Weick on Sense-Making in School Organizations

• In Event: Using Weick to Understand, Explore, and Sense-Make: Implications for School Organizations and the Development of Educational Leaders

Abstract

A leadership program student once confronted me during office hours with the statement, “I’m frustrated that we are not learning the actual steps for how to lead.” This declaration simultaneously involved sensemaking and demonstrated ignorance about sensemaking being embedded in decision making. Weick’s (1995) Sensemaking in Organizations draws together major themes in organizational theory from the second half of the twentieth century—including bounded rationality (March & Simon, 1993), institutionalization (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983), and serendipitous choice (Cohen, March, & Olsen, 1972)—and theoretical roots for perception, reality, and social psychology from the first half of the twentieth century. The result is a cogent theory about how actions, decisions, and inter-personal relations combine in ways that my student was unable to conceive.

The purpose of this paper is two-fold: 1) to demonstrate how sensemaking informs two strands of education leadership—instructional leadership and distributed leadership, and 2) to explain how sensemaking might be woven into the theory portion of leadership preparation courses. With growing evidence that principals play an important role in improving student achievement (Leithwood, Harris, & Hopkins, 2008; Leithwood, Patten, & Jantzi, 2010) and the explanatory power of instructional leadership behaviors (Robinson, Lloyd, & Rowe, 2008), sensemaking provides a critical lens to understand how instructional leadership is enacted in schools. What principals and their leadership teams choose to attend to as they strive to improve student performance and how they individually and socially make sense of the linkages among student outcomes, teacher and administrator actions, and improvement have been little studied. Similarly, distributed leadership has been unclear about what constitutes leadership action and silent about how uncertainty and ambiguity are managed through sensemaking (Gronn, 2008; Spillane, Halvorson, & Diamond, 2004). Enhancing understanding of instructional and distributed leadership by including sensemaking as a leadership behavior translates to practice through leadership preparation. Credentialing and degree programs that purport to teach teachers and others how to lead from administrative positions must contend with the fuzzy picture generated by fast-paced events, competing interests, and ignorance. Sensemaking is a helpful tool for doing so.

This paper connects Weick’s sensemaking to more contemporary theoretical and empirical works (e.g., Author, 2013a; Author, 2013b; Author, 2013c; Author, 2014; Grissom, Loeb, & Master, 2013; Ingram, Seashore Louis, & Schroeder, 2004; Seashore Louis & Robinson, 2012; Stein & Nelson, 2003) to demonstrate how sensemaking can inform future research and enhance the quality of leadership preparation. Leadership practice is neither all charisma nor the pedestrian following of successive steps to arrive at an intended goal. Rather, it involves navigating through uncertain territory, acting based on important cues (Weick, 1995), and thinking on one’s feet in the face of the unexpected. Understanding these behaviors more deeply through research informed by sensemaking and informing leadership preparation with resulting research will improve both knowledge and practice of education leadership.

Author

• David Brazer, Stanford University