CHAPTER 3 Decision Making and Sensemaking

Richard J. Boland, Jr.

Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, USA Judge Business School, University of Cambridge, UK

Decision making and sensemaking may at first seem to be an odd pair of terms to reconcile. The two have very different perspectives on quite dissimilar domains of human behavior. One quality that does unite them, however, is that decision making and sensemaking are intimately related to the human being as an actor. Decision making is concerned with evaluating alternative courses of action and making a choice among them. It is prior to and culminates in the action of a human being. Sensemaking, on the other hand, is concerned with making things that have already happened meaningful to us. It follows from, and is based on, the prior action of a human being. In this chapter we explore the different perspectives of these two traditions as they relate to the human action, and discuss the possibility of reconciling their divergent qualities with the emerging developments in design science. Keywords: Sensemaking; Decision making; Design; Design thinking; Design attitude

Introduction

Decision making by a human actor is fraught with difficulty. Herbert Simons Noble laureate research explored the cognitive limits of the human capacity to calculate a choice among alternative courses of action. His conclusion pointed to the bounded rationality of the human decision maker, and to the inevitability of settling for good enough in our decision making, as opposed to finding an optimal choice (Simon 1947, 1957, 1960). Simon referred to this limitation in human decision behavior as our bounded rationality and to the less than optimal decisions it led to as satisficing. In addition to our cognitive limits, humans display predictable strategies in their decision making which further limits their capacity to compute best solutions. The behavioral research of Tversky and Kahneman (1971) has explored those strategies, such as anchoring and adjustment, for decades. But here we are not going to deal with the limitations of humans as decision makers, or with the bias inducing strategies they employ. Instead, we consider the relation of human decision making to our position as actors our location in space and time and contrast that with our position in space and time as we engage in sensemaking. First, we review the process of decision making, based primarily on

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the work of Herbert Simon. Then, we review the process of sensemaking, based primarily on the work of Karl Weick. Finally, we explore some of the difficulties in bringing the two processes together in a single framework, and propose the act of designing and design thinking as a possible way of doing that.

Decision Making

Simon introduced a model of decision making based on an explicit analogy between the operation of the mind and the operation of a computer (Newell and Simon 1964). Using that analogy, he contended that decision making is an instance of a general problem-solving behavior we display, and that it takes place in a problem space. The problem space is pictured as a landscape, with different positions on the landscape corresponding to the various alternatives and actions open to the decision maker. Thinking during problem solving is pictured as movement from node to node in the problem space, searching for a solution (Simon 1957). The question then becomes: how do we make moves in the problem space that get us closer to our goal of solving the problem or making the decision, and how do we recognize that a satisfactory solution has been found, so that we can stop our search? Here, we use Simons concepts as a way of visualizing decision making, because of his generality, but we could just as easily use decision trees, multiple-criteria decision making, or other techniques. The method of decision making we consider is not really an issue for us here, because any decision-making theory or technique will include the same basic features of Simons model: traversing a complex decision space, searching for an alternative to select as our solution, testing for improvement in a possible solution, and making a choice. Consider a significant decision you have recently made to purchase a major item, to change a job, or to take a trip and you will see this basic decisionmaking process being played out in your own life. One overwhelming characteristic of decision making is its future orientation. I am choosing something now, which will be done sometime in the future, even if it takes place in the instant after deciding. Furthermore, everything I consider in making a decision has to do with some future time period. The considerations will include events that may or may not happen, costs that will or will not be incurred, benefits that will or will not be gained, conditions that may or may not hold, as well as opportunities that will be foregone. Our attention to the future in decision making is almost complete and without exception. In fact, we are instructed to avoid the fallacy of considering the past in making decisions. We are urged to avoid considering money or effort already invested in an alternative we are considering because they are sunk costs and not relevant in our calculations about the future. All that matters is what will happen as we move forward from this point in time the moment of decision making. We can depict decision making on a time line as shown in Figure 1.

