Sensemaking processes and Weickarious learning

Introduction

If the sensable in times of ambiguity, uncertainty and surprise is seldom sensible then practices and maxims that begin to correct this imbalance should be welcome and have an impact. (Karl Weick (1995: 181)

Genuine ignorance is profitable because it is likely to be accompanied by humility, curiosity, and open mindedness: whereas ability to repeat catch-phrases, cant terms, familiar propositions, gives the conceit of learning and coats the mind with varnish, waterproof to new ideas. (John Dewey (1930 [1909]: 177)

All experience is an arch wherethro

Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades

For ever and for ever when I move. (Lord Alfred Tennyson, Ulysses ([1842] 1991))

We live in interesting times, times in which unusual, unprecedented and unexpected events occur on a recurring basis, unfolding with rapidity and interactive complexity on a global scale, often seemingly owing little to what has gone before. Such events expose, sometimes cruelly, the now flawed assumptions on which yesterday rested, while instigating a search for meaning or a story that explains what is happening. Figuring out what is going on is the first question of sensemaking, while the second is what we do next (Weick et al., 2005). Put differently, how people inside and outside organizations learn to make sense and make sense to learn is of both theoretical and practical importance and relevance.

The relationship between sensemaking and learning is the concern of this Special Issue and the link is variously explored in the resulting five papers. The aim of this introduction is not to provide an overview of these papers as this is covered by Jean Bartunek (2016: xx in this issue). Instead, we provide a conceptual contribution which reappraises sensemaking and learning in the context of contemporary ‘dynamic complexity’ ¹ (Farjoun, 2010) and exposes the importance of the quality of attention in sensemaking processes and what we call, Weickarious learning. Together, the papers in this Special Issue continue Management Learning’s trajectory of linking the management learning community with the broader field of management and organization studies while advancing theory and practice that is of joint interest and mutual benefit (Bartunek et al., 2006; Corley and Gioia, 2011; Cunliffe and Sadler-Smith, 2013).

Our particular contribution to advancing this aim in our article is threefold. First, we articulate why the ability of the sensemaking perspective is challenged to be sensable in contemporary conditions of dynamic complexity and how it can be amended to make more effective sense through simplexity (Colville et al., 2012). It is challenged because given the pace, complexity and unfamiliarity with which events are unfolding, it is no longer pragmatic to continue with the assumption that ‘a sensible event resembles something that has happened before’ (Weick, 1995: 170). Indeed, the exact opposite may be the case and culminate in tragic outcomes (Brown, 2000; Colville et al., 2013). In such situations, simplexity asserts that the balance between thinking and doing needs to shift, that is, between the holding on to what we knew and the letting go to see the new.

Second, while ‘sensemaking’ is an extraordinarily influential perspective with a substantial following among organization scholars interested in how people appropriate and enact their ‘realities’ (Brown et al., 2015), it has recently been subject to several comprehensive reviews that have included a series of in-house criticisms (e.g. Holt and Cornelissen, 2014; Maitlis and Christianson, 2014; Sandberg and Tsoukas, 2015). Among these, and arguably the most ‘critical’ for the continuing fecundity and relevance of the sensemaking perspective lies in the charges that there has been a neglect of prospective sensemaking at the expense of retrospective sensemaking, a lack of proper attention to embodied sensemaking, and perhaps most damaging of all, that the vast majority of sensemaking studies are nothing more than studies of interpretation (Sandberg and Tsoukas, 2015). It is our contention that these limitations are not only linked but are also brought sharply into focus in times suffused with dynamic complexity and characterized by unprecedented and fast flowing events (Colville et al., 2012), and that the rebalancing of the sensemaking perspective provides insights in to how these criticisms may be approached if not resolved.

Third, we propose that this leads to the adoption of a more thorough-going process perspective which argues that ‘the act of updating and re-punctuating of continuous experience is what we mean by learning’ (Weick and Westley, 1996: 456). This requires paying attention on the part of the sensemaker not just to the content of their unfolding experience, that is, the what, but also and more demandingly on the process of experiencing, that is, the how that sensemaking is accomplished (Tsoukas, 2014). This is essentially to do with the quality of attention, captured in words such as wisdom, judgement, phronesis and imagination. We suggest that articulating such characteristics may lie more in the realm of poets rather than organizational theorists. This may explain why mindfulness and other such concepts have burgeoned but it also questions whether organizational theorists have the poetic eye to see such movement and the words to ‘wright’ its meaning (Mangham and Pye, 1991: 28). Seamus Heaney (2002) speaks to the craft and technique of the poet as she/he struggles to capture the meaning of human experience in translating thoughts and feelings into words. Our own modest suggestion in this direction to convey elusive meaning and to get feeling into words is to call for Weickarious learning.

