Crises are characterized by low probability/high consequence events that challenge organizational goals and defy easy interpretation. In his 1988 study of leader sensemaking Karl Weick introduces and explores the concept of enacted sensemaking in the context of organizational crises, arguing that the actions taken to understand a crisis can paradoxically worsen it.

Drawing on examples like the Bhopal disaster in 1984, the study illustrates how initial responses and underlying assumptions shape the unfolding events, often creating the very environments individuals are trying to comprehend. Ultimately, he suggests that understanding how human actions construct realities, particularly during triggered events, is crucial for effective crisis prevention and management. He proposes that an ideology built on enactment principles could lead to greater control and less severe outcomes. He further illustrates that commitment, capacity, and expectations significantly influence both the sensemaking process during a crisis and the severity of the crisis itself.

In the context of the Union Carbide Bhopal crisis, when toxic methyl isocyanate (MIC) was released killing thousands, these factors influenced how individuals perceived and acted within the unfolding events, essentially shaping the enacted environment of the crisis. The irrevocable public choice to keep the process of MIC production secret was justified as preventing “unnecessary” alarm and maintaining competitive advantage. This commitment to secrecy created a blind spot that delayed and limited necessary alarm during the actual gas leak, preventing a potential partial solution.

Despite having manual controls and potential action data, the Bhopal plant’s operating staff was cut by half (from 12 to 6 per shift). This understaffing reduced the capacity for action and interpretation, neutralizing potential assets. Furthermore, authority tended to be centralized, and the plant superintendent who responded during the crisis was from the administrative, not the technical side, possessing less requisite expertise to sense variations in the technological environment.

And finally, top management at Union Carbide assumed the Bhopal plant was unimportant, leading to limited resource allocation for its maintenance. This expectation set in motion a self-confirming vicious circle where worker indifference and management cost-cutting became mutually reinforcing, resulting in deteriorating conditions. The perception among workers that their unit didn’t matter led to increased inattention, indifference, turnover, low-cost improvisation, and working-to-rule.

A more recent study by Nowling & Seeger (2020) used Karl Weick’s theory of enacted sensemaking and some 37,000 pages of emails to analyze the failure of sensemaking during the Flint, Michigan water crisis. The study identified deficiencies in sensemaking, primarily linked to commitment and capacity, as factors contributing to the failure to address rising risk cues during the crisis.

Specifically, state officials demonstrated a strong commitment to the position that the water leaving the plant and meeting federal standards was safe to drink. Commitment also included attempts to downplay or discredit rising risk signals or third-party data inconsistent with the official stance. Examples included dismissing warnings about water quality or third-party scientific data, such as reports of lead contamination or elevated blood lead levels in children.

The study also found evidence of diminished capacity, such as the lack of reference to third-party expert scientific data about water quality. A significant majority (93.3%) of the sampled emails did not reference this critical information, which was essential for understanding the technical issues involved. Sources of information became scarce or limited, and decision-making authority was centralized, reducing the level of competence directed at the problem.

Limited capacity also silenced dissenting views and restricted the impact of additional information, potentially causing the crisis to spiral out of control. The predisposition of officials to see the problem through their limited areas of expertise reinforced uniform thinking and confirmed established, but incorrect, explanations, limiting the necessary “requisite variety” of information needed to grasp the unfolding events.

While this analysis emphasizes commitment and capacity more, the theoretical framework posits that expectations also play a role in creating environments where crises can develop. Adhering strictly to federal water safety standards in a “letter of the law” interpretation, rather than observing residents’ complaints, can be seen as an example related to expectation and rule adherence.

Michigan state officials’ failure in sensemaking during the Flint water crisis was significantly impacted by their strong commitment to a predetermined narrative of water safety, which led them to downplay or ignore contradictory information and expert warnings. This failure was exacerbated by diminished capacity, characterized by a lack of access to diverse expertise and information, centralized authority, and limited processing of critical data, creating an environment where the crisis intensified unchecked

The implications of transformational change pale in comparison to a crises the magnitude of the Bhopal disaster and the Flint water crisis, but they nonetheless bring to bear the same considerations.  Both contexts, crisis and significant change, are characterized by ambiguity, surprise, and demands on sensemaking.

Just as people in a crisis confront a puzzling situation and discover or shape the problem through action, individuals and groups undergoing organizational change confront new structures, processes, or goals and, through their actions, enact the new environment. The formal plans for change are just the starting point; the actual “changed environment” is the result of changes produced by enactment, which is the concrete, observable reality that emerges from how people act within the context of change initiatives and their subsequent interpretations.

The process of enactment involves bracketing certain aspects of the proposed change or the current situation based on existing preconceptions. People then act within these bracketed elements, guided by their preconceptions, and these actions often shape the elements in the direction of those preconceptions. For example, if people believe a change is doomed to fail (a preconception), their actions might inadvertently contribute to its failure, confirming their initial belief.

This action-driven process creates a “material and symbolic record of action.” The enacted environment contains the real objects and interactions of the changed organization, but their significance and meaning are determined by how people act upon them and interpret those actions retrospectively. The external changes are summarized internally as plausible maps or cause maps (if-then assertions relating actions to outcomes), which become the basis for future expectations and guide further actions during the change process. The reality of the change, therefore, exists significantly “in the mind of the actor” through these cause maps.

