Sensemaking

Karl Weick: how people make sense of ambiguous situations. Sensemaking is retrospective — we understand what we did after we've done it. It's social — we construct meaning through interaction. It's ongoing — never finished.

In 1949, fifteen smokejumpers parachuted into Mann Gulch, Montana to fight what their foreman assessed as a routine wildfire. Within minutes, the fire jumped the river and raced toward them at speeds exceeding 600 feet per minute. The foreman, Wagner Dodge, lit an escape fire — deliberately setting the grass at his feet ablaze and lying down in the ashes. He survived. Twelve of his thirteen crew members ran from both fires and died. They could not make sense of what Dodge was doing — why their foreman was setting a fire during a fire — fast enough to follow his lead. Weick argued they didn't die from a fire. They died from a collapse of sensemaking. Their existing sense of the situation disintegrated when conditions changed faster than they could construct a new understanding.

In ambiguity, meaning isn't discovered; it's constructed. Design the construction process.

In organisations: crises trigger sensemaking. Leaders don't "communicate" a message; they create conditions for shared sensemaking. Amazon's narrative structure for documents — the six-page memo, the PR/FAQ — forces clarity. The format doesn't transmit information. It forces the author to construct meaning from ambiguity before the meeting begins. The reader doesn't receive a message. They participate in sensemaking. The document is the construction process made visible.

Weick's famous formulation: "How can I know what I think until I see what I say?" You don't first understand and then act. You act, observe the results, and then construct an understanding. The entrepreneur doesn't fully understand the market and then launch. They launch, see what happens, and revise their understanding based on what they learn. Sensemaking is meaning created through action, not meaning discovered through contemplation.

The distinction between sensemaking and decision-making matters. Decision-making assumes the situation is understood and the task is choosing among options. Sensemaking addresses the prior question: what is the situation? Before you can choose, you have to frame. Before you can frame, you have to notice. Before you can notice, you have to act. The entire upstream process — from ambiguity to a situation clear enough to decide about — is sensemaking. Most leadership training focuses on decision-making. The bottleneck, in ambiguous environments, is almost always sensemaking.

Startup founders practice sensemaking constantly — often without knowing the term. A founder reads a weak signal from a customer conversation, connects it to a market trend, triangulates with an internal signal, and constructs a narrative: "the market is shifting toward X, and we need to move now." That narrative may be wrong. But it is actionable. It organises ambiguous data into a coherent direction. It enables a decision where pure analysis would produce paralysis, because the data is insufficient for analytical certainty.