Taken together, our proposition is that these three primary points (which are reflected in the opening three quotes) are key to further developing understandings of the relationship between sensemaking process and Weickarious learning, and in so doing, improve the reach and the grasp of the sensemaking perspective.

Sensemaking and simplexity

‘How can I know what I think until I see what I say?’ is the question uttered by a young girl which provides the recipe for organizing and sensemaking (Weick, 1979: 137). While it serves as a gloss on Weick’s career (Weick, 2001: 95), it also highlights the retrospective nature of sensemaking. Importantly, beneath this gloss lies Weick’s core [E]nactment, [S]election and [R]etention model which was a radical framework when first articulated in 1969 and remains central to this day. The phrase is often displayed across the three organizing processes of enactment, selection and retention, as displayed in Figure 1.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

E-S-R model.

The retention process is the repository for past successful organizing and sensemaking efforts. It has structure and memory, and to the extent that it controls what is singled out for closer attention in the processes of enactment, and the interpretations that are subsequently placed on what is bracketed in the selection phase, then it has a powerful effect on organizing and sensemaking. But what happens when we live in times characterized by dynamic complexity? When change is not only discontinuous, but continuously discontinuous? When the assumptions on which yesterday rested are exposed as non-sense? In short, when effective sensemaking is not reflected in something that has happened before. Does this mean that the sensemaking model has outlived its usefulness? Our argument is that it has not, but that it requires amendments. Amendments that lie within the model itself, that require a rebalancing of the relationship between thinking and doing in making sense of on-going streaming of experience. This we call simplexity.

Simplexity is a term (Colville, 1994; Colville et al., 2012) that refers to organizational skills that characterize future organizing and sensemaking: a fusion of sufficient complexity of thought with necessary simplicity of action. Complexity of thinking is required to notice and register the variety – the Foucauldian ‘wild profusion of things’ – that reflects an increasingly random, entropic world. Yet action which clarifies situations by eliminating ‘might have beens’ through reducing equivocality is also required. The difference between reducing equivocality and reducing ambiguity is crucial to our argument and to productive definitions of sensemaking and organizing. Lessening ambiguity, a phrase which is often used in sensemaking definitions, implies that through action you can discount what might have been going on and reach ‘the answer’ to the question ‘what is going on’ (i.e. what the story is). That is, the fog, or ambiguity, clears to reveal the answer. Reducing equivocality, however, suggests that action does not clarify by allowing one to eliminate ‘lack of clarity’ but that action clarifies by shaping what it is you are attending to, and in ‘the doing’ (Mangham and Pye, 1991) shapes what is going on. This way one creates the story. That is, people do not just make sense by cognitively interpreting what is going on, they also (en)act their way into meaning (Bruner, 1990).

What using the term equivocality reminds us of is the integral part action plays in sensemaking. Sensemaking always has been a balance between making sense through thinking and acting in which there is an element of both; what simplexity adds is the suggestion that this balance point changes in a world that is suffused by dynamic complexity. Goffman (1974; 8) says that people answer the question ‘what is it that is going on here?’ by placing events or cues in frames which reflect ‘what has gone on in the past’. As Bruner (1990: 56) has so felicitously put it, ‘framing pursues experience into memory’, and this is why a sensable event resembles one that has happened in the past:

Frames tend to be past moments of socialization and cues tend to be present moments of experience. If a person can construct a relation between these two moments, meaning is created. This means that the content of sensemaking is to be found in the frames and categories that summarise past experience, in the cues and labels that snare specifics of present experience, and the ways these two settings of experience are connected. (Weick, 1995: 111)

Simplexity refocuses attention on ‘the ways these two settings of experience are connected’, arguing more towards attending to perceiving cues of present experience and less to frames concerned with past experience. There is always a balance to be struck, a tension to be held, between concepts (frames) and percepts (cues). This is because as Blumer (1969: 168) reports Kant as saying, perception without conception is blind; conception without perception is empty. It seems there is a human bias for the concept (intellect) to trump the percept (experience). As William James (1987: 1009) pointed out, it involves arresting the process in which the intellectual life of humans consists almost wholly in their substitution of a conceptual order for the perceptual order in which their experience originally comes.