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Figure 1. Decision making and time

Sensemaking

Sensemaking has a similarly lopsided view of time. Sensemaking was introduced to the organizational literature by Karl Weick (1979, 1995), and follows from the phenomenological tradition in sociology of Alfred Schutz (1967). A sensemaking perspective emphasizes the continuous flow of action and interaction that constitutes human life, and the ambiguous meaning of the fresh trace of action that we have just experienced. Sensemaking pictures us as immersed in a flow of action, a blooming, buzzing confusion, as William James characterized it. In this stream of interaction in which we engage, we are continuously confronted with what we have just done, called our enactments, and are struggling to make sense of them. The problem for sensemaking is not to decide what to do, but to understand what we have just done. The doing always comes first as a raw experience of action, reaction, and interaction. A key phrase from Weicks sensemaking perspective is: How do I know what I think until I hear what I say? From this perspective, the act of talking is not a report summarizing what we have already thought and stored away as knowledge, but is a fundamentally creative and original accomplishment. The act of talking is an act of thinking, and only after having said something are those thoughts available to us to consider what they mean. What we have just spoken or heard or done is an enactment an unformed meaning, which our sensemaking faculty processes. In an organizational setting, our enactments have particularly rich possibilities to be made meaningful in different ways. Enactments in organizations are often highly equivocal, because there are so many diverse interests, positions, political struggles, and stakeholders involved, any one of which could understand a recent enactment quite differently. Sensemaking reduces the equivocality of enactments by applying a pattern of meaning onto the enactments and thereby making sense of them. Using an evolution-based image, Weick portrays sensemaking as following a pattern of variation, selection, and retention. First, our equivocal enactments continuously present us with variation that feeds the sensemaking process. Then, we select from a repertoire of meaning structures that have been encountered or employed in the past, or we generate a new meaning structure employing rules of construction that we have encountered or employed in the past, and we employ that meaning structure as an interpretive frame on the enactment. Finally, we retain the patterns

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Figure 2. Sensemaking and time

of interpretive structures that we have found useful, and employ them in subsequent sensemaking episodes. The sociologist Anthony Giddens (1979, 1984) provides us with a welldeveloped synthesis of traditions in social theory that is helpful for understanding the broader theoretical basis of sensemaking. His synthesis is called structuration theory, and it highlights the centrality of human agency in producing and reproducing social structures. Like Weick, he takes as a given that the only place we can find something close to a social or organizational structure is in the interaction of human beings as they initiate action, respond to the action of another, and anticipate anothers reaction to their action. All the while, Giddens portrays the individual as monitoring his/her conduct in real time, and drawing on understanding of the norms, power, and language in their organization or society to make meaningful the unfolding process of interaction in which they are enmeshed. Thus, the sensemaking perspective involves a very different attention to time and space from that of the decision-making perspective. The focus of theorizing for sensemaking is based on the present moment, as in decision making, but the attention to temporality is in the opposite direction. The sensemaking view begins with equivocal enactments that are encountered in the present moment, and looks backward through time to attribute meaning to them and reduce their equivocality. As with the decision-making perspective, the slice of time and space that it does not attend to is dismissed as unimportant. In this case, it is the future and the possibility of making decisions about future actions (such as organizational strategies or plans) that are discounted and ignored. As Weick explains, decisions are occasionally taken (i. e., in a forward-looking, future-oriented way), but they are relatively rare occurrences in comparison to the continuous process of sensemaking in human experience. Based on this brief discussion, we can depict sensemaking on a time line as shown in Figure 2.

Reconciling Decision Making and Sensemaking

Let us consider together these two ways of understanding the moment of situated action. These depictions of decision making and sensemaking seem to compli-

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ment each other, but we cannot easily combine them, because they have such different ontological and epistemological foundations. Each considers the world to be composed of quite different sorts of being, and each represents a very different way of knowing about the world. Their different assumptions about what constitutes the world and how we can know about it are, in a deep sense, incommensurable. Their differences reflect the long history of social philosophical writing in Western civilization for which John Dewey provides us an excellent overview. His classic work, entitled Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920), presents a series of lectures he delivered in Japan in which he set out a strong, and still relevant, critique of our modern concepts of truth. Essentially, Dewey argued that the tradition of the Greeks has been carried down to us in the form of certain presumptions about the world both as to what it is comprised of, and as to how we can know it. In this history of how we understand truth, Dewey emphasizes how action has constantly been devalued as a basis for truth, in favor of the belief in an ideal form that provides a basis for judging what is true. For example, the physical reality of the growing oak tree before us is not a reliable source of what is true about the oak tree, because it involves many unique, idiosyncratic features. To know the real oak tree, we have to search for its ideal form as that which holds true in general about oak trees. From this seemingly obvious observation about the relationship between instances and classes flows the unintended consequence of separating us from the immediacy of action when searching for the truth. Throughout history, Western civilization has tended to denigrate those who act in and upon the world, while elevating those who separate themselves from acting in the world. Those who work with their hands shaping the world with their craft are seen as lower status and further away from truth than those who merely contemplate the world. The clergy, the philosopher, or the laboratory-bound researcher who is seeking a pure form of knowledge, apart from acting in the world, is seen as being in closer communion with truth than the laborer, the craftsperson, or the manager. Later, in his Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938), Dewey further develops the connection between the concrete moment of action, the sense that action is leading to ambiguous outcomes, and the anticipation of creating more desirable conditions, as the pattern of inquiry that holds in both science and everyday common sense. For Dewey, the characterization of truth as a disinterested, objective activity is a tragedy we must work to overturn, and replace with a sense of truth as flowing from an engagement with the world that is involved in design, as well as decision making. We can see the lingering influence of the belief that the passive observer is closer to truth than the actor, and in the contrasting conceptions of decision making and sensemaking discussed above. Our understanding of and theorizing about decision making is very much embedded in the traditions that are criticized by Dewey. For instance, where do the alternatives that a decision maker chooses among come from in the first place if not from the engaged search for the conditions of betterment by an actor? And does not the act of deciding itself

