Sensemaking Capability Research Articles

Evaluation of Simulated Recognition Aids for Human Sensemaking in Applied Surveillance Scenarios.

We determined whether the human capability for sensemaking, or for identifying essential elements of information (EEIs), could be enhanced by a simulated recognition aid that directed attention to people and vehicles in scenes or by a simulated recognition aid that directed attention to EEIs. For intelligence analysts, sensemaking is challenging because it frequently involves making inferences about uncertain data. One way to enhance sensemaking may involve collaboration from a machine recognition aid such as Project Maven, an established algorithm that directs analysts' attention to people and vehicles in scenes. We simulated the directed attention of Project Maven as well as a machine recognition aid that directed attention to EEIs. We created full-motion videos of simulated compounds viewed by an overhead camera. Sensemaking was assessed by measuring participants' ability to predict events and identify signs. Participants' attention was directed by placing small globe symbols above either all people and vehicles, or all EEIs. Novices and intelligence analysts participated. Simulated recognition aids directing participants' attention to EEIs improved EEI identification but directing attention to people and vehicles (emulating Project Maven) did not. Participants' sensemaking was not enhanced by either type of simulated recognition aid. Guiding attention to features in a scene improves their identification whereas indiscriminate steering of attention to entities in the scene does not improve understanding of the holistic meaning of events, unless attention is drawn to relevant signs of those events. Results contribute to our goal of determining which human-machine systems improve the sensemaking capability of intelligence analysts in the field.

Sens pracy pedagogicznej a poczucie sprawstwa nauczycieli – szkolnych liderów. Relacja z pierwszej fazy projektu Erasmus+ Getting Heads Together

The Meaning of Pedagogical Work and the Teachers’- School Leaders’ Agency: a Summary of the First Phase of the Getting Heads Together Erasmus+ Project. The aim of the article is to present and to summarize the first phase of the Getting Heads Together (GHT) project, implemented under the Erasmus+ program in cooperation with seven institutions from five European countries. The aim of the project is to develop a transformational model for school leadership development, on the basis of which a school leadership development program will be created to support school leaders’ sense-making capability, a subject that has not been sufficiently included in school leadership developmental programs so far. The article briefly introduces the basic categories on which the development program will be based and their understanding in the context of the GHT projectIt indicates those elements of school reality addressed by the GHT project that may be related to teachers’ agency and self-efficacy.

Simple rules for sensemaking praxis: How HR can contribute to strategic change by developing sensemaking capability in organisations

AbstractThis paper explores how sensemaking theory offers a new perspective on HR's role during strategic change. As change in organisations today is less of a programme and more of a continuous cycle of business transformation, there has been a shift in focus to its underpinning, cognitive process of sensemaking. However, HR's role in developing sensemaking praxis in organisations is not widely researched to date. This paper addresses that gap. We draw on Eisenhardt and Sull's ‘simple rules’ whereby complex strategy praxis is reduced to a highly translatable, small number of key rules (2001). Through a diary study of middle managers engaging in strategic change, we investigate their real‐time, lived sensemaking praxis. We conclude that HR have a significant contribution to play in developing an organisation's sensemaking praxis through four Simple Rules of Sensemaking: (1) plan creative discourse opportunities, (2) ensure leader‐middle manager parity, (3) mutually direct sensemaking through ongoing re‐planning and re‐prioritisation, and (4) ensure leadership effort continues beyond the initiation of strategic change.

School principals at different stages of adult ego development: Their sense-making capabilities and how others experience them

The way school principals make sense of the context of their work shapes their actions. As in all adults, principals’ sense-making capability is a function of the ego and can change over time. Adult ego development theory describes distinct, qualitatively different stages of sense-making ability. The research reported here assessed the adult ego development stage of 20 school principals in England using the Washington University Sentence Completion Test. Principals in the Self-Aware, Conscientious and Individualist stages of adult ego development were identified. The research used a critical incident technique to analyse principals’ sense-making capabilities and how others experience them in their role as principals. The findings show substantive differences between those in different stages of adult ego development in relation to their sense-making processes, the feelings they experience and display as emotions, how they involve others in the sense-making process and how others experience them. There is a discernible trend in the behaviours of school principals and how others experience them that relates to the transition from the Self-Aware stage to the Conscientious stage and then to the Individualist stage. These findings have significant implications for understanding the practice of school principals.

THE EFFECTS OF INNOVATION IMPLEMENTATION AND SPEED TO MARKET ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN TEAM SENSE-MAKING, TRUST, AND NPD SUCCESS

New product development (NPD) has long been regarded as an important issue for the success of business operations. One of the key determinants of NPD is innovation, which is highly related to innovation implementation. Both innovation implementation and NPD success require team sensemaking and trust. The purpose of this study is to examine the antecedents of innovation implementation and its mediating role through which it influences NPD success. A causal model was developed to examine relevant variables for innovation implementation on NPD success. A survey was conducted using the responses from 286 NPD team leaders in the Taiwanese high-tech industry. The results indicated that team sensemaking and trust can influence innovation implementation, which further promotes NPD success. The influences of team sensemaking capability and trust on NPD success can be mediated through the mediating role that innovation implementation plays. This report sheds light on the relevance of innovation implementation in a NPD context.

