Text as a medium for sensemaking. In QDA tools, the “working document” where you make sense of your excerpts might be a spreadsheet, or a database query, or a whiteboard. By contrast, Latticework emphasizes a textual canvas, where freeform notes and snippets can mix arbitrarily. That mainly comes from a difference in the role of the snippets: we view them less as “evidence” or “data points”, and more as “kindling” which might be consumed and discarded on the way to insight. In the latter setting, when even the problem being solved is undefined, the only way forward is often to write in circles, until some sense starts to emerge. This writing may weave chaotically between new observations and snippets from old documents. Some QDA tools, like Dovetail, include freeform text editors, but their affordances emphasize communication to stakeholders, rather than sensemaking.

Latticework’s design evolved through many iterations, driven in large part by user interview and observation sessions. Through our personal networks and the Obsidian forum, we recruited experienced Obsidian users who needed to distill some insight from a large collection of unstructured notes. We’d like to discuss some observations from those sessions, and from our own use of the system.

Latticework’s main goal, then, is to enable fluid movement between these foraging and sensemaking stances. By extension, that means fluid movement between acting on source documents (which emphasize foraging) and on your working document (which emphasizes sensemaking)

when you’re trying to make sense of a confusing situation, you need to get everything into one place, where you can see, rearrange, and elaborate the pieces into a new whole.

Michele Zanini and I recently wrote a brief post for Harvard Business Review about what this sort of change in worldview might mean for  business, from strategy to supply chain management. For example, two  faculty members at the Center for Strategic Leadership at the U.S Army War College have suggested that AI could fluidly assign leadership roles based on the specific details of a threatening situation and the particular capabilities and strengths of the people in the team. This would alter the idea of leadership itself: Not a personality trait but a fit between the specifics of character, a team, and a situation.

Old graybeards like me still cling to the web, idolizing Yahoo Pipes and posting faux thinkpieces to our tiny blogs.

I'm tempted to say you can look at uh broadscale social organization uh or like Network Dynamics as an even larger portion of that light 00:32:43 cone but it doesn't seem to have the same continuity well I don't you mean uh it doesn't uh like first person continuity like it doesn't like you think it doesn't it isn't like anything to be 00:32:55 that social AG agent right and and we we both are I think sympathetic to pan psychism so saying even if we only have conscious access to what it's like to be 00:33:08 us at this higher level like it's there's it's possible that there's something that it's like to be a cell but I'm not sure it's possible that there's something that there's something it's like to be say a country

the quick definition would be 00:03:20 something like the metac crisis is all the crisis put together right and people go oh oh I see I see but they don't see right cuz it's not really the end of it that's just the beginning of the conversation the metac crisis is also in 00:03:33 the way you make sense of the world the way you feel it in in imote in relation to it the metac crisis is in your incapacity to fully articulate and narrate the self in this 00:03:47 context and The Meta crisis is also a you know coextensive with Co arising with this particular historical Epoch

I don't know why I can't do Evergreen and Atomic Notes.. .t3_16r8k0b._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; }

And lastly, we can push ourselves to do higher quality writing, research, and critical thinking. At the moment models still can't do sophisticated long-form writing full of legitimate citations and original insights.

Tobeuseful,thenotestakenatmedicallecturesshouldbeasummaryonly;noattempt shouldbemadetotakeaverbatimreport

At the same time, like Harold, I’ve realised that it is important to do things, to keep blogging and writing in this space. Not because of its sheer brilliance, but because most of it will be crap, and brilliance will only occur once in a while. You need to produce lots of stuff to increase the likelihood of hitting on something worthwile. Of course that very much feeds the imposter cycle, but it’s the only way. Getting back into a more intensive blogging habit 18 months ago, has helped me explore more and better. Because most of what I blog here isn’t very meaningful, but needs to be gotten out of the way, or helps build towards, scaffolding towards something with more meaning.

I’m not always connected to a stable internet connection

If people search through your website, will you guide them to topics first, or will they get a list of individual stories and updates to stories? Does your front page even hint at the fact that people can get more than just the daily news at your site?

If you eventually do manage to find the information you need, kudos. You’re obviously very committed to learn more. But wasn’t the whole “we need context” meme prompted by the acknowledgement that most readers get confused and quit way before that stage?

For the longest time, whenever I read the news, I’ve often felt the depressing sensation of lacking the background I need to understand the stories that seem truly important. Day after day would bring front pages with headlines trumpeting new developments out of city hall, and day after day I’d fruitlessly comb through the stories for an explanation of their relevance, history or import. Nut grafs seemed to provide only enough information for me to realize the story was out of my depth.

