Flipping Sensemaking on its Head: From common sense to sensus communis

Abstract

Sensemaking provides a compelling account of how meaning emerges by theorizing the organizational enactment of order. In this paper we question the underlying assumption that making sense is equivalent to ordering. We draw from Hannah Arendt’s work to argue that restricting sense to ordering as a means of addressing practical concerns is limiting, and even dehumanizing, and that the most profound forms of sense may emerge from disrupting rather than restoring order. In questioning the intimacy between sense and order, we also question the common-sense view that organization seeks practical settlements, certainty and reliability. Following Arendt, we pursue the question of what it means to organize for plural opinion-making, a condition she conceptualizes as sensus communis. The upshot is to flip sensemaking on its head: Rather than meaning being generated through organizing, and certain types of disruption merely triggering it, sense is made through disruption, with certain types of organizing enabling it.