Weick, Karl 1995, Sensemaking in Organizations Thousand Oaks California Sage

Weick, Karl 1995, Sensemaking in Organizations. Thousand Oaks/ California: Sage. 03.01.
2013
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Ideias e contedos na obra 1. THE NATURE OF SENSEMAKING
Tpicos e comentrios pessoais
Sensemaking is tested to the extreme when people encounter an event whose occurrence is so implausible that they hesitate to report it for fear they will not be believed. (Weick: 1) The fallacy of centrality (Westrum, 1982): Because of the fallacy of centrality, the better the information system, the less sensitive it is to novel events. (Weick: 3)
Exemplo para explicar esta ideia: the battered child syndrome (sndrome da criana mal-tratada). Researcher Ron Westrum, observing the diagnostic practices of pediatricians in the 1940s and 1950s, spotted what he has come to call the fallacy of centrality. The fallacy is this: under the assumption that you are in a central position, you presume that if something serious were happening, you would know about it. And since you don!t know about it, it isn!t happening. It is precisely this distortion that kept pediatricians from diagnosing child abuse until the early 1960s. Their reasoning? If parents were abusing their children, I!d know about it; since I don!t know about it, it isn!t happening. In Managing the Unexpected: Resilient Performance in an Age of Uncertainty, By Karl E. Weick, Kathleen M. Sutcliffe
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Ficha de Leitura de Ana Franco Gil!
Weick, Karl 1995, Sensemaking in Organizations. Thousand Oaks/ California: Sage. 03.01.2013
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Ideias e contedos na obra

The concept of sensemaking: The concept of sensemaking is well named because, literally, it means the making of sense. Active agents construct sensible, sensable (Huber & Daft, 1897, p. 154) events. They structure the unknown (Waterman, 1990, p. 41). How they construct what they construct, why, and with what effects are the central questions for people interested in sensemaking. a) Sensemaking como troca estmulo-estrutura: Many investigators (...) imply what Starbuck and Milliken (1988) make explicit, namely, that sensemaking involves placing stimuli into some kind of framework (p. 51). The well-known phrase frame of reference has traditionally meant a generalized point of view that directs interpretations (Cantril, 1941, p. 20). When people put stimuli into frameworks, this enables them to comprehend, understand, explain, attribute, extrapolate, and predict (Starbuck & Milliken, 1988, p. 51). (Weick: 4) Principais autores desta corrente: Starbuck, Milliken, Westley e Louis. b) Sensemaking como actividades/ mecanismos de interpretao, compreenso, crena...: Thomas, Clark, and Gioia (1993), for example, describe sensemaking as the reciprocal interaction of information seeking, meaning ascription, and action (p. 240), which means that environmental scanning, interpretation, and associated responses all are included. Sackman (1991) talks about sensemaking mechanisms that members use to attribute meaning to events, mechanisms that include the standards and rules for perceiving, interpreting, believing, and acting that are typically used in a given cultural setting (p. 33). Feldman (1989) talks about sensemaking as an interpretative process that is necessary for organizational members to understand and to share understandings about such features of the organization as what it is about, what it does well and poorly, what the problems it faces are, and how it should solve them (p. 19). (Weick: 5) Principais autores desta corrente: Thomas, Clark, Gioia, Sackman e Feldman. c) Sensemaking como mapa cognitivo individual: Some investigators (e.g., Gioia & Chittipeddi, 1991, p. 444) view sensemaking as a more private, more singular activity. Ring and Rang (1989), for example, dene sensemaking as a process in which individuals develop cognitive maps of their environment (p. 342). (Weick: 5)
a) Outra denio de sensemaking: Meryl Louis (1980) She views sensemaking as a thinking process that uses retrospective accounts to explain surprises. (Weick: 4) Interpretation, or meaning, is attributed to surprises... It is crucial to note that meaning is assigned to surprise as an output of the sensemaking process, rather than arising concurrently with the perception or detection of differences (Louis, 1980, p. 241) b) Discrdia entre autores: Sensemaking implica ou no aco? Whereas both Thomas et al. and Sackman mention action in conjunction with sensemaking, Feldman (1989) insists that sensemaking often does not result in action. (...) (p. 20). (Weick: 5)
c) Ring and Rang fazem uma distino entre sensemaking (processo que individual) e understanding (processo que partilhado e tem uma natureza reciproca...).
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The uniqueness of sensemaking: (...) I contrast sensemaking and interpretation because interpretation is often used as a synonym of sensemaking. Such synonym is not a blunder, but it does blur some distinctions that seem crucial if one wishes to understand the subtleties of sensemaking in organized settings. (Weick: 6) (Pgina 7 e 8 - Exemplos de estudos sobre a interpretao em contextos organizacionais.) Clear descriptions of nature of sensemaking that pry it apart from interpretation are found in the work of Schon (1983b), Shotter (1993), and Thayer (1988). (Weick: 9) A crucial property of sensemaking is that human situations are progressively claried, but this clarication often works in reverse. It is less often the case that an outcome fullls some prior denition of the situation, and more often the case that an outcome develops that prior denition. As Garnkel (1967) puts it, actors in the course of a career of actions, discover the nature of the situations in which they are acting (...) (p. 115). A similar emphasis on the idea that outcomes develop prior denitions of the situation is found in cognitive dissonance theory (Festinger, 1957). Dissonance theory focuses on postdecisional efforts to revise the meaning of decision that have negative consequences (Cooper & Fazio, 1984; Schler & Cooper, 1989; Thibodeaus & Aronson, 1992). (Weick: 11) "How can I know what I think till I see what I say?! (...) This recipe, which is central in organizational sensemaking (Weick: 1979, p. 133), retains several elements of dissonance theory. This recipe is about justication (...), choice (...), retrospective sensemaking (...), discrepancies (...), social construction of justication (...), and action as the occasion of sensemaking (...). (Weick: 12) Sensemaking, because it was inuenced by dissonance theory, also meant a focus on conict, affect, motivation, and instability as antecedents of change, rather than the current, more austere focus in cognitive studies on cool formation processing (Markus & Zajonc, 1985, p. 207). (Weick: 12) What makes current thinking about sensemaking robust is that both ethnomethodology (Czarniawska-Joerges, 1992, chap. 5; Gephart, 1993) and dissonance theory (Chatman, Bell, & Staw, 1986; Weick, 1993a) still inform some of the core ideas. (...) What is unusual about the topic of sensemaking is that it is grounded as much in deductions from well-articulated theories as it is in inductions from specic cases of struggles to reduce ambiguity. This is a decided advantage for investigators because there is a core set of ideas that holds this perspective together and has held it together for some time. (Weick: 13)

