Weick in the 1970s and has affected both theory and practice.

Who’s Weick?

> Karl Edward Weick (born October 31, 1936) is an American organizational theorist who introduced the concepts of "loose coupling", "mindfulness", and "sensemaking" into organizational studies.

And, um, what’s organizational studies?

Organizational studies is "the examination of how individuals construct organizational structures, processes, and practices and how these, in turn, shape social relations and create institutions that ultimately influence people".[1]

OK, something sociology-related. It’s a stub so probably not a huge subfield?

Weick ‘key contributions’ subheadings: ‘enactment’, ‘loose coupling’, ‘sensemaking’, ‘mindfulness’, ‘organizational information theory’

> Although he tried several degree programs within the psychology department, the department finally built a degree program specifically for Weick and fellow student Genie Plog called "organizational psychology".[3]

Only quoting this bc Genie Plog is a great name.

So, enactment: ‘certain phenomena are created by being talked about’. Fine.

Loose coupling:

> Loose coupling in Weick’s sense is a term intended to capture the necessary degree of flex between an organization’s internal abstraction of reality, its theory of the world, on the one hand, and the concrete material actuality within which it finally acts, on the other.

Hm that could be interesting but might take me too far off topic.

Sensemaking:

> People try to make sense of organizations, and organizations themselves try to make sense of their environment. In this sense-making, Weick pays attention to questions of ambiguity and uncertainty, known as equivocality in organizational research that adopts information processing theory.

bit vague but the next bit is more concrete:

> His contributions to the theory of sensemaking include research papers such as his detailed analysis of the breakdown of sensemaking in the case of the Mann Gulch disaster,[8] in which he defines the notion of a ‘cosmology episode’ – a challenge to assumptions that causes participants to question their own capacity to act.

Mann Gulch was a big firefighting disaster:

> As the team approached the fire to begin fighting it, unexpected high winds caused the fire to suddenly expand, cutting off the men’s route and forcing them back uphill. During the next few minutes, a "blow-up" of the fire covered 3,000 acres (1,200 ha) in ten minutes, claiming the lives of 13 firefighters, including 12 of the smokejumpers. Only three of the smokejumpers survived. The fire would continue for five more days before being controlled.

> The United States Forest Service drew lessons from the tragedy of the Mann Gulch fire by designing new training techniques and safety measures that developed how the agency approached wildfire suppression. The agency also increased emphasis on fire research and the science of fire behavior.

This is interesting but I’m in danger of tab explosion here. Keep a tab open with the paper and move on. Can’t resist opening the cosmology episode page though:

> A cosmology episode is a sudden loss of meaning, followed eventually by a transformative pivot, which creates the conditions for revised meaning.

ooh nice. Weick again:

> "Representations of events normally hang together sensibly within the set of assumptions that give them life and constitute a ‘cosmos’ rather than its opposite, a ‘chaos.’ Sudden losses of meaning that can occur when an event is represented electronically in an incomplete, cryptic form are what I call a ‘cosmology episode.’ Representations in the electronic world can become chaotic for at least two reasons: The data in these representations are flawed, and the people who manage those flawed data have limited processing capacity. These two problems interact in a potentially deadly vicious circle."

This is the kind of page that looks like it was written by one enthusiast. But it is pretty interesting. Right, back to Weick.

‘Mindfulness’: this is at a collective, organisational level

> The effective adoption of collective mindfulness characteristics by an organization appears to cultivate safer cultures that exhibit improved system outcomes.

I’m not going to look up ‘organizational information theory’, I have a bit of a ‘systems thinking’ allergy and I don’t wanna.

Right, back to sensemaking article. Roots in social psychology. ‘Shifting the focus from organizations as entities to organizing as an activity.’

‘Seven properties of sensemaking’. Ugh I hate these sort of numbered lists but fine.

1. Identity. ‘who people think they are in their context shapes what they enact and how they interpret events’

2. Retrospection. ‘the point of retrospection in time affects what people notice (Dunford & Jones, 2000), thus attention and interruptions to that attention are highly relevant to the process’.

3. Enaction. ‘As people speak, and build narrative accounts, it helps them understand what they think, organize their experiences and control and predict events’

4. Social activity. ‘plausible stories are preserved, retained or shared’.

5. Ongoing. ‘Individuals simultaneously shape and react to the environments they face… As Weick argued, "The basic idea of sensemaking is that reality is an ongoing accomplishment that emerges from efforts to create order and make retrospective sense of what occurs"’

6. Extract cues from the context.

7. Plausibility over accuracy.

The sort of gestalt I’m getting is that it focusses on social rather than individual thinking, and action-oriented contextual in-the-thick-of-it doing rather than abstract planning ahead. Some similar terminology to ethnomethodology I think? e.g. accountability.

