Knowing in Practice in Situational Sensemaking

Sensemaking has been widely discussed in organisation and management studies and the workplace learning field. Despite progress, there are still significant gaps in our understanding of this process. One ongoing challenge is developing a sensemaking framework that can explain the reasoning and decision-making process for real-world scenarios. Taking the pragmatic practice approach, this chapter explored the sensemaking notion from the perspectives of project management practitioners in the research domain. Through the qualitative lens of the approach and by adopting (Reich and Hager in Journal of Workplace Learning 26:418–431, 2014) notion of knowing-in-practice, the chapter discussed how practitioners made sense of their situations. The focus of this work was part of a more extensive study that employed ethnographic data collection methods as the data collection strategy and thematic analysis as the data analysis strategy to examine practitioners’ actions. Findings from the study suggested that practitioners engaged in sensemaking as they assessed their project situations during their projects. From the results, the study proposed the notion of situational sensemaking. This chapter further discussed the implications of the findings for the project management field of the research domain.