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 self-employed organizational philosopher and consultant working at the intersection of philosophy and organizational practice. He is affiliated as guest researcher at Radboud University, Nijmegen. In his consulting practice, he invites leaders to reflect critically on the meanings and assumptions that shape the way they organize.