The fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Weick's The Social Psychology of Organizing is catalyzing international research on the anatomy of sensemaking episodes (Tsoukas, Patriotta, Sutcliffe, & Maitlis, 2017). Simultaneously, business schools around the world are being asked to participate in interdisciplinary social science research agendas that have the reduction of human suffering as an explicit global grand challenge (var der Vegt, Essens, Wahlstrom, & George, 2015). In response, we used a mixed-method research methodology to study enacted extreme environments in sensemaking episode. First, we conducted on-the-ground fieldwork in Ferguson, Missouri, with people from several constituencies who experienced the racial unrest after the 9 August 2014 shooting of Michael Brown (an African-American man) in Ferguson, Missouri, in the United States, by a White police officer. Second, we conducted a qualitative meta- analysis of sensemaking episodes embedded in 138 management research articles on extreme contexts (Hallgren, Rouleau, & de Rond, 2018). The juxtaposition of rich data from a single sensemaking episode and rich data from multiple sensemaking episodes allowed us to elaborate nine components of sensemaking episodes: bracketed triggering events, deference-to-expertise leadership, extreme team decision-losing, improvisational retrospective audits, commitment to identity- leveraging improvisation, improvisational social sense-giving, extreme team decision-remaking, reluctance-to-simplify reorganizing, and re- equilibrium tipping points.