It is to counteract this bias that Dewey (1909/1930: 177) talks of ‘genuine ignorance’ and the belief that this leads to competitive advantage over the conceit of learning on the grounds that it is accompanied by ‘humility, curiosity and open mindedness’. Not dissenting, Chia and Holt (2007) argue that the pursuit of wisdom is a form of ‘learned ignorance’ that can lead to performative excellence, and relate it to phronesis or practical wisdom (Nonaka et al., 2014). Less extreme, the sensemaking-organizing model posits a balance between executing the E-S-R sequence in a forward direction consistent with the idea that doing is knowing, and in a backward direction (with memory/retention holding sway) consistent with the idea that knowing is doing (Weick, 2001: 95).

The simultaneous holding of both belief and doubt and adopting an attitude of ambivalence rather than averaging is, for Weick (2009: 19), the optimal compromise and the hallmark of wisdom. Quoting Meacham, he notes, ‘the essence of wisdom is in knowing that one does not know, in the appreciation that knowledge is fallible, in the balance between knowing and doubting’. That is, ‘to be wise is to be learned about our ignorance’ (Nonaka et al., 2014: 367).

However, with regard to contemporary dynamic complexity comprising unexpected and unprecedented events, we propose that what passes for conventional wisdom may need to change as, in such circumstances, it commonly defaults to drawing on and punctuating present experience through the frames of past experience. In terms of practice, this tendency to see what has been seen before can have major and sometimes tragic consequences. It is because of this that a nurse, Beverly Allitt, was left free to kill children (Brown, 2000), control room operators on the offshore oil installation Piper Alpha failed to shut it down before it exploded (Brown, 2004) and senior managers at Barings Bank took no effective action to curb the activities of Nick Leeson (Brown, 2005). In the most globally striking recent example of this phenomenon, the 9/11 Commission (2004) concluded that US Counter Terrorist agencies were not prepared to see anything they had not seen before and they missed clues and cues that there was an emerging changing present. In its evaluation and critique of what happened on 9/11, the Commission concluded that it is vital to find ways of routinizing or perhaps even ‘bureaucratising imagination’ (National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, 2004: 334).

This bias for the concept to dominate the percept is a human tendency that applies to theorists as well as practitioners. The sensemaking model has been criticized for its over-emphasis on the retrospective nature of sensemaking and a neglect of the role of action and prospective sensemaking (Corley and Gioia, 2011; MacKay and Parks, 2013; Sandberg and Tsoukas, 2015). Sandberg and Tsoukas (2015: S14) in a wide ranging review of sensemaking publications in nine leading international management journals, concluded that rather than being reflective of Weick’s sensemaking perspective, 84 percent of them were restricted to studying interpretation: ‘processes of sensemaking become synonymous with processes of interpretation, which often end up taken as processes of cognition’. This is a striking critique that coupled with our own and others’ (see Holt and Cornelissen, 2014 for a more phenomenological appraisal), draws attention to the need for updating and adapting the sensemaking model to address contemporary times.

Process, becoming and learning

The rise to prominence of the process perspective in organization studies (Hernes and Maitlis, 2010; Langley et al., 2013; MacKay and Chia, 2013; Tsoukas and Chia, 2002) is, we argue, partly due to its ability to make sense of the times. In their seminal and highly cited reworking of organizational change theorizing which marks a coming of age for the process perspective in organization studies, Tsoukas and Chia (2002) argue against traditional approaches on the grounds that they are dominated by an ontology that privileges stability, routine and order in which change is seen as an exception – an episode to restore order. However, as they point out, if one reverses the ontology to understand change as the norm, then this sensitizes us to how pervasive change already is and allows us to see that change is potentially there if only we choose to look for it (Tsoukas and Chia, 2002: 565). In times of dynamic complexity, it does not require one to look closely to observe it: as well as what is happening in our own immediate environment, we can see change (and hear it) all over the world at any time from wherever we are via our phones, tablets, televisions and computer screens which convey infinitely streaming events.

