People-focused knowledge management

Sensemaking and Situational Awareness
The purpose of Sensemaking is to create an understanding of what
a situation “is about” — what it means, how important it is, and, 
for Decision-Making/Problem-Solving purposes, to determine how
familiar the decision maker is with that type of situation.
Sensemaking is one of the most important and perhaps one of the
most ignored aspects of work. Before a person can handle a task,
tackle a challenge, or deal with a situation, he needs to identify the
circumstances — the normal characteristics, problems, and general
context. Unless both the target situation and its context are properly
understood, the situation-handling is liable to be handled unsatis-
factorily. The resulting decisions and action-options may become
ineffective and arbitrary because of misunderstanding or even capri-
cious because of preconceived biases.
Given its importance in business in Decision-Making/Problem-
Solving in general, and from our perspective on how people can and
need to act effectively, it is remarkable that Sensemaking is not
treated comprehensively — at times not at all — by cognitive scien-
tists and others concerned with how people think and behave. The
topic is not found in recent cognitive sciences encyclopedias (Nadel
2003; Wilson and Keil 1999). Instead, Sensemaking is found to be
an important technical concept in artificial intelligence (AI) and 
computer sciences. Some researchers consider Sensemaking to be an
ongoing activity that deals with a person’s attempts to understand
her environment in general. In this book, we take a different view
similar to that required for situational awareness. We use the term
to mean making sense of a particular situation, and we understand
it within a specific context and deal effectively with it.
Sensemaking
Sensemaking is the first task of situation-handling, and this is
where analysis and reasoning to understand the situation take place.
From a somewhat different perspective than the one we pursue here,
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People-Focused Knowledge Management
Weick (1995) treated Sensemaking in general and specifically within
the organization. Lakoff (1987) explained that, to provide a foun-
dation for discrimination of what is important and what is not, Sense-
making builds on extensive categorization of the important aspects
of the target situation.
The cognitive processes by which a person observes and forms 
an understanding of a situation — be it static or dynamic — are 
complicated. The processes proceed through sequential steps and 
iterations as relevant information about the situation is gathered,
analyzed, and interpreted. The Sensemaking task relies on Situation
Recognition Model knowledge as discussed later in this chapter.
Additional forms of knowledge are also used. These, as indicated in
Appendix C, include facts, concepts, rules, and expectations. Per-
sonal Situation Recognition models are primarily mental reference
models that exist in the minds of people at different conceptual levels
as was discussed in Chapter 4. The models can be highly concrete
(though, at the same time, both automatized and tacit) for routine
tasks, more generalized operational models for familiar but less
automatized tasks, or generalized scripts and schemata for broader
or less familiar tasks. More general reference models are also 
possessed as metaknowledge — either procedural or declarative
metaknowledge. These models provide abstract strategies, features,
and structures applicable to the domain and serve as the basis for
operationalization in the new context.
Many factors can affect Sensemaking , some positively and others
negatively, as indicated in Table 5-1. Attention is an important factor
that determines the degree to which situations are observed and pri-
oritized (Davenport & Beck 2001). Lack of attention may even lead
to important information — or whole situations — being overlooked
or ignored. Also, the person or the enterprise may refuse to accept
information that describes a situation. That may happen when infor-
mation is considered to be unbelievable for some reason, or if it
describes a threatening situation that the person wants to avoid and
may therefore tacitly ignore (Sherman & Cohen 2002). Sensemaking
also involves the “leaping to conclusions” problems: the person 
prematurely and erroneously assumes that the target situation fits a
previously known pattern when that is not the case.