Weick considera que, apesar de alguns autores considerarem que sensemaking tem que ver com interpretao, o conceito tem um facto de unicidade que permite fazer uma clara distino e operacionalidade... Interpretao tem que ver com um texto. Sensemaking tem uma aplicao mais dispersa: como que texto escrito e como que lido (authoring and reading)? (ver mais denies de interpretao na pgina 7) Ver Thayer: A leader does not tell it as it is; he tells it as it might be, giving what is thereby a different face. (...) The leader is a sense-giver. (p. 250-254) COGNITIVE DISSONANCE THEORY: To reduce dissonance, people spread the alternatives by enhancing the positive feature of the chosen alternative and the negative features of the unchosen alternatives. These operations retrospectively alter the meaning of the decision, the nature of the alternatives, and the history of the decision (...) people start with an outcome in hand - a verdict, a choice - and then render that outcome sensible by constructing a plausible story that produced it (...). (Weick: 11) O legado da Cognitive Dissonance Theory nos estudos organizacionais: enactment - aprovao (Abolaa & Kilduff, 1988; Weick, 1977)), commitment - comprometimento/ compromisso (O!Reilly & Caldwell, 1981; Salancik, 1977), rationality and rationalization - racionalidade e racionalizao (Staw, 1980), escalation - intensicao (Staw, 1981), attribution - atribuio (Calder, 1977; Staw, 1975), justication - justicao (Staw, McKechnie, & Puffer, 1983), motivation - motivao (Staw, 1977). O que estes estudos tm em comum o facto de terem em considerao o sensemaking... (ver: Weick: 12)
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Sensemaking ! Interpretation: Em que o sensemaking se distingue da interpretao? The key distinction is that sensemaking is about the ways that people generate what they interpret. (...) The concept of sensemaking highlights the action, activity, and creating that lays the traces that are interpreted and then reinterpreted. (...) Sensemaking is clearly about an activity or a process, whereas interpretation can be a process but is just as likely to describe a product. (...) A focus on sensemaking induces a mindset to focus on process, whereas this is less true with interpretation. Even when interpretation is treated as a process, the implied nature of process is different. The act of interpreting implies that something is there, a text in the world, waiting to be discovered or approximated (see Daft & Weick, 1984). Sensemaking however, is less about discovery that it is about invention. (Weick:13) To engage sensemaking is to construct, lter, frame, create facticity (Turner, 1987), and render the subjective into something more tangible. The contrast between discovery and invention is implicit in the word sense. To sense something sound like an act of discovery. But to sense something, there must be something there to create the sensation. And sensemaking suggests the construction of that which then becomes sensible. (Weick: 14) (...) the concept of sensemaking is valuable because it highlights the invention that precedes interpretation. It is also valuable because it implies a higher level of engagement by the actor. Interpretation connotes an activity that is more detached and passive than the activity of sensemaking. Sensemaking matters. A failure in sensemaking is consequential as well as existential. It throws into question the nature of the self and the world. As Frost and Morgan (1983) suggest, when people make sense of things, they read into things the meanings they wish to see; they vest objects, utterances, actions and so forth with subjective meaning which helps make their world intelligible to themselves (p. 207) (...) (Weick: 14) Interpretations can be added and dropped with less effect on one!s self-perceptions, which is not true of efforts to replace one sense of the world with another. And whenever sense is lost, the loss is deeply troubling (e.g., Asch, 1952; Garnkel, 1963; Milgram, 1963), whereas the loss of an interpretation is more like a nuisance. (Weick: 14) Finally, what sensemaking is not a metaphor. (Weick: 15) (...) to argue that bulk of organizational life is captured by the metaphor of reading texts is to ignore most of the living that goes into that life. I agree with Czarniawska-Joerges!s (1992, pp. 253-254) assessment that the text metaphor represents the activity of social construction as a static result, implies the meaning already exists and is waiting to be found (...). (Weick: 15)

