Rethinking Sensemaking: Tools and Techniques for Organizing

Sensemaking has become an essential concept for understanding how organizational members navigate uncertainty and complexity. It is widely regarded as a key capability for enabling collective action and informed decision-making in unpredictable environments. Yet, despite its popularity, the sensemaking perspective has become increasingly fragmented. Without re-examining its philosophical and conceptual foundations, there is a growing risk that sensemaking will collapse into conventional cognitive models of interpretation - models that are ill-suited to the complex, fluid realities of contemporary organizations. Rethinking Sensemaking undertakes a systematic and critical inquiry into some of the core assumptions that underpin sensemaking theory and practice. Drawing on insights from philosophy, it develops an alternative understanding of sensemaking as a relational, embodied, and dynamic process of organizing.

Building on this reorientation, the book introduces a set of conceptual tools and practical techniques designed to support organizing under conditions of ambiguity and change. It will be of interest to scholars and advanced students in organization studies and management, as well as to leaders seeking a more nuanced approach to organizational sense and action.

Ben Kuiken is a scholar of Organizational Philosophy and a guest researcher at the Institute for Management Research, Radboud University, the Netherlands. He has worked for many years as an executive coach and management consultant and has pivoted in recent years to an academic career, having recently completed his PhD, with his thesis on sensemaking. He has published several books for the practitioner market on organizational philosophy.