Making sense out of projects that facilitate strategic change

Abstract

This article tells a story, of how Laurea´s project team of one of the Critical Change Projects was confronted with discrepancies in our organisation and different views and interpretations on the concrete assignment. It tackles the topic with the help of a concept called sensemaking, which, according to Giuliani (2016, 220), is used mostly in managerial fields like strategy, organisation, and change management. The term ’sensemaking’ has been used in organisational research since the 1980s (Odden & Russ 2019, 188). According to Brown, Colville, and Pye (2015, 266), there is no single agreed definition of sensemaking, but the emergent consensus is that generally, sensemaking refers to those processes by which people seek to plausibly understand ambiguous,equivocal, or confusing issues or events.

The article describes how the concept of sensemaking supports changes in an organisation’s members’ RDI-related work. Many taken-for-granted assumptions that we have to build our solutions on were indeed assumptions and not entirely shared by our colleagues. We could detect continuous sensemaking efforts in our organisation, and in this article, we use these lenses in an attempt to make sense of our project to ourselves.