Organizations are, thus, always in a dynamic on-going process which is conveyed by the phrase ‘organizational becoming’. The sensemaking perspective is no stranger to process and this is explicitly acknowledged on the opening page of the first edition of The Social Psychology of Organizing, which asks us to stop thinking of organizations as entities:

Instead, assume that there are processes which create, maintain and dissolve social collectivities and that these processes constitute the work of organizing, and that the ways in which these processes are continuously executed are the organization. (Weick, 1969: 1)

The reason why processes had to be continuously executed was amplified in the second edition of Weick’s book:

The idea of process implies impermanence. The image of organization that we prefer is one that argues that organizations keep falling apart and have to be re-accomplished. Process imagery also means concerns with flows, with flux, and with momentary appearances. (Weick, 1979: 44)

Organization thus emerges out of processes of organizing: a process that involves reducing equivocality to produce (temporary) organization or order. However, this is achieved by ensuring there is sufficient requisite variety to register and match variety for effective sensemaking. Only variety can regulate variety which means that the organizational processes that are applied to equivocal inputs must themselves be equivocal:

It is the unwillingness to meet equivocality in an equivocal manner that produces failure, non-adaptation … It is the unwillingness to disrupt order, ironically, that makes it impossible for the organization to create order. If people cherish the unequivocal but are unwilling to participate in the equivocal, then survival becomes more problematic. (Weick, 1979: 189)

It is in this that we see the roots of the thinking-doing and sensemaking-learning puzzle. Sir Peter Medawar (1982 quoted in Pye, 1994), renowned Nobel prize-winning biologist (known as the ‘father of transplantation’), highlighted clearly a fundamental tension between thinking and doing, and learning. On the one hand, he argued we learn in order to forget such that we can take action without thinking about it. On the other hand, we advance ‘by learning to think about, adjust, subdue and redirect activities which are thoughtless to begin with because they are instinctive’ (Medawar, 1982: 196). As Pye (1994: 161–162) pointed out, ‘this very clearly emphasises the process nature of learning, an integrative and integral appreciation of sensemaking, changing with time. …[and]… the whole iterative process by which we question, shape and reshape our sense(s) and sensibilities’.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Weick and Westley (1996) note that the relationship between organization and learning is oxymoronic: ‘To learn is to disorganize and increase variety. To organize is to forget and reduce variety’ (p. 440). In other words, organization emerges from the process of organizing and creates plausible order out of disorder or flux. Clegg et al. (2005) are among the few to address this oxymoron. Locating their discourse in terms of Weick (1979) and the process of organizing and drawing on Tsoukas and Chia (2002), they argue that the concept of ‘becoming’ offers the possibility of reconsidering organizational learning. This way learning becomes just one element in the process of organizing if it increases variety and in this sense, it produces disorder. That is, ‘learning occurs in the interstices between different dis/orders in a relationship in which the phenomenon is described as paradoxical’ (Clegg et al., 2005: 155).

Colville et al. (2014) argue that the learning which takes place in the space ‘in between’ is the vexing of order in the form of frames derived from moments of past organizing against cues in the form of current moments of action. This becoming and learning is illustrated through empirical examples drawn from a Norwegian soap-making company which enabled managers to utilize on-going processes of changing across time (175 years) without the need for a formal episodic change intervention. This is a rare empirical example of continuous changing rather than episodic change. It illustrates how the juxtaposing of order/disorder, frames/cues and their vexing can connect the processes of learning/becoming/organizing (Clegg et al., 2005).

In sum, ideas of process and ‘becoming’ are at the centre of a revised way of understanding learning in terms of a model of organizing and sensemaking. While we endorse this, we argue that it is not enough to speak of becoming. Rather, circumstances of dynamic complexity comprise becomings. More problematically for the sensemaker, faster becomings provide frames with which slower becomings, cues, gain their meaning (Colville et al., 2012; Weick, 2012).

Colville et al. (2013) consider how the unprecedented event of 9/11 and the act of suicide bombing gave rise to a novel fast-tracked frame in the London Metropolitan Police Service for dealing with what was then, a new and yet unexperienced situation of suicide bombing. This resulted in the actions of Jean Charles De Menezes being made meaningful in this novel frame with tragic consequences. The events which culminated in the erroneous shooting of Jean Charles De Menezes unfolded at great pace and involved the juxtaposition of different frames that were in play at the same time and which had different implications regarding who people were, what their role was and where authority to act lay. This was sensemaking ‘on the run’ in which the issue was not a lack of meaning through an ambiguous situation but of too many meanings in which equivocality remained.

