Anticipatory and retrospective sensemaking during unfolding organizational crises.

Existing research on sensemaking during organizational crises has identified retrospective processes in which actors give meaning to what has happened, thus reducing uncertainty and enabling action. While sensemaking is generally considered to be retrospective, several scholars dispute that sensemaking is exclusively a past-oriented process. Klein, Snowden and Pin (2007, 2011) have recently proposed a future-oriented anticipatory sensemaking process that involves the preparation and enactment of a course of action to avert a predicted threat during an organizational crisis. The topic of future-oriented sensemaking remains an on-going debate in the sensemaking literature. This research attempts to contribute to this debate by offering a deeper understanding of the forms, temporal orientation and interaction of the sensemaking processes during unfolding organizational crises. The research approach involved semi-structured interviews with twenty people from fourteen organizations across nine different industries and three continents. There are three novel contributions from this research. The first contribution is the integrative model of anticipatory and retrospective sensemaking during unfolding crises that was synthesised from the literature and evidenced in the empirical data. The second contribution is the model of anticipatory sensemaking processes during unfolding organizational crises, which was derived from the literature and enhanced based on the findings from the empirical study. In identifying future-oriented anticipatory sensemaking processes during unfolding organizational crises, the findings provide evidence for the counter-argument to the key ontological assumption that sensemaking is exclusively a retrospective process. The third contribution is that the actors created collective organizing structures during the unfolding crises, which enabled them to make sense and take action. The findings and contributions from this research have implications for both theory and practice.