Just as journalists should be able to write about anything they want, comedians should be able to do the same and tell jokes about anything they please

War on Sensemaking II, Daniel Schmachtenberger

The Lisp Machine (which could just as easily have been, say, a Smalltalk machine) was a computing environment with a coherent, logical design, where the “turtles go all the way down.” An environment which enabled stopping, examining the state of, editing, and resuming a running program, including the kernel. An environment which could actually be fully understood by an experienced developer.  One where nearly all source code was not only available but usefully so, at all times, in real time.  An environment to which we owe so many of the innovations we take for granted. It is easy for us now to say that such power could not have existed, or is unnecessary. Yet our favorite digital toys (and who knows what other artifacts of civilization) only exist because it was once possible to buy a computer designed specifically for exploring complex ideas.  Certainly no such beast exists today – but that is not what saddens me most.  Rather, it is the fact that so few are aware that anything has been lost.

Zack [42] distinguished these four termsaccording to two dimensions: the nature of what is being processed and the consti-tution of the processing problem.The nature of what is being processed is either information or frames of ref-erence. With information, we mean “observations that have been cognitively pro-cessed and punctuated into coherent messages” [42]. Frames of reference [4, p.108], on the other hand, are the interpretative frames which provide the context forcreating and understanding information. There can be situations in which there is alack of information or a frame of reference, or too much information or too manyframes of reference to process.

Ta b l e 3DERMIS design premises [29]

For our research design, we drew on Walsham [33] and Klein and Myers [13],who provide comprehensive guidelines on how to conduct interpretive case studyresearch in the IS domain.

The problems of managing information and managing frames of reference are“tightly linked in a mutually interacting loop” and require “managing informationand the systems that provide it” [42]. IS have been generally designed to overcomethe information problems from Table 1. Most IS are aimed at either storing and re-trieving information to reduce uncertainty, such as database management systemsand document repositories, or at analyzing and processing large amounts of infor-mation to reduce complexity, such as decision support systems [31]. However, aswe have previously discussed, information related strategies are not always helpfulin coping with a variety of potential meanings.Problems of interpretation and the creation and management of frames of refer-ence, which aids Sensemaking, have generally not been taken into account whendesigning IS. Most IS currently seem tointend the opposite because they aim atreplacing or suppressing the possibility tomake sense of situations.

there is scarce research on how IS can support informa-tion processing challenges—specifically related to Sensemaking—in crisis manage-ment [14]

Sensemaking is about contextual rationality, built out of vaguequestions, muddy answers, and negotiated agreements that attempt to reduce ambi-guity and equivocality. The genesis of Sensemaking is a lack of fit between whatwe expect and what we encounter [40]. With Sensemaking, one does not look at thequestion of “which course of action should we choose?”, but instead at an earlierpoint in time where users are unsure whether there is even a decision to be made,with questions such as “what is going on here, and should I even be asking this ques-tion just now?” [40]. This shows that Sensemaking is used to overcome situationsof ambiguity. When there are too many interpretations of an event, people engagein Sensemaking too, to reduce equivocality.

Decision making is traditionally viewed as a sequential process of problem classifi-cation and definition, alternative generation, alternative evaluation, and selection ofthe best course of action [26]. This process is about strategic rationality, aimed atreducing uncertainty [6, 36]. Uncertainty can be reduced through objective analysisbecause it consists of clear questions for which answers exist [5, 40]. Complex-ity can also be reduced by objective analysis, as it requires restricting or reducingfactual information and associated linkages [42]

The central problem requiring Sensemaking ismostly that there are too many potential meanings, and so acquiring informationcan sometimes help but often is not needed. Instead, triangulating information [34],socializing and exchanging different points of view [20], and thinking back of pre-vious experiences to place the current situation into context, as the retrospectionproperty showed us, are a few strategies that are likely to be more successful forSensemaking.

Just as the information processing challenges from Table 1 are not mutually ex-clusive, Sensemaking and decision making cannot be separated, but instead operatesimultaneously. Meaning must be established and then sufficiently negotiated priorto acting on information [42]: Sensemaking shapes events into decisions, and deci-sion making clarifies what is happening [40].

Weick et al. [41, p. 419] formulate a gripping conclusion on what the sevenSensemaking properties are all about: “Taken together these properties suggest thatincreased skill at Sensemaking should occur when people are socialized to makedo, be resilient, treat constraints as self-imposed, strive for plausibility, keep show-ing up, use retrospect to get a sense of direction, and articulate descriptions thatenergize. These are micro-level actions. They are small actions. But they are smallactions with large consequences.”

The seven different properties of Sensemaking can be captured by the acronym SIRCOPE: Social context, Identity construction, Retrospection, Cue extraction, Ongo-ing projects, Plausibility, and Enactment [17–21, 37–39]

Crisis environments are characterized by various types of information problemsthat complicate the response, such as inaccurate, late, superficial, irrelevant, unreli-able, and conflicting information [30, 32]. This poses difficulties for actors to makesense of what is going on and to take appropriate action. Such issues of informationprocessing are a major challenge for the field of crisis management, both concep-tually and empirically [19].

