Sensemaking in Organisations

As early as the 1980s, Williamson (1981, p. 551) from the famous Carnegie School has warned us "hierarchical organization and associated controls are traced to the limited capacities of human actors to cope with the complexity and uncertainty with which they are confronted". If we take our cognitive limits on information processing seriously, it means that we must understand what managers/decision-makers actually do in their organizations and try to figure out "efficient procedures for computing actual solutions to concrete decisions problems" if possible (Simon, 1976, p.139). This is the precisely the task of "sense-making", and we will be exploring this theoretical construct together by referring to Weick's (2008), Brown et al. (2015)'s, and a post-human conceptualization of sense-making before discussing its implication for organisational life in the contemporary world.