Making Sense of Change Through Simulation: Organizational Futures at Play

ABSTRACT Simulation can be a powerful vehicle for prospective sensemaking, especially in organizational change processes where actors’ ability to engage with possible futures is essential. Yet, the way that actors enact different potential futures together via simulation has not been fully explored nor investigated across different contexts. We report on a qualitative study of how healthcare staff in an emergency department (ED) made sense of a planned change process via a simulation tool to explore how moving into a new building might impact their work. We observed simulation sessions and interviewed managers and staff. Using sensemaking theory, we analyse how actors engaged in iterations of different forms of prospective sensemaking together, both in the simulated organizational change and of the organizational change process itself. We found that the way actors used their bodies and the simulation tool to experience potential changes in work environment and work processes elicited emotions such as worry and excitement and deliberations about consequences and potential actions. Our study highlights the interwoven embodied, material and emotional elements of prospective sensemaking: through simulation, we experience and feel the possible futures that can arise from change. MAD statement This article demonstrates how simulation tools can facilitate sensemaking of organizational change in and between individuals. It shows how simulations of work in future physical surroundings can elicit strong emotions such as worry and hope for the imagined futures. The findings shed light on how people, who are trying to explore what organizational change might mean for them and their work, relate to desired and undesired futures through their bodies and physical surroundings. Such prospective sensemaking is a significant driver of organizational change. Therefore, understanding the embodied, material and emotional aspects underpinning such processes is important for both scholarship and practice.