A ‘Fruitless Obsession with Accuracy’: The Uses of Sensemaking in Public Sector Performance Management

Abstract

Sensemaking provides a framework for understanding and interpreting managers' working lives, based on a thorough critique of rational choice models. It refutes rational choice, and aims not to predict, prove or control but simply to explain: the making of sense. This article, based on the author's original prizewinning MBA thesis, presents research undertaken in 2005–2006 on the uses of sensemaking in understanding local government organisations' contrasting experiences of performance management systems: an internal system in Canadian city government, and an externally-imposed system in the form of the now abandoned Comprehensive Performance Assessment (CPA) in British local government. Key literature utilised includes social and organisational psychologist Karl Weick, British complexity theorists such as Ralph Stacey, and a literature on the politics of organisational behaviour (such as Guy Peters et al.). A critique of rational choice and summary of sensemaking precedes an account of phenomenological case study research across two countries, undertaken using ethnographic field methods. The author argues that using sensemaking to understand performance management systems provides a further imperfect means of making sense of inherent organisational equivocality. These systems are radically interpreted as devices for making sense of experience in organisations in which human behaviour cannot be expected to be forever accurately predicted and controlled. Conclusions with enduring relevance for practising managers are presented on the personal, tactical, methodological and philosophical ‘uses’ of sensemaking in managers' working lives.