We use the theory of Sensemaking to study exactly this: how people makesense of their environment, and how they give meaning to what is happening. Sense-making is a crucial process in crises, as the manner and thereby the success of howone deals with crucial events is determined by the grasp one has of a situation.

hese characteristics require thatemergent response groups adopt specific approaches forknowledge coordination. One such approach commonlydocumented in studies of such groups is their use ofa learn-by-doing (versus decision making) action-basedmodel of coordinated problem solving, in which sensemaking and improvisation are the norm rather than theexception

Recently, Brown and Duguid (2001, p. 208) sug-gested that coordination of organizational knowledgeis likely to be more challenging than coordination ofroutine work, principally because the “elements to becoordinated are not just individuals but communitiesand the practices they foster.” As we found in ourinvestigation of coordination at the boundary, signif-icant epistemic differences exist and must be recog-nized. As the dialogic practices enacted in responseto problematic trajectories show, the epistemic dif-ferences reflect different perspectives or prioritiesand cannot be bridged through better knowledge

Finally, the notation of the disaster phases affected emergency-respond­ers' decisions. The lexicon of the four phases appeared to force disaster managers and responders to think and respond in a linear, separate-category fashion. Thus, this paradigm in the end can hurt effective response

Emergency response and recovery is not a linear process; decisions that are made during the emergency phase will impact the recovery process. In practice, however, recovery often takes place in an ad hoc fashion because key decisions are not part of a strategic program to restore services and rebuild communities. (Dumam et al. 1993, p. 30)

Stoddard argues that the use of time-and-space models in disaster research

It is boundaries that help us separate one entity from another: "To classify things is to arrange them in groups ... separated by clearly determined lines of demarcation .... At the bottom of our conception of class there is the idea of a circumscription with fixed and definite outlines. "7 Indeed, the word define derives from the Latin word for boundary, which is finis. To define something is to mark its boundaries, 8 to surround it with a mental fence that sepa­rates it from everything else. As evidenced by our failure to notice objects that are not clearly differentiated from their surroundings, it is their boundaries that allow us to perceive "things" at all.

es an entity with a distinctive meaning5 as well as with a distinctive identity that sets it apart from everything else. The way we cut up the world clearly affects the way we organ

Temporal differentiation often entails an experience of disconti­nuity among different sorts of reality as well.

Temporal differentiation helps substantiate elusive mental dis­tinctions. Like their spatial counterparts, temporal boundaries often represent mental partitions and thus serve to divide more than just time.

In order to endow the things we perceive with meaning, we normally ignore their uniqueness and regard them as typical mem­bers of a particular class of objects (a relative, a present), acts (an apology, a crime), or events (a game, a conference).2 After all, "If each of the many things in the world were taken as distinct, unique, a thing in itself unrelated to any other thing, perception of the world would disintegrate into complete meaninglessness. "3 Indeed, things become meaningful only when placed in some category.

The perception of supposedly insular chunks of space is probably the most fundamental manifestation of how we divide reality into islands of meaning. Examining how we partition space, therefore, is an ideal way to start exploring how we partition our social world

Cooperative work is not facilitated simply by the provision of a shared database, butrequires the active construction by the participants of a common information spacewhere the meanings of the shared objects are debated and resolved, at least locallyand temporarily. Objects must thus be interpreted and assigned meaning, meaningsthat are achieved by specific actors on specific occasions of use. Computer supportfor this aspect of cooperative work raises a host of interesting and difficult issues.

In this section of the paper we broach two aspects of this articulation issue, onefocusing on the management of workflow, the other on the construction and manage-ment of what we term a ‘common information space’. The former concept has beenthe subject of discussion for some time, in the guise of such terms as office automa-tion and more recently, workflow automation. The latter concept has, in our view,been somewhat neglected, despite its critical importance for the accomplishmentof many distributed work activities

Plotline 3: Making life sensible is as much about who we are as about narrating events and experiences

Plotline 2: Making our life sensible enough to go on is an embodied process

Plotline 1: Making life sensible occurs in polyphonic, responsive and ongoing moments of embodied narrative performance

Indeed, we use the term ‘sensible’ deliberately to differentiate our approach from more cognitive schematic approaches to sensemaking. The Latin root of sensible is sensibilis, to do with the senses – being sensitive to and showing good sense in practical living circumstances.

We offer an alternative to sensemaking as a representational, cognitive, information-processing, or communicative process, and contest the idea that sensemaking is a purely retrospective and linear activity. We build on narrative theory to propose that sensemaking is a temporal process of making our life and ourselves sensible through embedded and embodied narrative performances. It is an interpretive process in which we judge our expe-rience, actions and sense of identity in relationship to specific and generalized others.

Narrative rationality is therefore fundamental to narrative sensemaking, because it connect us with our social surroundings through an ongoing process of interpreting, assessing and critiquing our experience: a form of ‘criti-cal self-awareness’ (Fisher, 1985: 349)

Although Weick sees interpretation as a key element in creating such stories, he defines it as ‘the process by which managers translate data into knowledge and understanding about the environment’ (2001: 251), i.e. a cognitive infor-mation-processing activity. Our article offers an alternative perspective by focusing on the interpretive and embodied nature of sensemaking within the flow of experience.

