Marlys K. Christianson

Sensemaking in Organizations: Taking Stock and Moving Forward

Sensemaking is the process through which people work to understand issues or events that are novel, ambiguous, confusing, or in some other way violate expectations. As an activity central to organizing, sensemaking has been the subject of considerable research which has intensified over the last decade. We begin this review with a historical overview of the field, and develop a definition of sensemaking rooted in recurrent themes from the literature. We then review and integrate existing theory and research, focusing on two key bodies of work. The first explores how sensemaking is accomplished, unpacking the sensemaking process by examining how events become triggers for sensemaking, how intersubjective meaning is created, and the role of action in sensemaking. The second body considers how sensemaking enables the accomplishment of other key organizational processes, such organizational change, learning, and creativity and innovation. The final part of the chapter draws on areas of difference and debate h...

Learning Through Rare Events: Significant Interruptions at the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Museum

The collapse of the roof of the Baltimore & Ohio (B&O) Railroad Museum Roundhouse onto its collections during a snowstorm in 2003 provides a starting point for our exploration of the link between learning and rare events. The collapse occurred as the museum was preparing for another rare event: the Fair of the Iron Horse, an event planned to celebrate the 175th anniversary of American railroading. Our analysis of these rare events, grounded in data collected through interviews and archival materials, reveals that the issue is not so much what organizations learn “from” rare events but what they learn “through” rare events. Rare events are interruptions that trigger learning because they expose weaknesses and reveal unrealized behavioral potential. Moreover, we find that three organizing routines---interpreting, relating, and re-structuring---are strengthened and broadened across a series of interruptions. These organizing routines are critical to both learning and responding because they update understanding and reduce the ambiguity generated during a rare event. Ultimately, rare events provoke a reconsideration of organizational identity as the organization learns what it knows and who it is when it sees what it can do. In the case of the B&O Railroad Museum, we find that the roof collapse offered an opportunity for the organization to transform its identity from that of a museum to that of an attraction.

Understanding Mechanisms in Organizational Research Reflections From a Collective Journey

Social mechanisms are theoretical cogs and wheels that explain how and why one thing leads to another. Mechanisms can run from macro to micro (e.g., explaining the effects of organizational socialization practices or compensation systems on individual actions), micro to micro (e.g., social comparison processes), or micro to macro (e.g., how cognitively limited persons can be aggregated into a smart bureaucracy). Explanations in organization theory are typically rife with mechanisms, but they are often implicit. In this article, the authors focus on social mechanisms and explore challenges in pursuing a mechanisms approach. They argue that organization theories will be enriched if scholars expend more effort to understand and clarify the social mechanisms at play in their work and move beyond thinking about individual variables and the links between them to considering the bigger picture of action in its entirety.

Becoming a high reliability organization

Aircraft carriers, electrical power grids, and wildland firefighting, though seemingly different, are exemplars of high reliability organizations (HROs) - organizations that have the potential for catastrophic failure yet engage in nearly error-free performance. HROs commit to safety at the highest level and adopt a special approach to its pursuit. High reliability organizing has been studied and discussed for some time in other industries and is receiving increasing attention in health care, particularly in high-risk settings like the intensive care unit (ICU). The essence of high reliability organizing is a set of principles that enable organizations to focus attention on emergent problems and to deploy the right set of resources to address those problems. HROs behave in ways that sometimes seem counterintuitive - they do not try to hide failures but rather celebrate them as windows into the health of the system, they seek out problems, they avoid focusing on just one aspect of work and are able to see how all the parts of work fit together, they expect unexpected events and develop the capability to manage them, and they defer decision making to local frontline experts who are empowered to solve problems. Given the complexity of patient care in the ICU, the potential for medical error, and the particular sensitivity of critically ill patients to harm, high reliability organizing principles hold promise for improving ICU patient care.

Coordinating Flexible Performance During Everyday Work: An Ethnomethodological Study of Handoff Routines

Our paper examines the challenge of coordinating flexible performance during everyday work. We draw on routine dynamics and ethnomethodology to examine how intensive care unit (ICU) physicians coordinate their actions—flexibly yet intelligibly—as they handoff patients at change of shift. Through our analysis of interview and video data, we demonstrate how physicians use the sequential features of the handoff routine—i.e., the expected moves and their expected sequence—to adapt each performance of the routine to the unique needs of each patient. We show the need for ongoing coordinating despite a strongly shared ostensive pattern and we illustrate how participants use the sequential nature of the ostensive pattern of the routine as a resource for flexible performance, to manage sequential variation and the sufficiency of moves at transitions. Our findings contribute to the routine dynamics and coordination literatures by providing a more nuanced understanding of how mutual intelligibility is achieved through coordinating, whereby participants create the conditions to move forward with a common project.

Mapping the Terrain The Use of Video-Based Research in Top-Tier Organizational Journals

My article examines how researchers use video recordings to gain insight into organizational phenomena. I conduct a literature review of articles published from 1990 to 2015 in six top-tier organizational journals: Academy of Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, Journal of Management Studies, Organization Science, Organization Studies, and Strategic Management Journal. My review identifies 56 articles where video was central to the research design. My analysis demonstrates how researchers used the audible, visible, and timing affordances of video recordings to investigate organizational phenomena, including rhetoric, emotion, group interactions, and workplace studies. By exploring how researchers studied these phenomena, I show how video illuminates aspects of situated action and interaction that are difficult to evaluate using other kinds of data. My review contributes to the literature on video in organization studies by providing an overview of video-based research in these journals, highlighting the diversity of approaches used to collect and analyze video, and illustrating some of the ways that video helped to advance knowledge around organizational phenomena.

More and Less Effective Updating: The Role of Trajectory Management in Making Sense Again:

This study examines how updating—the process of revising provisional sensemaking to incorporate new cues—occurs within teams during unexpected events. I compare how 19 teams of emergency department staff managed the same unexpected event (a broken piece of equipment) in a medical simulation scenario. Using a microethnographic approach to analyze video recordings of these teams, I conduct a fine-grained examination of how updating takes place and find considerable variation in its effectiveness across teams. I show that the effectiveness of updating depends not only on how teams remake sense but also on how they engage in trajectory management, balancing the work of updating with their ongoing work (in this case, patient care). Trajectory management practices related to monitoring cues and managing engaging tasks facilitated effective updating and allowed teams to detect and identify the problem caused by the broken piece of equipment and correct it before it led to serious consequences. More-effective teams monitor and rapidly interpret cues, confirming them with others and evaluating changes over time; they then investigate cues, develop plausible explanations, and quickly test them, monitoring cues for feedback. Less-effective teams fail to monitor and confirm cues with others, overlook or misinterpret cues, and delay investigating cues and developing plausible explanations; they also delay testing explanations, often being sidetracked by patient care tasks.