Esta a sesso do texto mais importante...
interessante a comparao que Drucker (1974) faz entre a tomada de deciso tpica da cultura japonesa e da cultura ocidental; os japoneses praticam o sensemaking (a enfse est na denio da pergunta...) e os ocidentais o decision-making (a nfase est na resposta). (Weick: 15)
Although texts and language games are metaphors for interpretation, sensemaking is not. Sensemaking is what it is, namely, making something sensible. Sensemaking is to understood literally, not metaphorically. (Weick: 16)
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2. SEVEN PROPERTIES OF SENSEMAKING

Como que eu posso saber o que penso at ver o que disse?
1. Identidade: A resposta a esta pergunta sobre quem eu sou, atravs da descoberta de como e o que que eu penso. 2. Retrospeco: Para aprender o que penso, eu olho para aquilo que disse antes. 3. Estabelecer/ determinar: Eu crio o objecto para que este seja olhado e aferido quando eu digo ou fao alguma coisa. 4. Social: Aquilo que eu digo, escolho e concluo determinado pelas pessoas com quem sociabilizo e pela forma como sociabilizo, assim como pelo pblico que eu penso que ir ouvir as concluses que eu alcanar. 5. Processo em contnuo: A minha conversa estende-se no tempo, compete pela ateno de outros processos em contnuo; reecte ainda a forma com os meus interesses vo mudando ao longo do tempo. 6. Pistas extradas: O qu que eu escolho e embelezo como o contedo apenas uma pequena parte do discurso que se vai tornando proeminente devido ao contexto envolvente e s minhas disposies pessoais. 7. Plausibilidade: Eu preciso de saber o suciente sobre o que eu penso sobre os meus projectos, mas apenas isso. Isso signica que sucincia e a plausibilidade esto frente da preciso.
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I. Grounded in identity construction Sensemaking begins with a sensemaker. (...) The trap is that sensemaker is singular and no individual ever acts like a single sensemaker. (Weick: 19) Identities are constituted out of the process of interaction. To shift among interactions is to shift among denitions of self. (...) But the direction of causality ows just as often from the situation to a denition of self as it does the other way. And this is why the establishment and maintenance of identity is a core preoccupation in sensemaking and why we place it rst on our list. (Weick: 20) It is the ongoing fate of these needs that affects in individual sensemaking in organizations. (Weick: 20) If negative images threaten any of these three representations of self, the people may alter the sense they make of those images, even if this means redening the organization identity. If redenition proves unworkable, then something other than the organization (e.g., political afliation with the religious right) may become the mirror in front of which individuals primp, evaluate, and adjust the self that acts, interprets, and becomes committed. (Weick: 21) The thing that moves us to pride and shame is not the mere mechanical reection of ourselves, but an imputed sentiment, the imagined effect of this reection upon another!s mind. (Weick: 22) Sensemaking processes derive from (...) the need within individuals to have a sense of identity (...). Sensemaking processes have a strong inuence on the manner by which individuals within organizations begin processes of transacting with others. (...) Organizational participants come to appreciate the nature and purpose of a transaction with others by reshaping or clarifying the identity of their own organization. By projecting itself onto its environment, and organization develops a self-referential appreciation of its own identity, which in turn permits the organization to act in relation to its environment. (Ring & Van de Ven, 1989: 180) A partir desta descrio, Weick conclui que: a. O sensemaking controlado e intencional espoletado por uma falha da conrmao do self; b) O sensemaking surge como uma forma de manter a consistncia e uma percepo positiva do self; c) As pessoas aprendem sobre as suas identidades atravs de se projectarem no ambiente envolvente e nas suas consequncias; d) As pessoas tentam simultaneamente moldar e agir contra o ambiente (proaco e reaco); e) A ideia de que o sensemaking auto-referencial sugere que o self, mais do que o ambiente, o texto que precisa de uma interpretao.