More specifically it is the process by which we label, categorize and create plausible stories that retrospectively ‘rationalize what peo-ple are doing’ (Weick et al., 2005)

Weick’s formative work is based on the claim that sensemaking is the means by which we enact (make ‘real’) our environments: a process of social construction and committed interpretation that ‘introduces stability into an equivocal flow of events by means of justi-fications that increase social order’ (2001: 15).

Our theorization of embodied sensemaking differs from, and extends, current work in three main ways. First, we define embodiment more broadly than emotion – as bodily sensations, felt experiences, emotions and sen-sory knowing; second, we situate embodiment in lived experience not as abstracted from, and able to be generalized across, experience; and third, we argue that embodiment is an integral part of sensemaking.

Ricoeur (e.g. 1988) because he sees narrative theory as a form of making sense in and across time that involves personal and community identit

Merleau-Ponty (2004 [1962], 2004 [1948]) because of his theorization of the relationship between perception and embodi-ment.

Specifically, we argue that making life sensible:• occurs in embedded narrative performances – in the lived experience of everyday, ordinary interactions and conversations with others and ourselves;• is temporal, taking place moment-to-moment within and across time and space;• encompasses polyphony as we attempt to interweave multiple, alternative and contested narratives and stories;• is an ongoing embodied process of interpretation of self and experience in which we cannot separate ourselves, our senses, our body and emotions

Our contribution lies in extending the work on sensemaking theory to include the notion of embodied narrative sensemaking, which posits that whether we are aware of it or not, we make our lives and ourselves ‘sensible’ through embodied (bodily) interpreta-tions in our ongoing everyday interactions.

A gap therefore exists in terms of theorizing sensemaking as a lived embodied everyday experience

They are concerned with organization theory, with explanations that ‘separate processes of organizing from the sites where they take place’ (Czarniawska, 2010: 156). To talk about abduction as cue + frame + connection, or about improvisation as variation + selection + retention, or about recurrent action patterns (Cohen, 2009) as routines, or about dominant frames of reference, is to reach for a more sweeping grasp of social order.

Humphreys, Ucbasaran and Lockett attend to recurring stories told by jazz musicians, with the joint lenses of sensemaking and sensegiving, for purposes of articulating the order that makes improvisation possible.

As a final comment to follow-up on the template for linking that Cunliffe and Coupland provide, while they keep three processes in motion, it is unlikely that all three stabilize at the same time. It is plausible that the first of the three to stabilize then acts as a frame within which the other two unfold. Thus, while there may be a dominant story that shapes organizing and sensemaking, there may be dominant sensemaking or dominant organizing that constrain the other two. It is all a matter of sequences of stabilization.

The haunting question is how do I fit into the story.

A cue, by itself, with-out a frame, has no predicate. Once you put it in a frame, it does. A further linkage is that the emphasis in abduction on supposition ties it to antenarrative conceived as a bet or speculation akin to a presumption of logic that needs to be worked out.

The difference between contested and uncontested polyphony may link to antenarratives. Boje (2001: 2) argues that when people translate stories into narratives they ‘impose counterfeit coherence and order on otherwise fragments and multi-layered experiences of desire.’ Counterfeit coherence is unstable, subject to detection and breaching, all of which link the degree of contestation to sensemaking, organizing, and transitions between stories and narratives

Cunliffe and Coupland call attention to polyphony. That one word is rich in connota-tions for them. It suggests contestation, making meaning with others, the overlap of sensemaking and sensegiving, and the emotionality of sensemaking

Sense and organizing emerge when a story begins to come together, identities begin to make sense, identities and actions can be given a sense of narrative rationality and we can connect plot and character. (p. 81)This is my favorite one sentence effort to provide a template for further development of linkages. The sentence is noteworthy because it includes sense, organizing, story, identities, actions, making sense, giving sense, narrative rationality, plot, and character. All of these elements are portrayed in the context of beginnings and emergings, which conveys a sense of ongoing forming and dissolving

Maclean et al. point to an intriguing tension in sensemaking. The tension is generated by the question, is sensemaking episodic or continuous?

In the lan-guage of Heidegger, sensemaking is triggered when the availableness of ready-to-hand coping is interrupted and attention shifts to unready-to-hand occurentness. The inter-rupted project still provides a frame and restoration occurs within that frame. An impor-tant linkage resides in the fact that environments vary significantly in the frequency of unexpected events.

Jeong and Brower (2008: 225) propose that practitioner sensemaking develops through the three stages of noticing, interpretation, and action, which vary as a function of the ecological, institutional, and social relational contexts in which they are constructed.

Starbuck and Milliken (1988) assert that ‘sensemaking refers to “comprehending, understanding, explaining, attributing, extrapolating and predicting.”

Maclean et al. also demonstrate clearly how sensemaking can be defined by its stages. The movement through time of different forms of interpretive work is captured in their phrase ‘language that constructs and gives order to reality, which it (temporarily) sta-bilizes’ (p. 20). They suggest that this movement consists of locating, meaning-making, and becoming.