In short, if we consider learning from a sensemaking perspective to be the updating and re-punctuating of continuous experience (Weick and Westley, 1996; Tsoukas, 2014), attending to the content of ‘what is going on’ is not sufficient for sensemaking to reduce equivocality. Tsoukas (2014) asserts that the sensemaker learns by staying attuned to process but this involves not just attending to the content of his/her unfolding experiences (the what – first-order process) but more demandingly, paying attention to the process of experiencing (the how – second-order process). For Tsoukas (2014), this means not only sensing unfolding events – fast and most likely, confusingly succeeding one another – but also on how the sensing of events is accomplished. This mirrors the experiences reported in the Jean Charles De Menezes case (Colville et al., 2013), while it also contains threads of prospective, embodied (they use and carry guns) and emotional sensemaking (adrenalin running high).

This draws attention also to the quality of sensemaking. The task of the process researcher (and the active practitioner) is, according to Pettigrew (1990), to catch reality in flight. However, if this means catching and arresting it by bracketing it for retrospective sensemaking that takes us in one direction: if it means catching in flight in order to derive its meaning, then that takes us in another direction. This means drawing on a vocabulary of words that is more the preserve of philosophers and poets. The debate is replete with difficult concepts denoted by relations that are oxymoronic or paradoxical, such as organizational learning, bureaucratized imagination, learned ignorance and so forth. To call for researchers to attend to the quality of attention means further delving into ideas from the poets.

The poetic eye and Weickarious learning

‘There is more to sensemaking than Karl Weick but it doesn’t make much sense without him’ (Colville et al., 2014: 11). This Special Issue explores the relationship between sensemaking and learning in an endeavour not to follow Weick but to go beyond him although it is inevitable that his work permeates throughout efforts in this direction. Even as Sandberg and Tsoukas (2015) take issue with some of the strange loops of sensemaking, they acknowledge the foundational and inspirational role of Weick in putting forward the dynamic and process perspective denoted by organizing, in comparison to the dominant entitative and positivist view of organization that held sway at that time (Colville et al., 1999; Weick, 2010).

Weick writes with style (Van Maanen, 1995) which some call poetic (Czarniawska, 2006) and this mirrors the extent to which people do poetry in their everyday lives (Weick, 2009). Seamus Heaney echoes a similar sentiment in noting how poetry is capable of distilling human experience and concentrating in words that make sense and ‘go home as only poetry can’. He adds that poetry cannot be proved in the way a theorem can, we are dealing with the arts, not science. But: ‘the paradox of the arts is that they are all made up and yet they allow us to get at truths about who and what we are or might be’ (Heaney, 2002: 68–69).

Getting at truths (note the plural) about who and what we are or might be is an apt aim for a rebalanced, more open and prospective view of sensemaking. Weick in an edited book (Hernes and Maitlis, 2010) entitled Process, Sensemaking and Organizing, comments on the ‘ineffable task’ of the process theorist while drawing attention to the need for the eye of the poet to make sense when the flux is in flux. Quoting from Theseus in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Act 5, Scene 1), he notes how,

The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling,

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;

And as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen

Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name. (Emphases added)

This provides challenge for the organizational eye and the organizational pen. Our concern is that while we do not quarrel with the direction of travel, we are less sure if there are enough people with the poetic eye in organization studies who can not only ‘catch reality in flight’, but also find the words that can catch the meanings as the inchoate process unfolds.

To carry this off, Heaney (2002) says the poet has to have craft and technique. Craft is about knowing how to make a poem, to put the elements together, whereas,

technique … involves not only a poet’s way with words, his management of metre, rhythm and verbal texture; it involves also a definition of his stance towards life, a definition of his own reality … Technique entails the watermarking of your essential patterns of perception, voice and thought into the touch and texture of your lines; it is that whole creative effort of the mind’s and body’s resources to bring the meaning of experience within the jurisdiction of form. (Heaney 2002: 19)

To bring the meaning of experience within the jurisdiction of form is the aim of the process researcher, divining a poetic blend of technique and craft.