As sete caractersticas do sensemaking so mencionadas na literatura, tm implicaes prticas, cada uma delas tem uma pergunta de investigao que se relaciona com as outras seis, todas elas incorporam aco e contexto, podem ser representadas como uma sequncia. As sete propriedades sugerem de que forma o sensemaking funciona e como pode falhar. Esta lista um manual de observao, mais do que um modelo com o objectivo de ser testado e melhorado. O objectivo de agrupar as caracterstica do sensemaking por algumas barreiras ao fenmeno. I. Baseado na construo da identidade Ver: Mead - one sensemaker is a parliament of selves; Pablo Neruda - We are Many; Knorr-Cetina - the individual is a typied discursive construction. Erez and Earley (1993) - cultural self-representation theory: view the self (...) as a socially situated dynamic interpretive processes (p. 26) Trs tipos de necessidade que so cobertos pelo processo de desenvolvimento e manuteno do processo (permanente) de sentido do self: a) a necessidade de auto-reforo; b) o motivo da auto-eccia; c) a necessidade de auto-consistncia. Dutton and Dukerich (1991) - "Individuals! self-concepts and personal identities are formed and modied in part by how they believe others view the organization for which they work. (...) The close link between and individual!s character and an organization!s image implies that individuals are personally motivated to preserve a positive organizational image and repair a negative one through association and dissociation with action and issues (p. 548) image of mirror (Dutton and Dukerich, 1991) / looking-glass sef (Cooley, 1902) The more selves I have access to, the more meanings I should be able to extract and impose in any situation. (Weick: 24)
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II. Retrospective Perhaps the most distinguishing characteristic of the present conceptualization of sensemaking is the focus on retrospect. (...) The idea of retrospective sensemaking derives from Schutz!s (1967) analysis of meaningful lived experience. The key word in that phrase, lived, is stated in the past tense to capture the reality that people can know what they are doing only after they have done it. (Weick: 24) For the Act of attention (...) presupposes an elapsed, passed-away experience - in short, one that is already in the past. (Schutz, 1967: 51) A partir desta descrio, Weick conclui que: a. A criao de signicado um processo de ateno, mas ateno para aquilo que j ocorreu; b) A ateno est direccionada para trs, para um ponto especco no tempo aquilo que est a ocorrer agora ir inuenciar o que for descoberto quando olharmos para trs; c) para ser interpretado, o texto j decorreu e apenas uma memria, tudo aquilo que a nossa lembrana ir afectar o sentido dessas memrias; d) por estas razes, a sequncia estmulo-resposta pode ser uma unidade analtica enganadora. Actions are known only when they have been completed, which means we are always a little behind or our actions are always a bit ahead of us. (...) Meaning is not attached to the experience that is singled out. Instead, the meaning is in the kind of attention that is directed to this experience. (Weick: 26) The important point is that retrospective sensemaking is an activity in which many possible meanings may need to be synthesized, because many different projects are under way at the time reection takes place (e.g., Boland, 1984). The problem is that there are too many meanings, not too few. The problem faced by the sensemaker is one of equivocality, not one of uncertainty. The problem is confusion, not ignorance. (Weick: 27) If the outcome is perceived to be bad, then antecedents are reconstructed to emphasize incorrect actions, awed analyses, and inaccurate perceptions, even if such aws were not inuential or all that obvious at the time (Starbuck & Milliken, 1988, pp. 37-38). (Weick: 28) Retrospective sensemaking does erase (Starbuck & Milliken, 1988, pp. 37) many of the sequences that made it harder to accomplish the nal outcome. (Weick: 28) ***

II. Retrospectivo Ver: Pirsig (?) Hartshorne (1962: 442) - Man discovered that this perceived world is in reality a past world. (...) Any object outside the body, however close, is at least minutely past by the time we perceive it.
The choice of the stimulus affects the choice of what the action means. And both choices are heavily inuenced bu the situational context. (Weick: 26) We are conscious always of what we ave done, never of doing it. We are always conscious directly only of sensory processes, never of motor processes (...). (Mead, 1956: 136)
***A partir desta ideia, Weick adverte que: a) O sensemaking retrospectivo no dia-a-dia envolve extenses de tempo curtas entre agir e reectir, o que signica que os registos da memria so tipicamente frescos e ricos para a determinao; b) A retrospeco apenas torna o passado mais claro que o presente e o futuro; no torna o passado transparente (Starbuck & Milliken, 1988, pp. 39-40); c) O sentimento da ordem, da clareza e da racionalidade so um objectivo importante do sensemaking, o que signica que quando este sentimento conquistado, o processo retrospectivo pra. Os estudos organizacionais reconhecem este processo de retrospeco: ver Mintzberg (1978), Boland (1984), Staw (1975)...
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III. Enactive of sensible environments I cited Thomas et. al.!s (1993, pp. 2) argument that the concept of sensemaking keeps action and cognition together; when I said that interpretation better explains how entities get there in the rst place; and when I implied that action is a precondition for sensemaking as, for example, when the action of saying makes it possible for people to then see what they think. (Weick: 30) I use the word enactment to preserve the fact that, in organizational life, people often produce part of the environment they face (Pondy and Mitroff, 1979, p. 17). I like the word because it suggests that there are close parallels between what legislators do and managers do. Both groups construct reality through authoritative acts. (Weick: 30-31) I assume that action is crucial for sensemaking. (...) The centerpiece of Follet!s thinking is the idea that people receive stimuli as a result of their own activity, which is suggested by the word of enactment. (Weick: 32) If we begin to think about sensemaking as relating, several classic issues in organizational studies become recast. (Weick: 33) resistance to change confronting the activity of environment