Low-VDD Operation of SRAM Synaptic Array for Implementing Ternary Neural Network

For Internet of Things (IoT) edge devices, it is very attractive to have the local sensemaking capability instead of sending all the data back to the cloud for information processing. For image pattern recognition, neuro-inspired machine learning algorithms have demonstrated enormous powerfulness. To effectively implement learning algorithms on-chip for IoT edge devices, on-chip synaptic memory architectures have been proposed to implement the key operations such as weighted-sum or matrix-vector multiplication. In this paper, we proposed a low-power design of static random access memory (SRAM) synaptic array for implementing a low-precision ternary neural network. We experimentally demonstrated that the supply voltage (VDD) of the SRAM array could be aggressively reduced to a level, where the SRAM cell is susceptible to bit failures. The testing results from 65-nm SRAM chips indicate that VDD could be reduced from the nominal 1–0.55 V (or 0.5 V) with a bit error rate ~0.23% (or ~1.56%), which only introduced ~0.08% (or ~1.68%) degradation in the classification accuracy. As a result, the power consumption could be reduced by more than $8\times $ (or $10\times $ ).

Impact of Technology Sensemaking Capability and Management Capability on the Innovation Performance of Export Venture Firms in Korea

Impact of Technology Sensemaking Capability and Management Capability on the Innovation Performance of Export Venture Firms in Korea

An exploration of the validity and potential of adult ego development for enhancing understandings of school leadership

ABSTRACTAn adult ego development (AED) perspective accepts that the way adults interpret and interact in the social world can change during their life-span. This article seeks to analyse the validity and potential of AED for enhancing understandings of educational leadership practice and development. We analysed the AED literature and interviewed 16 individuals in senior leadership positions in the English school system. The interviews enabled them to explore the notion of AED and to reflect on their own sense-making capability and their experience of school leaders they considered to be in the different stages of AED. Educational leaders judged to be in the different AED stages were encountered by respondents to varying extents and were experienced and valued differently. Those considered to be in the later AED stages appeared to be more highly valued and their sense-making capabilities may have substantial value in the complex working environment of schools. The analyses showed that: AED has a considerable role in educational leadership practice; can inform the analysis of educational leadership practice and development; and has valuable explanatory power.

Incivility’s Relationship with Workplace Outcomes: Enactment as a Boundary Condition in Two Samples

The current two-sample investigation explores the role of enactment as a boundary condition in the relationship between experienced incivility and workplace outcomes (i.e., job satisfaction, organizational citizenship behavior [OCB], and turnover intent). We integrate the tenets of the transactional model of stress and sensemaking theory to explain why enactment is a psychological sensemaking capability that can neutralize the adverse effects of experienced incivility on workplace outcomes. The results across two samples of data (nSample 1 = 156; nSample 2 = 620) supported the study hypotheses by demonstrating that experienced incivility had stronger adverse effects on employees’ job satisfaction, OCBs, and turnover intent for employees who reported lower levels of enactment than employees who reported higher levels of enactment. This study’s results make three important contributions to theory and research. First, we make an empirical contribution by examining enactment as a psychological sensemaking capability that can neutralize the adverse effects of experienced incivility on workplace outcomes. Second, we make a theoretical contribution by integrating the tenets of the transactional model of stress and sensemaking theory in a novel way that explains why enactment is a psychological sensemaking capability that can neutralize the adverse effects of stress on strain. Third, we demonstrate that enactment is the boundary condition that explains why incivility does not have universally adverse effects on employees’ outcomes.

Sensemaking, a New Entrepreneurial Approach for Today’s Uncertain Business Environment

Sensemaking has gained substantial attention from scholars in various fields like organizational studies, information technology and chaotic environments. In the field of entrepreneurship, sensemaking earned significance in explaining entrepreneurial opportunity creation and enactment of opportunities as well as entrepreneurs’ rhetoric, metaphors and narratives in justifying their decisions for other stakeholders by engaging in direct negotiations with them. When faced with ambiguity and while dealing with uncertain environments, sensemaking enables entrepreneurs to hold their ground by identifying salient elements of the environment, giving them meaningful labels and therefore enacting their own environment. Sensemaking has not been given adequate attention in entrepreneurial studies. This paper acknowledges previous efforts to link entrepreneurship and sensemaking but claims that there are important undiscovered sensemaking applications relevant to entrepreneurial activities, the most important of which could be failure prediction and failure prevention. On the other hand, lack of sensemaking among the entrepreneurial team in a given enterprise could not only deprive it of identifying or exploiting lucrative and profitable opportunities but also under severe circumstances lead to its final failure and collapse. The main goal of this paper is shedding more lights on those undiscovered field by conducting a comprehensive survey of not only sensemaking but also relevant entrepreneurial fields and claiming that sensemaking capability reduces the chances of entrepreneurial failure.