Later in their article, Cunliffe and Coupland effectively summarize sensemaking as embodied efforts to figure out what to do and who we are. That is a tidy framework for interpreting the life stories of elite bankers since they are essentially figuring out what they did and who they were, with heavy editing, to point up the legitimacy of the what and who that are retrieved.

Gephart et al. define sensemaking as ‘an ongoing process that creates an intersubjective sense of shared meanings through conversation and non-verbal behavior in face to face settings where people seek to/produce, negotiate, and maintain a shared sense of meaning’ (2010: 284–285).

Cunliffe and Coupland treat sensemaking as ‘collaborative activity used to create, legitimate and sustain organiza-tional practices or leadership roles’ (p. 65). If we add the phrase ‘and individual’ to the word ‘collaborative’ in that definition then we have a rendition of sensemaking that works for the Maclean et al. article, right down to the focus on legitimacy and leadership.

Whittle and Mueller also anticipate and inform the nature of reconstructing a life story when they depict sensemaking as ‘a broader term [than stories] that refers to the process through which people interpret themselves and the world around them through the pro-duction of meaning’ (p. 114). It is their focus on ‘meaning’ and their inclusion of both the person and ‘the world around them’ that fits Maclean

To talk about antenarrative as a bet is also to invoke an important structure in sense-making; namely, the presumption of logic (Meyer, 1956)

People are often thrown into pre-existing, organized action patterns. They experience the middle of a narrative but only the vaguest beginnings or ends. Without those boundaries people dwell in antenarrative. But that is where sense-making, organizing, and discursive devices make a difference. ‘People who are thrown establish their own temporality’ (Hernes and Maitlis, 2010: 31)

‘Antenarrative is the fragmented, non-linear, incoherent, collective, unplotted and pre-narrative speculation, a bet’ (Boje, 2001: 1). Organizing, in the context of antenarrative, is a bet that these fragments will have become orderly and that efforts to impose temporality

Whittle and Mueller describe how, in crises, people are ‘called upon to justify or excuse their own role (or lack thereof)’ (p. 133) using story-lines built from discursive devices. Justifications are crucial anchors in organizing as they bind people to actions that are consistent with them. And such actions tend to recur, stabilize, and serve as resources for dominant stories.

Justification, understood as discourse that introduces legitimacy and stability into social action, is a source of linkage that recurs in several articles. Cunliffe and Coupland, for example, argue that we create sense ‘if we can find justifications (narrative rationality) for our and others’ actions’ (p. 69)

Brown’s (2004) summary description of dominant stories: a hegemonic story may be able to fix the meaning of the concepts and labels available to narrate events in the organization, and thereby circumscribe sensemaking

When I say ‘see more clearly’ I have in mind John Dewey’s (1902) threefold question for examining attention. Dewey argues that we need to examine to what attention is being paid, with what, and for what.

sensemaking

The term ‘enactment’ is used to preserve the central point that when people act, they bring events and structures into existence and set them in motion. People who act in organizations often produce structures, constraints, and opportunities that were not there before they took action.

The way to counteract catastrophes, therefore, is to reduce tight coupling and interactive complexity. To do this, it seems important not to blame technology, but rather to look for and exag- gerate all possible human contributions to crises in the hope that we can spot some previously unnoticed contributions where we can exert leverage.

Perhaps the most important implication of enactment is that it might serve as the basis for an ideology of crisis prevention and management. By ideology, we mean a ‘relatively coherent set of beliefs that bind people together and explain their worlds in terms of cause-and-effect relations’ (Beyer, 1981, p. 166).

Not only does action simplify tasks, it also often slows down the effects of one variable on another.

Enactment affects crisis management through several means such as the psychology of control, effects of action on stress levels, speed of interactions, and ideology

As people see more, they are more likely to notice things they can do something about, which confirms the perception of control and also reduces crisis intensity to lower levels by virtue of early intervention in its development

As forcefulness and ambiguity increase, enactment is more con- sequential, and more of the unfolding crisis is under the direct control of human action. Conversely, as action becomes more tentative and situations become more clearly structured, enactment processes will play a smaller role in crisis development and managment. Enactment, therefore, will have most effect on those portions of a crisis which are loosely coupled.

These possibili- ties are more likely to be seen if we think of large crises as the outcome of smaller scale enactments. When the enactment perspective is applied to crisis situations, several aspects stand out that are normally overlooked. To look for enactment themes in crises, for example, is to listen for verbs of enactment, words like manual control, intervene, cope, probe, alter, design, solve, decouple, try, peek and poke (Perrow, 1984, p. 333), talk, disregard, and improvise. These verbs may signify actions that have the potential to construct or limit later stages in an unfolding crisis

The assumptions that top management make about components within the firm often influence enactment in a manner similar to the mechanism of self-hlfdling prophecy. Many of these assumptions can increase or decrease the likelihood that small errors will escalate into major crises. Thus, assumptions are an important source of crisis prevention.

Capacity can also affect crisis potential through staffing decisions that affect the diversity of acts that are available. Enactment is labour-intensive, which means understaffing has serious effects.