III. O poder de determinar dos ambientes sensatos/ razoveis (?!?) Enactment: estabelecer, determinar, aprovar...
(...) there is not some kind of monolithic, singular, xed environment that exists detached from and external to these people. Instead, in each case the people are very much a part of their own environments. They act, and in doing so create the materials that become the constraints and opportunities they face. (Weick: 31)
the environment: Weick considera que esta construo sugere algo que singular e xo, por isso, afastado do indivduo: Both implications are nonsense. (Weick: 32)
Follet (1924) argues that use of the word resistance creates an unfortunate mindset that limits the way in which we presume people deal with the environment. She argues that rather than talk about resistance, we should talk about confronting the activity of environment. (Weick: 33) Weick chama a ateno para o conceito de ENACTMENT: H duas preocupaes que devemos ter presentes quando nos referimos ao conceito de sensemaking: a) Criar no a nica coisa que se faz atravs da aco - no devemos pensar que a aco uma mera resposta a um estmulo (perdem-se as subtilezas que lhe conferem um signicado...); b) Cuidado com a Ansiedade Cartesiana - as pessoas parecem precisar de pensar o mundo com traos predeterminados e informao j feita, uma vez que desistir desta ideia de mundo como uma referncia estvel cair no idealismo, nihilismo e no subjectivismo. The destructive side of deconstructionism is the undermining of the faith and belief necessary to get sensemaking started. (...) Faith is instrumental to sensemaking. (Weick: 38)
Ver: Follet (1924) I never react to you but to you-plus-me; or to be more accurate, it is I-plus-you reacting to you-plus-me. (p. 62-63)
Confront does not mean combat. In other words, it leaves the possibilty of integrating as the method of the meeting of difference. (Follet, 1924: 120)
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IV. Social When discussing sensemaking, it is easy to forget that human thinking and social functioning (...) (are) essential aspects of one another (Resnick, Levine, & Teasley, 1991, p. 3). (Weick: 38) An organization is a network of intersubjectively shared meanings that are sustained through the development and use of a common language and everyday social interaction (Walsh and Ungson, 1991: 60) Those who forget sensemaking is a social process miss a constant substrate that shapes interpretations and interpreting. (Weick: 39) Sensemaking is never solitary because what a person does internally is contingent on others. Even monologues and one-way communications presume an audience. GRAND THEORIES: 1. Socialization: Louis (1980); Lave & Wenger (1991) In general, socialization studies represent a variant of Schutz!s (1964) analysis of the stranger, which suggests that newcomers need to learn both how to interpret and how to express themselves in the natives! vernacular. (Weick: 41) 2. Symbolic interactionism: Fine (1993) Investigators who talk about sensemaking often invoke imagery associated with symbolic interactionism (...), not so much because this is the unofcial theory of sensemaking but because the theory keeps in play a crucial set of elements, including self, action, interaction, interpretation, meaning, and joint action. (Weick: 41) (...) to use the images of symbolic interactionism is to insure that one remains alert to the ways in which people actively shape each other ! s meanings and sensemaking processes. (Weick: 41) ****** And Weick (1985) argues that a signicant portion of the organizational environment consists of nothing more than talk, symbols, promises, lies, interest, attention, threats, agreements, expectations, memories, rumors, indicators, suporters, detractors, faith, suspicion, trust, appearance, loyalties, and commitments(...). (p. 128). (Weick: 41) This sounds obvious, but it is striking how often people discuss shared meaning or social construction, as if that exhausts what there is to say about social sensemaking. (...) Czarniawska-Joerges (1992) argues that shared meaning is not what is crucial for collective action, but rather is the experience of the collective action that is shared (see p. 188 Chapter 8) (Weick: 42)

IV. Social the contigent quality of sensemaking descoberta na descrio de Allport (1985: 3) sobre a psicologia social: an attempt to understand and explain how the thought, feeling, and behavior of individuals are inuenced by the actual, imagined or implied presence of others. Burns and Stalker (1961: 118): In working organizations decisions are made either in the presence of others or with the knowledge that they will have to implemented, or understood, or approved by other. Blumer (1969:8): (...) the activities of others enter as positive factors in the formation of their own conduct; in the face of the actions of others one may abandon an intention or purpose, revise it, check or suspend it, intensify it, or replace it. (...) The actions of others have to be taken into account and cannot be regarded as merely an arena for the expression of what one is disposed to do or sets out to do. VER: Segundo Weick, o interaccionismo simblico deriva dos trabalhos de Mead. People who study sensemaking pay a lot of attention to talk, discourse, and conversation because that is how a great deal of social contact is mediated. (Weick: 41) Gronn (1983): talk as the work March and Olsen (1976: 25): organizations as a set of procedures for argumentation and interpretation Shotter (1993: 157): descreve manager as author: a practicalethical author, a conversational author... Alignment is no less social than is sharing. But it does suggest a more varied set of inputs and practices in sensemaking than does sharing. (Weick: 43)
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V. Ongoing Sensemaking never starts. The reason it never starts is that pure duration never stops. People are always in the middle of things, which become things, only when those same people focus on the past from some point beyond it. Flows are constants of sensemaking (...). (Weick: 43) To understand sensemaking is to be sensitive to the ways in which people chop moments out of continuous ows and extract cues from those moments. (Weick: 43) GRAND THEORIES / GROUNDED THEORIES: 1. Burrell and Morgan (1979, p. 237) citing Rickman (1976), note that, when Dilthey adapted the so-called hermeneutic circle to social phenomena, he recognized that there are no absolute starting points, no self-evident, self-contained certainties on which we can build, because we always nd ourselves in the middle of of complex situations which we try to disentangle by making, then revising, provisional assumptions. (Weick: 43) 2. Winograd and Flores (1986) make a similar point in their gloss of Heidegger!s idea that people nd themselves thrown into ongoing situations and have to make do if they want to make sense of what is happening. (Weick: 43-44) *** An interruption to a ow typically induces an emotional response, which then paves the way for emotion to inuence sensemaking. It is precisely because ongoing ows are subject to interruption that sensemaking is infused with feeling. (Weick: 45) Interruption is a signal that important changes have occurred in the environment. Thus a key event for emotion is the interruption of an expectation. It makes good evolutionary sense to construct an organism that reacts signicantly when the world is no longer the way it was. (Weick: 46) (...) we can now summarize arguments linking emotion with sensemaking. Emotion is what happens between the time that an organized sequence is interrupted and the time which the interruption is removed, or a substitute response is found that allows the sequence to be completed. (Weick: 46) (...) organizational sensemaking should occur largely in conjunction with negative emotion. (...) First, people have little control over the onset or termination of interruptions. Second, over time people tend to experience more rather than fewer interrupting stimuli (...). And third, the achievement of plans in organizations is more often slowed than accelerated (...). Culture may modify all three of these effects, as Van Maanen and Kunda (1989) show. (Weick: 48)