In that spirit and towards that end, we offer up the term Weickarious learning. This is, of course, a pun, a play on words which is also being playful with the thread that runs through this Special Issue. It identifies why there is need to revitalise sensemaking and learning in the light of dynamic complexity if it is to provide practical sense which is sometimes called wisdom or phronesis, that is, ‘the kind of prudential judgement by which equivocal circumstances are negotiated with both individual and collective good in mind’ (Nonaka et al., 2014: 368). The negotiation of equivocality is the process of organizing from which organization (however ephemeral) emerges. Indeed, management for Czarniawska (2008: 41) is the organization of organizing.

Weickarious learning also offers a playful provocation, which is particularly apt because vicarious learning is to do with movement and encounters/enactments with the world: for example, the noun ‘vicar’ derives from this and denotes a priest who moves from parish to parish to substitute for the bishop (Macdonald, 1972). Weickarious learning is used here to signify the importance movement has on the process of learning. If the act of re-punctuating experience is a form of continuous learning (Weick and Westley, 1996: 456) and experience is not what happens to a man, it is what a man does with what happens to him (Huxley quoted in Weick, 1979, emphasis added), then the role of enactment in the process of learning to make sense of new and different goings on is crucial, expanding the sense of how life can go (Geertz, 1989).

Process is about movement – Weickarious learning is a way of conveying that movement and the added significance of becoming/being where the action is amid dynamic complexity. It is a prompt for effective organizing and sensemaking when life is experienced as metaphorically, ‘on the run’. If sensemaking is connecting the abstract with the concrete (Weick et al., 2005), then the notion of Weickarious learning we propose enables us to do that – it allows us to ascend to the concrete (Bruner, 1987: xv). It also underscores the dynamic complexity – reflected in contemporary use of terms such as oxymoron, paradox, negative capability, bureaucratic imagination, honest doubt, learned ignorance, simplexity – and seems to convey the essence of the times while retaining a degree of equivocality that resists scientific explanation. On this note, Weickarious learning is an idea that moves us in the right direction for making sense of learning and learning to make sense.

Concluding comments

We find ourselves in overwhelming times with underwhelming theories (Corley and Gioia, 2011; Weick, 2012). Times in which organizations have to face the unusual, unexpected and unprecedented are becoming part of everyday life and in which, for example, counter terrorism organizations are no longer outliers but prototypes. Against this our theories have been tested by the times and found wanting because the oft-cited gap attributed to Kierkegaard between living forward and understanding backwards is widening. This puts a premium on organizations’ abilities to make sense and, ironically, one of the perspectives that is challenged by the times is that of sensemaking.

If sensemaking is concerned with reducing equivocality through a balance between thinking (concepts) and acting (percepts), then our argument is that in dynamic complexity the balance should shift more to perceiving cues of current action in the ‘coming wave’ and less to frames conceived and born in yesterday’s waves. This we called ‘simplexity’ a maxim that we hope would counter the imbalance and have impact by aligning once again the sensable and the sensible.

This is an effort to keep up with the streaming of experience as it unfurls with an intensity, complexity and novelty that William James would have found difficult to imagine. A feature of contemporary life is that it happens ‘on the run’ and its happening is available to all to see and experience, not so much punctuated by having history in hand as having a smart phone in hand. Continuous life is streaming 24/7 in multiple voices, forms and social media. This is why a process perspective that calls us to pay attention to the quality of experience is important. However, It is one thing to call for approaches that ask us to pay attention to the how of experience and quite another to be able to translate this into words which can convey such qualities. This seems to require the craft and technique of the poet and wordsmith.

As Seamus Heaney said, ‘It is in the realm of the glimpsed potential that the future takes shape’. This view of prospective sensemaking stands as a contrast to retrospective glances to the past. Our rebalancing and opening up of the sensemaking perspective to one that understands learning as a process that is part of organizing and sensemaking, that is more than mere interpretation and attends to embodied sensemaking through the adoption of a more thorough-going process approach, provides such gleams that extend the grasp and reach of the sensemaking perspective.

We trust that you find the articles in the Special Issue also open up and extend the requisite variety of sensemaking as we seek to make sense of the overwhelming times in which we find ourselves. In so doing, we may also find out in an altogether more profound sense (Colville et al., 1999), who we are, what our identities are and what we are becoming. A case of sensemaking processes and Weickarious learning.