Sensemaking

In plain terms

Sensemaking is the process through which people work to understand issues or events that are novel, ambiguous or confusing, or that violate their expectations (Maitlis & Christianson, 2014). It is what happens in the gap between "something is different" and "here is what we do now."

Weick, Sutcliffe and Obstfeld (2005) put it in action terms: sensemaking turns circumstances into a situation that is understood explicitly in words and that serves as a springboard into action. In a change, it is the work every manager and employee does to decide what the announcement means for them.

Where it came from

Karl Weick. Karl Weick's book Sensemaking in Organizations was published by Sage in 1995 (Decker, 1998). Two years earlier he published "The Collapse of Sensemaking in Organizations: The Mann Gulch Disaster" in Administrative Science Quarterly, a revised version of a lecture he gave at the University of Michigan in 1993 (Weick, 1993).

Sensegiving. Gioia and Chittipeddi (1991) followed the first year of a strategic change at a large public university. They tracked it through four phases, which they labeled envisioning, signaling, re-visioning and energizing, and suggested that the chief executive's role in starting the change might best be understood through two ideas: sensemaking and sensegiving.

Taking stock. By 2005, Weick, Sutcliffe and Obstfeld called for sensemaking research to become more future oriented, more action oriented, more closely tied to organizing and identity, and more concerned with emotion and with sensegiving and persuasion. Maitlis and Christianson (2014) reviewed the field and grouped it into two bodies of work: how sensemaking is accomplished, and how it enables other processes, organizational change among them.

How it works

Three features show up across the sources above.

• It is triggered. Sensemaking starts when something does not fit: an event that is new, ambiguous or against expectations (Maitlis & Christianson, 2014). A change announcement is a trigger by design.
• It is social. Maitlis and Christianson (2014) describe research on how intersubjective meaning is created, meaning that people build an account of events with each other. That is why people's conversations with each other after an announcement matter.
• It leads to action. In Weick and colleagues' (2005) wording, the account people arrive at serves as a springboard into action. What people decide a change means, they act on, whether or not it is what the sponsor intended.

Sensemaking in organizational change

Several of the studies reviewed here look at middle managers, the people who have to make sense of a change for themselves and then for their teams.

In one study, managers' understanding was revised as the change went on. Balogun and Johnson (2004) followed middle managers through an imposed shift from a hierarchical to a decentralized organization. In this longitudinal, qualitative study, they identified what they call a 'replacement' pattern of schema development (abstract read; the available abstract is cut off).

In two Atlas cases, managers translated rather than relayed. In the Atlas of the Middle, Rouleau and Balogun (2011), rated Low as qualitative cases, describe four middle managers at Radio-Canada and a UK engineering multinational moving strategic change by pairing the right words with the right setting. Teulier and Rouleau (2013), also rated Low, describe middle managers from five large French public works firms making sense of a shared digital design model by translating and reworking ideas together.

Managers can steer the sense their bosses make. Hope (2010), rated Medium, describes middle managers in an insurance company using business expertise and political moves to steer how even their bosses understood a change. Sensegiving runs upward too.

In one case, sensemaking struggled with contradictions. At Lego, middle managers charged with a major restructuring struggled for meaning. Reflecting with researchers brought their dilemmas into view as paradoxes, and the authors set out a process for working through them (Lüscher & Lewis, 2008, rated Low). These are single cases. They show what sensemaking looks like in practice; they do not show which approach works best.

What the research says

In the Unfrozen Research Index (24,463 abstracts of research articles and reviews supplied by OpenAlex, covering 28 of the 29 journals (21 core, 7 expansion), 2007 to 2026, 2026 to date), 403 titles or abstracts mention sensemaking or sense-making. The Journal of Organizational Change Management accounts for 61, Organization Studies for 47 and Human Relations for 43. These are keyword counts of titles and abstracts, not full texts.

The studies reviewed here are mostly qualitative: it describes how people make sense of change rather than testing whether helping them do it improves outcomes. The Evidence Library holds one strong test that comes close.

A randomized trial of making sense of a new practice. A randomized trial across 21 youth mental health clinics compared clinics whose leaders received a leadership and organizational change strategy (LOCI) with clinics that received training and technical assistance only. It is rated High after a full-text read (Williams et al., 2026). Clinicians in the LOCI clinics reported much stronger enactment of all four mechanisms of normalization process theory, including coherence, which is how well staff make sense of a new practice. The effect was large. Within the same trial, clinics with higher mechanism scores were far more likely to keep using the practice over the next 16 months, but that comparison is observational, not randomized. The trial ran in health services, and it tested leader training, not a sensemaking routine by itself.

Safety is linked to learning more strongly in knowledge-intensive work. A meta-analytic review, rated Medium from its abstract, found psychological safety more strongly associated with team learning and performance in knowledge-intensive settings involving complexity, creativity and sensemaking (Sanner & Bunderson, 2015). See psychological safety.

Where the evidence is thin

The idea is well developed; the tests are not. In the studies reviewed here, no controlled study tests a manager-level sensemaking routine, such as structured team conversations about what a change means, against business as usual. The one High-rated trial changes what leaders do and measures sensemaking as one result among several. The Loop page records the same gap for Make sense together: no trial yet has senior leaders joining their teams to work out what a change means.

How it maps to the Unfrozen Loop

1. Week 0
   Before you start
2. 1
   Surface both ways
3. 2
   Make sense together, top included

   This part is sensemaking by name. Managers and their teams work out what the change means for their own work, and the people above say what it costs.

4. 3
   Start it close to the work

   Middle managers translate a change into everyday work. The Atlas cases on sensemaking show them translating and editing ideas, not just relaying them.

5. 4
   Review on a rhythm, then hold the pace
6. 5
   The middle’s own weather
7. Ring
   Safe to speak, and speaking changes something

   Making sense together needs people to say what does not fit. In one meta-analytic review, psychological safety was more strongly associated with learning and performance in knowledge-intensive work, which includes sensemaking tasks.

Highlighted parts are the ones this idea speaks to. The mapping is my reading, not a tested finding. See the whole Loop and the evidence for each part.

Common misreadings

"Sensemaking is communication." Communication is what the sender does. Sensemaking is what the receivers do with it, including with each other (Maitlis & Christianson, 2014). A well-written announcement starts sensemaking; it does not finish it.

"Sensemaking is a leader's job." Gioia and Chittipeddi (1991) studied a leader, but the Atlas cases show middle managers translating and editing a change, and steering how their own bosses understand it (Hope, 2010; Rouleau & Balogun, 2011).

"Resistance means people did not understand." In my reading, people can understand a change and still conclude it does not fit their work. That conclusion is sensemaking too, and it carries information. See resistance to change.

Using it well

Two things a manager can try this week.

1. Give the team the question before the answer. After a change is announced, ask your team: "What does this mean for our week?" Listen before you explain. Their account is the sensemaking you will be working with, whether you hear it or not.
2. Report the sense back up. Write down the two or three readings of the change you heard most often and send them to the person who sponsored it, unedited. Sensegiving runs both ways, and the sponsor cannot correct a reading they never hear.