Organizational change often requires people to act (e.g., learn a new system, follow a new process) before they fully understand the implications or effectiveness of those actions. The action itself generates the “raw material” for understanding, but it also affects the unfolding change process. There’s a delicate balance: taking action helps people make sense of the change, but those actions can also inadvertently exacerbate negative consequences or create new problems within the changed environment.

The three factors identified as affecting sensemaking during a crisis – Commitment, Capacity, and Expectations – are highly relevant to sensemaking during organizational change. Let’s examine each in the context of significant, transformational change.

Commitment

People involved in organizational change, especially those in leadership roles, make public, irrevocable, and volitional actions related to the change. These commitments (e.g., announcing the change, dismantling old structures, investing resources) lead to the development of tenacious justifications for the change.

Initially, these justifications can be beneficial in generating meaning and providing structure during the ambiguity of change. They help people orient themselves and understand why the change is happening. However, the “dark side of commitment” is that these justifications can transform into taken-for-granted assumptions, creating blind spots. A strong commitment to a specific change plan might blind leaders to evidence that the plan is flawed or that employees are struggling to adapt.

Just as commitment to secrecy at Bhopal became a blind spot to necessary alarm, commitment to the idea of change can create a blind spot to the negative realities being enacted by those experiencing the change. These commitments and their underlying assumptions can become shielded from scrutiny, potentially hiding significant contributors to difficulties or even crises within the change process.

Capacity

A person’s perceived capacity to act effectively within the changing environment significantly influences how they perceive the change. If people believe they have the skills, resources, and support to navigate the change (“I have the capacity”), they are more likely to pay attention to a wider variety of information about the change and its impacts. This leads to greater accuracy in their perception of the unfolding situation and increases the likelihood they will see ways to adapt or make the change successful (seeing more places where they could intervene).

Conversely, feeling overwhelmed or lacking capacity can narrow perception, causing individuals to miss important cues about problems or opportunities related to the change. Specialists focusing only on their area might miss the “big picture” of how the change impacts the interconnected system.

The distribution of capacity also matters. Centralizing decision-making during change can reduce the level of relevant competence applied to problems and decrease the use of action at the local level for developing meaning. Understaffing or high turnover during change periods can severely hinder the collective capacity for enactment and interpretation, degrading “institutional memory” and potentially leading people to rely on irrelevant past experiences or salient distractions when making sense of the change.

Expectations

The assumptions or expectations held by key individuals, particularly leadership, about the organization, its units, or the change process itself, can act as self-fulfilling prophecies, significantly influencing the success or failure of the change. Negative expectations (e.g., viewing certain departments as “unimportant,” assuming employees will resist, believing the change will be easy) can set in motion a vicious circle of actions and reactions that confirm those initial assumptions. For example, viewing a unit as unimportant might lead to reduced resources for change management, indifference, sloppy implementation, and increased turnover, all of which make the change harder and more likely to fail within that unit, thus confirming the initial negative expectations.

These expectations, even if focused on themes like competence, importance, or value rather than the change process directly, can lead to enacted realities where organizational “slack” is reduced, procedures become sloppy, and the system becomes more “interactively complex,” making it easier for small errors or resistance points to escalate into significant roadblocks for the change. The realities enacted by disheartened workers who feel undervalued remove the buffers that could help absorb the disruption of change.

The enactment perspective highlights that crises, and similarly, large-scale organizational changes, often have small, volitional beginnings in human action. Individual actions during change, even seemingly minor ones like how someone adapts a process or talks about the change, can accumulate over time to systematically construct the final state of the changed organization. Listening for “verbs of enactment” – that is, how people are talking about and doing the change (e.g., adapt, resist, comply, innovate) – and assessing the forcefulness of actions and the ambiguity of the situation can reveal how the change is being enacted and where interventions might be possible. Loosely coupled aspects of the organization (like culture or informal networks) are particularly susceptible to being shaped by this human action.

An enactment perspective suggests that the outcomes of organizational change are more controllable than if we viewed change as an external force simply happening to the organization. By understanding how their own actions and interpretations create the reality of the change, people can potentially feel more control, reduce stress, and be more likely to see opportunities for positive intervention.

Viewing organizational change through the lens of enactment involves actively managing the process by:

• Recognizing how individual and collective actions shape the changed environment.
• Increasing skills and awareness of existing capacities to broaden people’s perception of the change.
• Appreciating how small interventions or actions can amplify over time, for better or worse.
• Being exquisitely aware of the commitments and expectations that might bias how the change is perceived and enacted

Considering enactment as an ideology, a shared belief that highlights human agency in shaping the changed environment, can encourage self-control and cooperation, potentially making change more successful. It urges people to see their own actions and decisions as crucial determinants of the change outcome.

Sources:

Nowling, W. D., & Seeger, M. W. (2021). “Sensemaking and Crisis Revisited: The Failure of Sensemaking during the Flint Water Crisis”. Journal of Applied Communication Research. 48(2), 270–289.

Weick, K. E. (1988). “Enacted Sensemaking in Crisis Situations”. Journal of Management Studies, 25(4), 306-317.