V. Um processo contnuo... *** Os autores descrevem 6 propriedades de uma thrownness situation (a partir da teoria de Heidegger): 1) No podes evitar agir; 2) No podes andar para trs e reectir sobre as tuas aces; 3) Os efeitos da aco no podem ser previstos; 4) No tens uma representao estvel da situao; 5) Toda a representao uma interpretao; 6) A linguagem aco. VER: Langer (1989), Cohen, March, and Olsen (1972), Starbuck (1983) Eccles and Nohria (1992: 48) describe the context of managing as the ongoing ow of actions and words in an organization, which is often punctuated by events such as a product launch, an off-site strategy-planning exercise, or a budget meeting. (Weick: 45)
A emoo aquilo que ocorre entre a interrupo de um processo e a descoberta de uma nova resposta que permita completar a sequncia... If interruption slows the accomplishment of an organizational sequence, people are likely to experience anger. If interruption has accelerated accomplishment, then they are likely to experience pleasure. (Weick: 48)
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VI. Focused on and by Extracted Cues Sensemaking tends to be swift, which means we are more likely to see products than process. To counteract this, we need to watch how people deal with prolonged puzzles that defy sensemaking, puzzles such as paradoxes, dilemmas, and inconceivable events. We also need to pay close attention to ways people notice, extract cues, and embellish that which they extract. (Weick: 49) Extracted cues are simple, familiar structures that are seeds from which people develop a larger sense of what may be occurring. The importance of these cues in organizational analysis was recognized by Smircich and Morgan (1982) when they said leadership lies in large part in generating a point of reference, against which a feeling of organization and direction can emerge (p. 258). (...) To establish a point of reference (...) is a consequential act. (Weick: 50) A seed is a form-producing process that captures much of the vagueness and indeterminacy of sensemaking. (...) A specic observation becomes linked with a more general form or idea in the interest of sensemaking, which then claries the meaning of the particular, which then alter slightly the general, and so on. (Weick: 51) What an extracted cue will become depends on context (local contingencies) in two important ways. First, context affects what is extracted as a cue in the rst place (...). Second, context also affects how the extracted cue is then interpreted (...). (Weick: 51) CONTEXT MATTERS IN SENSEMAKING STUDIES: *** 1. Salancik and Pfeffer (1978, p. 233), for example, argue that the social context is crucial for sensemaking because it binds people to actions that they then must justify, it affects the saliency of information, and it provides norms and expectations that constrain explanations. (Weick: 53) 2. Mailloux (1980) adds the fact that context incorporates politics (...). (Weick: 53) 3. (...) Starbucks and Milliken, who argue that people in organizations are in different locations and are familiar with different domains, which means they have different interpretations of common events. (Weick: 53) (...) the point to be retained is that faith in these cues and their sustained use as a reference point are important for sensemaking. (Weick: 53) **SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY: An extracted cue is used to prophesy the nature of the referent from which it was extracted. When the person acts condently, as if that malleable referent has the character inferred from the cue, the referent often is shaped in directions consistent with the prophecy. (Weick: 54)

