Perception and sensemaking are of primary importance within the business context. Managers are always engaged in the process of understanding the environment in which they operate and they make decisions based on how they perceive …show more content…
Perception in fact is based on previous experience. Individuals start noticing things when they go out of their ordinary lives (Weick & Sutcliffe, 2005). At that point they start "noticing and bracketing" or in other words, they begin the process of the interpretation of something that has not been identified yet (Weick & Sutcliffe, 2005). For example, if a person receives a bill from the telephone company that contains seven digits the person notice it and, based on the experience of all the previous bills the person can interpret that something is amiss. Afterward, the process of sensemaking proceeds into a functional deployment phase. This phase consists of assigning tags on interdependent events so that they can be easily identified (Weick & Sutcliffe, 2005). In the case of the telephone bill, the person may try to categorise calls based on distance, duration, time, and so on. When this process is completed it goes into a retrospective phase which engages the person on identifying what is different based on what it was before. In this case it is known that previous bills were much lower so it is easy to recall that detail. Basing perception on the retrospective of previous bills, the person starts making assumptions and turning these into a definite action. The answer to the question "what 's the story here?" comes from the person 's previous …show more content…
The stimuli are interpreted based on factors in the perceiver, in the situation, and in the object or situation.
Sensemaking is the process of making sense of the world around us. It consists of the process by which individuals (or organizations) create an understanding of a situation and develop plans in order to deal with the situation. It is an activity with cognitive and social dimensions, and has informational, communicational, and operational aspects.
Managers are continually involved in the sensemaking process. They have to be able to turn circumstances into a situation that is clearly understandable by everyone. They must also be aware of the fact that people within the organisation may see things under different perspectives based on their needs, values and motivation. This may create alienation to employees which may lead to low production of outcomes. In this case managers should act as leaders and turn negativity into positivity.
Works CitedAncona, D., Malone, T. W., Orlikowski, W. J., & Senge, P. M. (2007). In praise of the incomplete leader. Harvard Business Review ,