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involve a continuous reshaping of the alternatives being considered? Theories of decision making do not have much at all to say about the origin of alternatives, and for good reasons. Alternatives are assumed to be a given they are considered as a stable part of the presented decision problem. They are the object of our contemplation, pre-existing the moment of decision, and are part of the input to decision making, not the output of it. Sensemaking, on the other hand, is based on an alternative tradition that emphasizes the steam of action in its immediacy as being the real, and the immersion in action as being the source of truth. This emphasis on action as a source of truth is a product of the last one or one and a half centuries, so it is quite recent in comparison with the traditions of thought behind the decisionmaking view. We can see aspects related to the sensemaking view in existentialism, as captured in Sartres bold assertion of its central tenet that existence precedes essence. In other words, human beings do not reflect an ideal essence that pre-exists them. Rather, human beings exist they persist against the void of non-being and that is primary. Any essence (or ideal form) that we associate with them is derived later, through inference. Consider the early existentialist writer, Soren Kierkegaard, who, in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments (1992) scorned the philosopher Hegel because he represented a high point in the tradition of seeing truth as an essence of the ideal. Kierkegaard wrote about the human being and the question of religious belief, but his message is universal. Because we are finite beings, we cannot know with certainty through appeal to an essence, which would require a knowledge of the infinite, and we must therefore always rely on a subjective way of knowing, a leap of faith. Similarly, the life work of Wittgenstein, who many consider the greatest philosopher of the 20th century, reflects a dramatic turning away from the hope of finding truth as an essence of the ideal. His early work, as presented in his Tractatus Logico Philisophicus (1933), attempted to demonstrate rigorously that what could be said with formal logic was true. His later work, as seen in his Philosophical Investigations (1953), rejected that early effort, and declared that the inescapable multiplicity of meanings, even for the simplest of statements in language, could not be reliably translated into a single meaning to be manipulated with logical operators. The meaning of a word in our language is never single or stable. Language is a game we play, one in which we change the rules as we go. Each language game is played within a form of life, and in order to participate in the language game, we must participate in its form of life. As in the sensemaking perspective, understanding a language game requires action within a form of life. As Wittgenstein put it, We know how to go on. It is a continuous, subjective process of engagement in action, not something to observe passively or to learn the essence of objectively.

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Seeking a Metalevel Reconciliation in Design Thinking

We see that the decision making and sensemaking perspectives of human action reflect deep-seated differences in the history of human thought. Each is rooted in major philosophical and social theoretical traditions, and each also reflects a familiar way that humans experience themselves as actors located in space and time. We experience ourselves as rational beings, conscious of moving forward in time, and desiring to act as logical, responsible persons. We experience this even when we walk casually down the street or go shopping, and most certainly when we act in organizational settings. At the same time, we experience ourselves as historical beings, conscious of leaving a defining trail of action behind us, and desiring to be seen as a logical, responsible person. Each perspective is thus well supported in the traditions of Western thought, as well as in our everyday experience, and we would like to bring them together into a single way of understanding, but they cannot be reconciled in that way; they cannot be integrated and presented in a synthesis, because each approach fundamentally contradicts the other. As a result, our literature handles them in separate quarters. Research that adopts a sensemaking perspective does not include a planning or decision-making analysis, and research that adopts a decision-making perspective does not discuss the sensemaking process involved in framing the decision. An emerging trend in organizational research may hold a key to bringing these two traditions for studying human action together, not through an integration, but through the higher-order or metalevel constructs of design science and design thinking. Design is the giving of form to an idea, and design thinking is the unique mode of thought that accompanies the act of designing. Curiously enough, it was Herbert Simon, in his classic Sciences of the Artificial (1969), who pointed to design as the human activity that brings the diverse, seemingly incommensurate aspects of an objective, analytic, decision-making discipline together with the subjective, form-giving aspects of sensemaking. Designing work processes, new products, reward systems, budgets, or any of the myriad things that managers design as part of acting in organizations is one of the places where we can see the two domains of decision making and sensemaking being brought together in human action. Assessing the design situation involves a sensemaking activity that brings an order to the behaviors (enactments) of the organization members in their environment. A manager is hardly ever able to design in a blank-slate situation, and is inevitably confronted with a preexisting set of stakeholders, histories, conflicts, supporters, and opponents. Being good at designing starts with being good at reading the design situation, or sensemaking from the enactments that mark the current situation (Buchanan 1995). Being good at designing also involves being good at decisionmaking. Decisions about materials, functionality, methods, costs, and processes

