Supporting Organizational Sensemaking with Collaboration Engineering

Organizations are increasingly facing complex problems that no single individual can solve alone. When dealing with complex and ambiguous issues, people must interact, discuss, and share their different perspectives and interpretations. Existing literature recognizes sensemaking as one way for group members to understand and talk about complexity. Unfortunately, little has yet been reported on exactly how the properties of sensemaking can be materialized in practice. Collaboration Engineering (CE), on the other hand, has a practical focus in supporting collective work with an attempt to design productive, task-specific work practices that practitioners can collaboratively execute for themselves. This paper seeks to gain a deeper understanding of 1) how sensemaking and CE are related and 2) how they can jointly support the collective construction of meaning by individuals who hold different pieces of information. Drawing on sensemaking and CE literature, the paper illustrates how a collaborative sensemaking process is designed and deployed in one case company.