VI. Focado em (e por) pistas extradas Foco no processo Metfora da semente: I intentionally used the metaphor of seed to capture the openended quality of sensemaking when extracted cues are used. (Weick: 50) Sobre a metfora, ver: Shotter (1983: 29-30) *** Importncia do contexto 1. O que extrado como pista? Este processo descrito de formas diferentes na literatura: search (Cyert & March, 1963), scanning (Daft & Weick, 1984), noticing (Starbuck & Milliken, 1988)... 2. Como que a pista extrada interpretada? (discusso sobre indexicals). Noticing diferente de sensemaking (ver Starbuck & Milliken, 1988: 60): Sensemaking focuses on the subtleties and interdependencies whereas noticing picks up major events and gross trends.); noticing refers to the activities of ltering, classifying, and comparing, whereas sensemaking refers more to interpretation and the activity od fetermining what the noticed cues mean. (Weick: 51) Indexicality refers to the contextual nature of objects and events. That is to say, without a supplied context, objects and events have equivocal or multiple meanings. (Leiter, 1980: 107)
**EPISDIO DO MAPA DOS PIRINUS: This incident raises the intriguing possibility that when you are lost, any old map will do. (...) Once people act (enactment), they generate tangible outcomes (cues) in some context (social), and this helps them discover (retrospect) what is occurring (ongoing) what needs to be explained (plausibility), and what should be done next (identity enhancement). (Weick: 54-55)
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VII. Driven by Plausibility rather than Accuracy The prex sense in the word sensemaking is mischievous. It simultaneously invokes a realist ontology, as in the suggestion that something is out there to be registered and sense accurately, and an idealist ontology, as in the suggestion that something out there needs to be agreed on and constructed plausibly. The sensible need not be sensable, and therein lies the trouble. (Weick: 55) A reasonable position to start from in studies of sensemaking is to argue that accuracy is nice but not necessary. (Weick: 56) (...) sensemaking is about plausibility, pragmatics, coherence, reasonableness, creation, invention, and instrumentality. Sensemaking, to borrow Fiske!s (1992) imagery, takes a relative approach to truth, predicting that people will believe that can account for sensory experience but what is also interesting, attractive, emotionally appealing, and goal relevant (p. 879). (Weick: 57) *** WHY IS ACCURACY SECONDARY IN STUDYING SENSEMAKING? 1. First, people need to distort and lter, to separate signal from noise given their current projects, if they are not to be overwhelmed with data (Miller, 1978, chap. 5). (Weick: 57) 2. Second, sensemaking is about the embellishment and elaboration of a single point of reference or extracted cue. (...) accuracy is meaningless when used to describe a ltered sense of the present, linked with a reconstruction of the past, that has been edited in hindsight. (Weick: 57) 3. (...) a third reason why accuracy is secondary is that speed often reduces the necessity of accuracy in the sense that quick responses shape events before they have become crystallized into a single meaning. (...) The ability to use minimal cues quickly in categorizing the events of the envrionment is what gives the organism its lead time in adjusting to events. (Weick: 57-58) 4. A fourth reason why issues of accuracy do not dominate studies of sensemaking is that, if accuracy does become an issue, it does so for short periods of time and with respect to specic questions. (Weick: 58) 5. Our repeated reference to the interpersonal, interactive, interdependent quality of organizational life can be interpreted as a fth reason why accuracy is not the sole concern in sensemaking. (Weick: 58) 6. We have talked throughout about the important effect projects have on sensemaking. That ongoing effect provides the background for the sixth reason that themes of accuracy seldom dominates discussions on sensemaking. (Weick: 59)

VII. Movido mais pela plausibilidade que pela preciso Ver Isenberg (1986: 242-243): Plausible reasoning involves going beyond the directly observable or at least consensual information to form ideas or understandings that provide enough certainty. (...) There are several ways in which this process departs from a logicaldeductive process. First, the reasoning is not necessarily correct, but it ts the facts, albeit imperfectly at times. Second, the reasoning is based on incomplete information. Ver Sutcliffe (1994: 1374): Having an accurate environmental map may be less important than having some map that brings order to the world and prompts action. *** H, POR ISSO, UMA RELAO COM AS ESTRIAS...
6. A diferena aqui reside entre action (accuracy) e enactment (plausibility)...
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7. The seventh reason why accuracy plays a secondary role in analyses of sensemaking is that stimuli that are ltered out are often those that detracts from an energetic, condent, motivated response. (...) Bold action is adaptive because its opposite, deliberation, is futile in a changing world where perceptions, by denition, can never be accurate. They can never be accurate because by the time people notice and name something, it has become something else and no longer exists. (Weick: 60) 8. The eighth, and nal, reason why accuracy is nice but not necessary is that it is almost impossible to tell, at the time of perception, whether the perceptions will prove accurate or not. (Weick: 60) If accuracy is nice but not necessary in sensemaking, then what is necessary? The answer is, something that preserves plausibility and coherence, something that is reasonable and memorable, something that embodies past experience and expectations, something that resonates with other people, something that can be constructed retrospectively but also can be used prospectively, something that captures both feeling and thought, something that allows for embellishment to t current oddities, something that is fun to construct. In short, what is necessary in sensemaking is a good story. A good story hold disparate elements together long enough to energize and guide action, plausibly enough to allow people to make retrospective sense of whatever happens, and engagingly enough that others will contribute their own inputs in the interest of sensemaking. (Weick: 61) (...) in a equivocal, postmodern world, infused with the politics of interpretation and conicting interests and inhabited by people with multiple shifting identities, an obsession with accuracy seems fruitless, and not of much practical help, either. Of much more help are the symbolic trappings of sensemaking, trappings such as myths, metaphors, platitudes, fables, epics, and paradigms (see Gagliardi, 1990). Each of these resources contains a good story. And a good story, like a workable cause map, shows patterns that may already exist in the puzzles an actor now faces, or patterns that could be created anew in the interest of more order and sense in the future. The stories are templates. They are products of previous efforts of sensemaking. They explain. And they energize. And those are two important properties of sensemaking that we remain attentive to when we look for plausibility instead of accuracy. (Weick: 61)
MUITO IMPORTANTE!
Ligao para o contexto de simplexity...
61 - 62
SUMMARY (Ver pgina 5 da Ficha de Leitura)
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120 - 121 127 - 131 120 - 121
Ideias e contedos na obra SENSEMAKING AND STORIES (...)