Capacity and response repertoire affect crisis perception, because people see those events they feel they have the capacity to do something about. As capacities change, so too do perceptions and actions. This relationship is one of the crucial leverage points to improve crisis management.

Action in the form of capacity can affect crisis management through perception, distribution of competence and control within a hierarchy, and number and diversity of actors.

When action is irrevocable, public and volitional, the search for explanations becomes less casual because more is at stake. Explanations that are developed retrospec- tively to justify committed actions are often stronger than beliefs developed under other, less involving, conditions. A tenacious justification can produce selective attention, confident action, and self-confirmation. Tenacious justifications prefigure both perception and action, which means they are often self-confirming.

From the standpoint of enactment, initial responses do more than set the tone; they determine the trajectory of the crisis. Since people know what they have done only after they do it, people and their actions rapidly become part of the crisis. That is unavoidable. To become part of the problem means that people enact some of the environment they face. Had they not acted or had they acted differently, they would face a different set of problems, opportunities and constraints.

Thus, an enacted environment has both a public and a private face. Publicly, it is a construction that is usually visible to observers other than the actor. Privately, it is a map of if-then assertions in which actions are related to out- comes. These assertions serve as expectations about what will happen in the future.

At the heart of enactment is the idea that cognition lies in the path of the action. Action precedes cognition and focuses cognition. The sensemaking sequence implied in the phrase, ‘How can I know what I think until I see what I say?’ involves the action of talking, which lays down traces that are examined, so that cognitions can be inferred. These inferred cognitions then become pre- conceptions which partially affect the next episode of talk, which means the next set of traces deposited by talk are affected partially by previous labels and partially by current context. These earlier inferences also affect how the next episode of talk is examined and what is seen.

An enacted environment is the residuum of changes produced by enactment. The word ‘residuum’ is preferred to the word ‘residue’ because residuum emphasizes that what is left after a process cannot be ignored or left out of account because it has potential significance (Webster‘s Dictionary of Synonyms, 1951, p. 694). The product of enactment is not an accident, an afterthought, or a byproduct. Instead, it is an orderly, material, social construction that is subject to multiple interpreta- tions. Enacted environments contain real objects such as reactors, pipes and valves. The existence of these objects is not questioned, but their significance, meaning, and content is. These objects are inconsequential until they are acted upon and then incorporated retrospectively into events, situations, and explanations.

Enactment is the social process by which a ‘material and symbolic record of action’ (Smircich and Stubbart, 1985, p. 726) is laid down. The process occurs in two steps. First, portions of the field of experience are bracketed and singled out for closer attention on the basis of preconceptions. Second, people act within the context of these bracketed elements, under the guidance of preconceptions, and often shape these elements in the direction of preconceptions (Powers, 1973). Thus, action tends to confirm preconceptions.

Diverse as HROs may seem, we lump them together because they all operate in an unforgiving social and political environment, an environment rich with the potential for error, where the scale of consequences precludes learning through experimentation, and where to avoid failures in the face of shifting sources of vulnerability, complex processes are used to manage complex technology (Rochlin, 1993).

We will argue that HROs are important because they provide a window on a distinctive set of pro-cesses that foster effectiveness under trying conditions.The processes found in the best HROs provide the cognitive infrastructure that enables simultaneous adaptive learning and reliable performance.

We then move to the heart of the analysis and argue that organizing for high reliability in the more effective HROs, is characterized by a preoccupation with failure, reluctance to simplify interpretations, sensitivity to operations, commitment to resilience, and underspecifi ed structuring. These processes reduce the inertial blind spots that allow failures to cumulate and produce catastrophic outcomes.

Sixth, investi-gating the use of temporal modalities in making andgiving sense in the storytelling of management andother occupational groups, for example, in processesof story-weaving in the assembly of smaller storiesthat variously draw from the past, present and future(see Maitlis 2005, p. 45; Reissner and Pagan 2013,pp. 52, 83)

Fifth, the importance of shifting contextualconditions over chronological time in the rewritingof histories and the reconstruction of narratives thatreposition individuals and groups, in, for example,a movement from hero to villain (see Cunliffe andCoupland 2012; Godfreyet al. 2016).

Fourth, the com-pression and expansion of time structures in storiesthat compete, and the different techniques for draw-ing on temporal modalities for sensemaking in theconstruction of compelling power-political narrativesthat seek to influence the sense giving of others (seeBuchanan and Dawson 2007; Dawson and Buchanan2012)

Third, the use of time and temporality for mak-ing and giving sense to unfinalized stories, antenar-ratives and future scenarios (see Boje 2011), includ-ing attention to issues, such as temporal depth, timeurgency and temporal orientation in promoting theneed for short or long-term strategies (see Jabri 2016,p. 97; Kunischet al. 2017, p. 1043)

Second, howtime is variously used in past constructions that givesense to what has occurred, in for example, nostal-gic tales that seek to sustain identity-relevant valuesand beliefs, or using time to leverage reformulationsin repositioning these tales, for example, with theaim of undermining nostalgia as a platform for resis-tance (see Brown and Humphreys 2002; Strangleman1999).