Ah yeah: ‘Sensemaking scholars are less interested in the intricacies of planning than in the details of action’

> The sensemaking approach is often used to provide insight into factors that surface as organizations address either uncertain or ambiguous situations (Weick 1988, 1993; Weick et al., 2005). Beginning in the 1980s with an influential re-analysis of the Bhopal disaster, Weick’s name has come to be associated with the study of the situated sensemaking that influences the outcomes of disasters (Weick 1993).

‘Categories and related concepts’:

> The categories of sensemaking included: constituent-minded, cultural, ecological, environmental, future-oriented, intercultural, interpersonal, market, political, prosocial, prospective, and resourceful. The sensemaking-related concepts included: sensebreaking, sensedemanding, sense-exchanging, sensegiving, sensehiding, and sense specification.

Haha OK it’s this sort of ‘fluidity soup’ that I have an allergy to. Too many of these buzzwords together. ‘Systems thinking’ is just a warning sign.

‘Other applications’: military stuff. Makes sense, lots of uncertainty and ambiguity there. Patient safety (looks like another random paragraph added by an enthusiast).

There’s a big eclectic ‘see also’ list. None of those are jumping out as the obvious next follow. Back to google. What I really want to know is why people are using this word now in some internet subcultures. Might be quite youtube centred? In which case there is no hope of tracking it down in one speedrun.

Oh yeah let’s look at google images:

Looks like businessy death by powerpoint contexts, not so helpful.

31 minutes left. Shit this goes quick!!

Google is giving me lots of video links. One is Daniel Schmachtenberger, ‘The War on Sensemaking’. Maybe this is the subcultural version I’ve been seeing? His name is familiar. Ok google ‘daniel schmachtenberger sensemaking’. Rebel Wisdom. Yep I’ve vaguely heard of that.

OK here is a Medium post about that series, by Andrew Sweeny:

> There is a war going on in our current information ecosystem. It is a war of propaganda, emotional manipulation, blatant or unconscious lies. It is nothing new, but is reaching a new intensity as our technology evolves. The result is that it has become harder and harder to make sense of the world, with potentially fatal consequences. If we can’t make sense of the world, neither can we make good decisions or meet the many challenges we face as a species.

Yes this is the sort of context I was imagining:

> In War on Sensemaking, futurist and visionary Daniel Schmachtenberger outlines in forensic detail the dynamics at play in this new information ecology — one in which we are all subsumed. He explores how companies, government, and media take advantage of our distracted and vulnerable state, and how we as individuals can develop the discernment and sensemaking skills necessary to navigate this new reality. Schmachtenberger has an admirable ability to diagnose this issue, while offering epistemological and practical ways to help repair the dark labyrinth of a broken information ecology.

It’d be nice to trace the link from Weick to this.

Some stuff about zero sum games and bullshit. Mentions Vervaeke.

> Schmachtenberger also makes the point that in order to become a good sensemaker we need ‘stressors’ — demands that push our mind, body, and heart beyond comfort, and beyond the received wisdom we have inherited. It is not enough to passively consume information: we first need to engage actively with with information ecology we live in and start being aware of how we respond to it, where it is coming from, and why it is being used.

Getting the sense that ‘information ecology’ is a key phrase round here.

Oh yeah ‘Game B’! I’ve heard that phrase around. Some more names: ‘Jordan Hall, Jim Rutt, Bonnita Roy’.

‘Sovereignty’: ‘become responsibility for our own shit’… ‘A real social, ‘kitchen sink level’ of reality must be cultivated to avoid the dangers of too much abstraction, individualism, and idealism.’ Seems like a good idea.

‘Rule Omega’. This one is new to me:

> Rule Omega is simple, but often hard to put into practice. The idea is that every message contains some signal and some noise, and we can train ourselves to distinguish truth and nonsense — to separate the wheat from the chaff. If we disapprove of 95% of a distasteful political rant, for instance, we could train ourselves to hear the 5% that is true.

> Rule Omega means learning to recognise the signal within the noise. This requires a certain attunement and generosity towards the other, especially those who think differently than we do. And Rule Omega can only be applied to those who are willing to engage in a different game, and work with each other in good faith.

Also seems like a Good Thing. Then some stuff about listening to people outside your bubble. Probably a link here to ‘mememic tribes’ type people.

This is a well written article, glad I picked something good.