Firestone!s analysis is also a wonderful foot-in-the-door that shows why stories are so crucial for sensemaking. (...) These stories are the extracted cues and the seeds for sensemaking referred to earlier. But they may also imply crude frames within which previously unnoticed features of the organization now are noticed and take on meaning. (Weick: 120)
Chapter 5: The substance of sensemaking
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Stories: Vocabularies of Sequence and Experience The role of stories in sensemaking has given considerable attention recently, due in part to Mittroff and Kilmann!s (1976) pilot studies, Fisher!s (1984) systematic thinking, Polkinghorne!s (1988) survey, and Bruner!s (1990) and Zukier!s (1986) engaging discussions of the idea that people think narratively rather than argumentatively or paradigmatically. (Weick: 127) The importance of stories for sensemaking is evident in Robinson!s (1981) observation that given mankind!s propensity for inductive generalization, noteworthy experiences will often become the empirical basis for rules of thumbs, proverbs, and other guides to conduct. Thus, telling stories about remarkable experiences is one of the ways in which people try to make unexpected expectable, hence manageable (p. 60). (Weick: 127) The elements of s prototypical story include a protagonist, a predicament, attempts to resolve the predicament, the outcome of such attempts, and the reactions of the protagonist to the situation (Stein & Policastro, cited in Robinson & Hawpe, 1986, p. 12). When people punctuate their own living into stories, they impose a formal coherence on what is otherwise a owing soup. Narrativity is a mode of description that transforms events into historical facts by demonstrating their ability to function as elements of completed stories (White, 1981, p. 251). (Weick: 128) Events in a story are resorted and given order, typically one in which a sequence is created (Zukier, 1986). (...) the editing necessary to construct that tight sequence is substantial. In like manner, personal narratives are the product of severe editing (...) because people who build narratives of their own lives use hindsight. (Weick: 128) Stories are inventions rather than discoveries. They are works in ction, but they are no more ctional than any other product such as tought since abstraction, schematization, and inference are part of any cognitive act (Robinson & Hawpe, 1986, pp. 111-112). (Weick: 128) The requirement necessary to produce a good narrative provide a plausible frame for sensemaking. Stories posit a history for an outcome. They gather strands of experience into a plot that produces that outcome. The plot follows either the sequence beginning-middle-end or the sequence situation-transformation-situation. But sequence is the source of sense. (Weick: 128) ***

Chapter 5: The substance of sensemaking (...) most organizational realities are based on narration (e.g., Bantz, 1993; Boje, 1991; Orr, 1990). (Weick: 127) Making the unexpected expectable through stories is a major theme in Orr!s (1987, 1990) research (...). The fact that stories serve as guides to conduct recapitulates once more the point made earlier that frames guide conduct by facilitating the interpretation of cues turned up by that conduct. (Weick: 127) When Robinson (1981) refers to vivid, tellable, interesting stories that are noteworthy, he means stories that depart from shared norms of experience and prevailing frames in four ways (p. 59): a) the actions described are difcult, b) the situation poses a predicament that cannot be handled in a routine manner, c) unexpected events happen in an otherwise normal sequence of events, d) something about the situation is unusual in the narrator!s experience. (Weick: 128-129) ________________________________________________________ *** Sequencing is a powerful heuristic for sensemaking. Because the essence of storytelling is sequencing, it is not surprising that stories are powerful standalone contents for sensemaking. (Weick: 129) Stories (...) may be crucial for sensemaking because they facilitate diagnosis and reduce the disruption produced when projects are interrupted. (Weick: 129) What is interesting about stories is that they may rehearse implausible sequences. When stories overstate the strength of causal ties, they simulate the effects of tight coupling in a complex world. (...) stories provide tools for diagnosis. But they also serve to reduce the arousal that can interfere with sensemaking. (Weick: 130)
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This is a lot to ask of stories. And a lot to claim for them. At minimum, the point is that vivid stories are stubborn vocabularies that intrude into sensemaking (Wilkins, 1984). Perhaps there is no common sensemaking gambit than, that reminds me of a story (Brown, 1985). This innocent phrase represents a unit of meaning. Something in the present reminds the listener of something that resembles it from the past. (Weick: 131) Some functions of stories for sensemaking: First, stories aid comprehension because they integrate that which is known about an event with what which is conjectural. Second, stories suggest a causal order for events that originally are perceived as unrelated and akin to a list. Third, stories enable people to talk abut absent things and to connect them with present things in the interest of meaning. Fourth, stories are mnemonics that enable people to reconstruct earlier complex events. Fifth, stories can guide action before routines are formulated and can enrich routines after those are formulated. Sixth, stories enable people to build a database of experience from which they can infer how things work. And seventh, stories transmit and reinforce thirdorder controls by conveying shared values and meaning (...). (Weick: 129)
129
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Weick, Karl 1995, Sensemaking in Organizations Thousand Oaks California Sage

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Ideias e contedos na obra 1. THE NATURE OF SENSEMAKING

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2. SEVEN PROPERTIES OF SENSEMAKING

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6. A diferena aqui reside entre action (accuracy) e enactment (plausibility)...

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Chapter 5: The substance of sensemaking

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