First, exam-ination of time representations in the more finalizedand structured stories in organizations (see Gabriel2000): for example, how time and temporality areused to convey a particular message, moral lesson orpresent a causal explanation that is both compellingand plausible.

Our discussion commences with a fourfold charac-terization of underlying temporal modalities fromwhich we extend six pathways in mapping out fu-ture research opportunities.

Boudes and Laroche (2009) attend to narra-tive sensemaking in post-crisis inquiry reports inanalysing the foreseeability of the deaths that oc-curred following the heat wave in France in 2003.They identify a tendency towards simplification andreductionism, but suggest that, rather than represent-ing a linear temporal sequence in which recommen-dations follow explanation, ‘the story is built at leastpartially around preferred lessons and the desiredrecommendations for action’ (Boudes and Laroche2009, p. 392).

This returns us to Weick’s (2012) claimthat the unfinalized uncertainties of life experiences ismade sense of and temporally fixed in narrative ratio-nality, but with the added notion that these temporalconstructions build on prospective ideas (a non-lineartemporality in story construction, but not in the struc-ture of the final narrative).

As the authors note: ‘Sensemaking is tempo-ral in at least two ways: in the moment of performancewe draw on past experiences, present interactions andfuture anticipations, and second, we plot narrative co-herence across time’ (Cunliffe and Coupland 2012,p. 83).

However, in their study focusing on theimportance of time to sensemaking in crisis situa-tions, Combe and Carrington (2015) point out thatmost studies still remain focused on objective clocktime with little attempt to examine the influence ofthe subjective experience of the past or how leadersimagine the future may affect how they interpret andmake sense of the present

Al-though both scholars usefully illustrate the powerof narratives to make and give sense to experiencesin organizations, Gabriel (2000) adopts a folkloristposition with a reliance on conventional temporal-ity and sequenced event time, in which causality isbuilt into the narrative construction with a progres-sive temporality (beginning, middle and end). In con-trast, Boje (2011) is interested in the more fragmentedand terse stories and the ways in which these un-resolved narratives open up possibilities for poten-tial futures (prospective sensemaking).

As Bojeet al. (2016a, p. 395)indicate, through situating antenarratives in subjec-tive time, they are able to show ‘how diverse voicesinterconnect, embed and entangle in organizationalstrategies’.

Boje seeks to elevate the place ofstories in organization studies in examining the inter-play between the control of narrative (order) and theunfinalized nature of emergent story (disorder)

For Gabriel, stories are a subset of narratives (whileall stories are narratives, not all narratives are stories),arguing that theories, statistics, reports or documentsthat describe events and seek to present objective factsshould not be treated as stories (nor for that mattershould clich ́es), as stories interpret events often dis-torting, omitting and embellishing to engage audienceemotions, they generate, sustain, destroy and under-mine meaning, and while they are crafted along par-ticular lines they do not obliterate the facts (Gabriel2000, pp. 3–4).

This dominant linear view of temporality drawnfrom conventional representations of clock time (dig-itally embedded in a range of everyday devices) hasbeen widely criticized (Adam 1990, 2004; Glennieand Thrift 1996; Thrift 2004; Wajcman 2015), witha growing recognition of the need to bring differen-tiated concepts of time to the fore (see Christens-sonet al. 2014). There is a small but expandingcall to move beyond objective time (Allmanet al.2014) and time-free research (Hassard 1990b, p. 1)or timeless knowledge (Roeet al. 2009) to a moreconceptually informed theorization in which conceptsof time are made more explicit and openly discussed(Anconaet al. 2001b; Bluedorn 2002; Dawson andSykes 2016; Goodmanet al. 2001).

This review highlights how conventional explanations in these related fields of studyare underpinned by linear conceptions of temporality (with an associated causality)and how there is growing recognition of fluidity in the way pasts and futures cometogether in temporal sensemaking of an emergent present.

ClassicAristotelian narratives with a linear time structure (stories with a beginning, middle andend) are prominent in the storytelling literature, whereas retrospection, in drawing onthe past in making sense of the present, is a temporal modality central to foundationalconcepts of sensemaking. In examining time and temporality in these related fields,the authors show how the conventional temporal sequence of a past, present and futuredominates, with little consideration being given to time as a multiple rather than singularconcept

A promising approach that addresses some worker output issues examines the way that workers do their work rather than the output itself, using machine learning and/or visualization to predict the quality of a worker’s output from their behavior [119,120]

But time is a complex and a sensitive topic in reason to the different vantage points; and its meaning often tends to be taken for granted and given commonsense or self-evident attributions (Sahay, 1997).

In order to endow the things we perceive with meaning, we normally ignore their uniqueness and regard them as typical mem-bers of a particular class of objects (a relative, a present), acts (an apology, a crime), or events (a game, a conference).