‘Information war’ and shadow stuff:

> Certainly there are bad actors and conspiracies to harm us, but there is also the ‘shadow within’. The shadow is the unacknowledged part we play in the destruction of the commons and in the never-ending vicious cycle of narrative war. We need to pay attention to the subtle lies we tell ourselves, as much as the ‘big’ lies that society tells us all the time. The trouble is: we can’t help being involved in destructive game theory logic, to a greater or lesser degree.

‘Anti-rivalrous systems’. Do stuff that increases value for others as well as yourself. Connection to ‘anti-rivalrous products’ in economics.

‘Information immune system’. Yeah this is nice! It sort of somehow reminds me of the old skeptics movement in its attempts to help people escape nonsense, but rooted in a warmer and more helpful set of background ideas, and with less tribal outgroup bashing. Everything here sounds good and if it helps people out of ideology prisons I’m all for it. Still kind of curious about intellectual underpinnings… like is there a straight line from Weick to this or did they just borrow a resonant phrase?

‘The dangers of concepts’. Some self-awareness that these ideas can be used to create more bullshit and misinformation themselves.

> As such it can be dangerous to outsource our sensemaking to concepts — instead we need to embody them in our words and actions. Wrestling with the snake of self-deception and illusion and trying to build a better world in this way is a tough game. But it is the only game worth playing.

Games seem to be a recurring motif. Maybe Finite and Infinite Games is another influence.

OK 13 minutes left, what to do? Maybe trace out the link? google ‘schmachtenberger weick’. Not finding much. I’m now on some site called Conversational Leadership which seems to be connected to this scene somehow. Ugh not sure what to do. Back to plain old google ‘sensemaking’ search.

Let’s try this article by Laura McNamara, an organizational anthropologist. Nice job title! Yeah her background looks really interesting:

> Principal Member of Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories. She has spent her career partnering with computer scientists, software engineers, physicists, human factors experts, I/O psychologists, and analysts of all sorts.

OK maybe she is trying to bridge the gap between old and new usages:

> Sensemaking is a term that gets thrown around a lot without much consideration about where the concept came from or what it really means. If sensemaking theory is democratizing, that’s good thing.

6 minutes left so I won’t get through all of this. Pick some interesting bits.

> One of my favorite books about sensemaking is Karl Weick’s, Sensemaking in Organizations. I owe a debt of thanks to the nuclear engineer who suggested I read it. This was back in 2001, when I was at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). I’d just finished my dissertation and was starting a postdoctoral position in the statistics group, and word got around that the laboratories had an anthropologist on staff. My nuclear engineer friend was working on a project examining how management changes were impacting team dynamics in one of LANL’s radiochemistry bench laboratories. He called me asking if I had time to work on the project with him, and he asked if I knew much about “sensemaking.” Apparently, his officemate had recently married a qualitative evaluation researcher, who suggested that both of these LANL engineers take the time to read Karl Weick’s book Sensemaking in Organizations.

> My nuclear engineer colleague thought it was the most brilliant thing he’d ever read and was shocked, SHOCKED, that I’d never heard of sensemaking or Karl Weick. I muttered something about anthropologists not always being literate in organizational theory, got off the phone, and immediately logged onto Amazon and ordered it.

Weick’s influences:

> … a breathtakingly broad array of ideas – Emily Dickinson, Anthony Giddens, Pablo Neruda, Edmund Leach…

‘Recipe for sensemaking:’

> Chapter Two of Sensemaking in Organizations contains what is perhaps Weick’s most cited sentence, the recipe for sensemaking: “How can I know what I think until I see what I say?”

And this from the intro paragraph, could be an interesting reference:

> in his gorgeous essay Social Things (which you should read if you haven’t already), Charles Lemert reminds us that social science articulates our native social intelligence through instruments of theory, concepts, methods, language, discourse, texts. Really good sociology and anthropology sharpen that intelligence. They’re powerful because they enhance our understanding of what it means to be human, and they really should belong to everyone.

Something about wiki platforms for knowledge sharing:

> For example, back in 2008, my colleague Nancy Dixon and I did a brief study—just a few weeks—examining how intelligence analysts were responding to the introduction of Intellipedia, a wiki platform intended to promote knowledge exchange and cross-domain collaboration across the United States Intelligence community.

DING! Time’s up.

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That actually went really well! Favourite speedrun so far, felt like I found out a lot. Most of the references I ended up on were really well-written and clear this time, no wading through rubbish.

I’m still curious to trace the link between Weick and the recent subculture. Also I might read more of the disaster stuff, and read that last McNamara article more carefully. Lots to look into! If anyone has any other suggestions, please leave a comment 🙂