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are embedded within and necessary for a good design outcome. This combination of decision and sensemaking is characterized as a design attitude by Boland and Collopy (2004). The design attitude opens the scholarship on management to an expansive set of research opportunities that link decision making and sensemaking in a rich appreciation of designing in situated action as a source of truth in managerial studies. Design thinking enables us to bring the traditions of both sensemaking and decision making into a single, overarching framework of action, which then allows us to draw upon and benefit from their complementary strengths. For instance, designing plays the closure of decision making off against the openness of sensemaking. A sensemaking process is always able to go further in surfacing new possibilities for meaning and invention in its rich field of organizational enactments. Design tempers the potentially endless process of sensemaking by bringing project deadlines and decision requirements into the picture. Design also carries a higher-order cost-benefit dialogue with it, as design thinking balances the desire for further exploration of new ways to make the situation meaningful with the need to complete the design project on time and within budget. Design also helps balance the tendency of decision making to take an existing set of alternative choices as given, by always suspecting that our initial ideas are the default ideas that anyone would think of. Design balances that tendency against a commitment to seek new alternatives that have not yet been created. Design plays these competing tendencies of openness and closure off on each other as a source of its energy and inventiveness. Finally, design serves as a continuing source of challenge to our sensemaking and decision-making capabilities. It keeps both sensemaking and decision making alive in organizations because of its central underlying belief, expressed by Herbert Simon as the belief that things can be other than they are. Because design thinking is always posing the challenge that things can be other than they are, we struggle to make sense of our situation and to plan actions that transform it into a more desirable one.

Conclusion

Research activities in the emerging field of design science and design thinking are in a nascent stage, but they promise a new invigoration of the fields of decision making and sensemaking that should be of great benefit to both. The possibilities of bringing these two traditions together, not as an integration or a synthesis, but in a combination of interplay, is an exciting new horizon for organizational research.

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References
Boland, R J. and F. Collopy (eds.) Managing as Designing. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004. Buchanan, R, Wicked Problems in Design Thinking, in Margolin, V. and R. Buchanan, (eds.) The Idea of Design: A Design Issues Reader, pp. 320, Cambridge: MIT Press 1996. Dewey, J. Reconstruction in Philosophy, enlarged edition, with a new introduction by Dewey, Boston, MA: Beacon, 1948. Dewey, J. Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, New York: Holt, 1938. Giddens, A., Central problems in social theory: Action, structure, and contradiction in social analysis, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. Giddens, A. The constitution of society: Outline of the theory of structuration, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Kierkegaard, S., Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, (Edited and translated by H. V. Hong and E. H. Hong), Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. Newell, A. and H. A. Simon, Information Processing in Computer and Man, American Scientist, 52, 281300, 1964. Schutz, A. The Phenomenology of the Social World, (translated by G. Walsh. and F. Lehnert), Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press, 1967. Simon, H. A. Models of Man, New York, NY: Wiley, 1957. Simon, H.A. Administrative Behavior, New York, NY: Wiley, 1947. Simon, H.A. The New Science of Management Decision, New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1960. Simon, H.A. The Sciences of the Artificial, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1969. Teversy, A. and D. Kahneman, Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases, Science, 185, 4157, 11241131,1974. Weick, K. E. The Social Psychology of Organizing, 2nd Ed. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979. Weick, K. E. Sensemaking in Organizations, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995. Wittgenstein, L. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, London: Routledge &Kegan Paul, 1933. Wittgenstein, L. Philosophical Investigations, (translated by G.E.M. Anscombe) Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953.