The tension between action theory (or the theory of structuration) and sys-tems theory has not completely vanished, but at least the areas of dis-agreement have become clearer. The 'event' structure of time with its implicit legitimization through physics, but which is equally a central notion for historians (Grossin, 1989) holds a certain attraction for empiri-cal studies and for those who are interested in the definitional

Some have described rumoring as a task of collective problem solving (Bordia and DiFonzo, 2004; Shibutani,1966) withreasonably well defined start and end points. A process helping individuals make sense of their environments and cope withuncertainty, rumoring tends to dissipate once cognitive unclarity has been eliminated (Caplow, 1947).

“Since one cannot distinguish a figure without a background, the present does not meaningfully exist without a past” (emphasis added; 2001, p. 608). As the background, the past provides a bench­mark for the present against which comparisons can be made. And such com­parisons indicate whether the present is the same as the past or different from it.

So connections and the meaning they generate are funda­The Best of Times and the Worst of Timesmental, which is why the loss of meaning is so troubling—the systematic loss of meaning even more so.

Put succinctly, these principles indicate that the definition of the situation guides human behavior, and according to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, lan­guage is a necessary prerequisite for defining any situation (see Chapter 1). Language provides the elements from which meaning is constructed—the names of things and their qualities and the manner in which they may be re­lated—and the definition of the situation combines these elements to con­struct sense-making explanations of events, definitions of the situation.

Lewin’s famous final clause, “there is nothing so practical as a good theory,” means that understanding (theory) can guide useful action (the practical), so theory (understanding) can be empowering. A lack of meaning and under­standing of events also makes it very hard to know what one should do (norm- lessness or anomie), because it is nearly impossible to know what to do in a situation if one cannot comprehend it.

“the dynamic weaving of events, interactions, situations, and phases that comprise those relationships” (2000, p. 27), the dynamic weaving of events, interactions, and situations being very similar to narrative.

A narrative consists of three essential elements: past events, story elements, and a temporal ordering (Maines 1993, p. 21).

And if Weick has drawn the correct conclusion about how the past is used to enact the present, being able to note the differences may be even more im­portant than being able to see the similarities. This is especially so in equivocal enactments, which Weick (1979, p. 201) described as involving a figure-ground construction, one in which the ground consists of the strange and unfamiliar

Among the reasons this may be so is that the simple future tense is more open-ended than the future perfect tense, the latter seeming to con­vey a sense of closure and a focus on specific events, which is unlike the sim­ple future tense in which anything is possible (Weick 1979, pp. 198-99). It is well to note that although Weick did not explicitly frame his argument in terms of metaphor, it is really another example of the past-as-metaphor-for- the-future idea developed in this chapter, albeit a more precise manifestation of it. The precision comes in Weick’s conclusion that some futures are more like the past, are more similar to it than others. In his argument, the future described in future perfect terms is more similar to the past than the future de­scribed in simple future terms.

To consider the future, it may help to treat it like the past, that is, as ifit had already happened. This is the premise Weick proposed in his discussion of fu­ture perfect thinking (1979, pp. 195-200). Future perfect thinking is a gram­matical prescription instructing managers and planners and all who consider the future to do so in the future perfect tense. Thus rather than the simple fu­ture tense as used in a statement like “We shall overcome,” the future perfect128Eternal Horizonstense would have us say, “We shall have overcome.” Alfred Schutz believed that the “planned act bears the temporal character of pastness' (Schutzs emphasis), be­cause the actor projects the act as completed and in the past, a paradox that places the act in both the past and the future at the same time, something the future perfect tense makes possible (1967, p. 61). These were insights that Weick both noted (1979, p. 198) and built upon to explain why future perfect thinking may make it easier to envision possible futures.

Weick argued that the past was used to understand the present and the future, that neither could be understood without the past. And how the past can provide this understanding, this meaning, is a major insight

A concept in Anthony Giddens’s structuration theory explains how pat­terns like these are maintained with such regularity and precision. The concept is “duality of structure,” by which Giddens meant that “the structured proper­ties of social systems are simultaneously the medium and outcome of social acts(Giddens’s emphasis; 1995, p· 19)·

Thus for meaning (significance) to be attributed to events, behaviors, and objects, to things in general, they must be seen in their relationships with other things. They can have no meaning as isolated phenomena.

Less explicit and less emphasized in the literature is time’s role in the creation of meaning. Malinowski and Adam hint at this capability in their statements: “sentimental necessity,” “orientation,” and “symbol for the conceptual organisation of natural and social events,” the last of the three phrases most directly indicating time’s role in generating meaning. So both capabilities increase with the development of greater temporal expertise.

The over­load of information, for example, is becoming so extensive that taking advantage of only the tiniest fraction of it not only blows apart the principle of instantaneity and 'real-time' communication, but also slows down operators to a pomt where they lose themselves in the eternity of electronically networked information.

If the Web were a concrete space, what would it look like?

I’ve come to realize more and more that these analogies, metaphors, and symbols are the way that we can come to teach the Web so that our students know it in the sense of recognizing it — distinguishing it, perceiving it in relation to those things already known.

"I do not believe that knowledge is embedded in documents, just as beauty is not embedded in objects. Beauty and knowledge are created by joining and creating complex relationships between creators, viewers, contexts, histories, etc."