Antecedents and consequences of organizations' technology sensemaking capability

Abstract As an intriguing concept, organizational sensemaking has attracted many researchers from a variety of disciplines. However, a specific context of the sensemaking concept, a firm's sensemaking capability on technology-related information and strategy development (i.e., technology sensemaking capability) has rarely been reported in the literature. In this study, we investigate how technology sensemaking capability of organizations influences their product and process innovativeness as well as how the use of organizational memory contents, such as declarative, procedural, and emotional memory, affects development of the technology sensemaking capability of organizations. By studying 203 firms, we found that (1) employing an organization's declarative, procedural, and emotional memory facilitates the development of its technology sensemaking capability, (2) technology sensemaking capability positively affects the product development and process implementation efforts of the firm, and (3) technology sensemaking capability partially mediates the relationship between organizational memory contents and firm product and process innovativeness. Also, we investigated the moderating role of environmental turbulence (e.g., technology and market turbulence) on the relationship between organizational memory contents and technology sensemaking capability. We found that declarative and emotional memory has an inverted U-shaped (∩-shaped) relationship with technology sensemaking capability with increasing levels of environmental turbulence. Theoretical and managerial implications of this study are discussed.

Gaining competitive advantage through business analytics

The industry for business analytics within the BI sphere is growing significantly and the distinction in organizations between transactional information systems and decision-oriented systems breaks down. Firms need to understand both the opportunity and the potential of business analytics. Reporting, which is getting a handle on what happened in organizations, is complemented by analytics that is rather explanatory and predictive. Leveraging business analytics means to use analytics applications in order to analyse business problems and produce related business recommendations to improve business process performance. Business analytics must but be a part of a value creating process operating together with other systems and organisational factors in a synergistic manner, including people, processes, knowledge and relationship assets, culture, structure, and policies. In order for companies to be efficient, they need to automate processes, workflows and make rules. Effectiveness, on the other hand, is about making better decisions, perhaps using the same data that their competitors may have. What matters is not necessarily the technologies deployed, but emerging competence that the firm uses to support its business. A specific “mindset” needs to be installed for companies to invest into business analytics. Organisations need to better understand how best to exploit their data and convert them into information and sense-making capabilities. Business capabilities can be enhanced not only by exploitation of analytical tools, but also by the sophisticated use of information. This leads to a truly sense-making capability or “analytical mindset”. The primary data covers 398 data sets, where firms have been asked about the specifics of their information management. The data is used as input to statistical tests and the value of business analytics is being analyzed in an empirical way.

Antecedents and Consequences Of Team Sensemaking Capability In Product Development Projects

Antecedents and Consequences Of Team Sensemaking Capability In Product Development Projects

Antecedents and consequences of team sensemaking capability in product development projects

With the increasing popularity of organizational sensemaking in the literature, sensemaking capability of firms attracts many researchers and practitioners from different fields. Nevertheless, sensemaking capability is rarely addressed in the new product development (NPD) project teams in the technology and innovation management literature. Specifically, we know little about what team sensemaking capability is, its ingredients and benefits, and how it works in NPD projects (e.g., its antecedents and consequences). By investigating 92 NPD project teams, we found that (1) team sensemaking capability, which is composed of internal and external communication, information gathering, information classification, building shared mental models, and taking experimental actions, has a positive impact on the information implementation and speed‐to‐market; (2) information implementation and speed‐to‐market mediate the relationship between team sensemaking capability and new product success; and (3) team sensemaking capability mediates the relationship between team processes and information implementation and partially mediates the relationship between team processes and speed‐to‐market. We also found that team autonomy, interpersonal trust among team members, and open‐mindedness of team members positively influence the development of team sensemaking capability. Theoretical and managerial implications of the study findings are discussed.

Developing the organization's sensemaking capability: Precursor to an adaptive strategic marketing response

Effective strategic planning demands that organizations develop an understanding of the forces shaping the situation by engaging the collective efforts and interpretive capabilities of various representatives of the organization. This study investigates the mechanisms by which such an understanding develops and, subsequently, shapes marketing strategy. Specifically, organizations are examined as sensemaking units stimulated by perceived environmental turbulence, cultural open-mindedness, and team functional diversity. These factors are modeled as determinants of an organization's sensemaking capability, which is comprised of communicative, interpretive, and analytical dimensions. This study argues that a developed sensemaking capability increases the potential range of strategic responses and, ultimately, enhances customer-based performance. The results from a sample of wholesale distributors suggest that organizations that maintain greater internal variety are better able to sense and respond to the environment.