Sense making is rolling hindsight. It is a continual weaving of sense from beliefs, from implicit assumptions, from tales from the past, from unspoken premises for decision and action, and from ideas about what will happen as a result of what can be done. Once put into words it is constrained and framed by those same words because they are only approximately what they refer to. Often words have multiple meanings, so all the time people are working with puns. Further, words are inclined to convey discrete categories: they are not equal to depicting the unbroken, complex flow of life in organizations.

The sense that is made is shaped also by selective perception, that is, by noticing some things and not others. Commitments that have been made then have to be justified retrospectively. There is a constant process of putting together reasoned arguments and arguing about them, most obviously in meetings which have a value as sense making occasions. However, the sense that is made has its limits. People with time to spend on a problem at a meeting make sense of it in away most understandable to themselves, so others become less able to follow what is afoot. Showing up at meetings therefore produces a situation that is manageable only by those who have been showing up.

The whole sense making process gives ostensible orderliness to what is going on, and has gone on. The development of a ‘generic sense making’, within which individuals differ yet sufficiently concur, maintains a sense of organization …

Whatever the form of organization, it will have to work with ambiguous, uncertain, equivocal and changing information. Despite their facade of numbers and objectivity and accountability, organizations and those who manage them wade amidst guesswork, subjectivity and arbitrariness. Weick feels that language could better reflect this constant ambiguous flux by making more use of verbs and less of nouns. Indeed, he urges people to ‘stamp out nouns’: to think of managing rather than management, of organizing rather than organization …

He offers managers and others in organizations ten further ‘pieces of advice’:

1. Don’t panic in the face of disorder. Some degree of disorder is necessary so that disorderly, ambiguous information can be taken in and coped with, rather than tidily screened out.
2. You never do one thing all at once. Whatever you do has many ramifications, not just the one you have in mind. And whilst some consequences happen right away, others show up indirectly and much later.
3. Chaotic action is preferable to orderly inaction. When someone asks ‘What shall I do?’ and is told ‘I don't know, just do something’, that is probably good advice. Since sense is made of events retrospectively, an action, any action, provides something to make sense of. Inaction is more senseless.
4. The most important decisions are often the least apparent. Decisions about what is to be retained in files, in databases, in memories indeed, provide the basis for future action. Such decisions may not be conspicuous, yet they sustain the past from which the future is begun.
5. There is no solution. As there are no simple answers, and rarely is anything right or wrong, learn to live with improvisation and just a tolerable level of reasonableness.
6. Stamp out utility. Good adaptation now rules out some options for the future. Concentrating overmuch on utility now can rule out sources of future utility. Resources and choices are used up. Better to retain some noise and variability in the system, even at a cost to present efficiency, so that fresh future repertoires of action may be opened up.
7. The map is the territory. When the managers’ map of what causes what, drawn from past experience, is superimposed on the future, it becomes for them the territory that it maps. Simplification though it is, such a map has been worked over more than any other product has, and is as good a guide as can be had.
8. Rechart the organizational chart. Do not be boxed in by its conventional form. See things as they work out and people as they are to you. See the chart in the way that it functions. For example, in the box on the chart for chairman write ‘hesitancy’, in the box for general manager write ‘assertiveness’, and so on, in the way people come over to you.
9. Visualize organizations as evolutionary systems. See what is evolving, and what you can and should change. Likewise, recognize what is not, and you cannot.
10. Complicate yourself! Consider different causes, other solutions, new situations, more complex alternatives, and take pleasure in the process of doing so.