Enhancing Organizational Adaptive Capacity through Sensemaking, Causal Reasoning, and Experimentation

 

Remaining competitive in an era of unprecedented change requires organizations to become adept at rapidly adapting to new realities. Leaders play a key role in building adaptive capacity through three interconnected capabilities: sensemaking, causal reasoning, and experimentation.

Sensemaking involves developing useful interpretations of ambiguous situations to support action. It entails gathering inputs from diverse sources, uncovering biases, and creating evolving maps or models of the environment. Sensemaking is social and benefits from collective inquiry.

Sensemaking grew out of organizational theory in the 1970s-1980s, with foundational work by Karl Weick examining how people make retrospective meaning amidst ambiguity.

1990s - Weick and others continued to develop sensemaking as making the unfamiliar familiar through labels, concepts, and actions. Sensemaking was seen as an organizing process.

2000s - Research delved into dynamics of collective/social sensemaking, power in sense-giving, and the role of identity. Sensemaking was linked to resilience and crisis response.

2010s - With rising VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity), sensemaking became increasingly connected to adaptive leadership and change management.

Evolution - Early views of sensemaking as purely retrospective gave way to seeing it as an ongoing activity amidst change. The focus moved from individual to collaborative sensemaking.

Expansion - Sensemaking research spread beyond organizational studies to other domains like healthcare, emergency response, entrepreneurship, and education.

Critiques - Some argued that overly cognitive views of sensemaking overlooked emotions, embodiment, power structures, and the role of tools/technology.

Causal reasoning helps leaders move from observation to explanation by articulating theories about how key variables influence each other. Visual causal maps enable debate, testing, and refinement of these theories. Valid causal logic is crucial for learning from experience.

Experimentation provides concrete feedback to evaluate both causal hypotheses and interpretive assumptions. Small, safe-to-fail experiments allow for trial-and-error learning in complex domains. Tests reveal flaws in both causal and sensemaking models.

These three capabilities are mutually reinforcing in developing organizational adaptive capacity:

• Sensemaking sets the stage for causal reasoning by uncovering relationships needing explanation. Cause-effect theories help deepen explanatory sensemaking.
• Experiments provide diverse new inputs for sensemaking and surface contradictions that catalyze re-examining causal hypotheses.
• Insights from experiments must then be diffused through sensegiving dialogue so that individual learning becomes organizational learning.
• A culture of psychological safety enables exposure of flawed assumptions without blame so that experiments become learning opportunities.

The interplay of sensemaking, causal reasoning, and experimentation equips organizations to continually reinterpret reality and evolve practices in response to a changing world. It allows moving from reaction to proaction.

Leaders play a crucial role in fostering these capabilities through modeling, training, communication, and shaping cultural norms. A true learning organization emerges when these practices become embedded into everyday operations rather than isolated initiatives. The result is heightened adaptive capacity and the resilience to face unfamiliar disruptions.