DE E. A CONTINUACIÓN SE TRANSCRIBEN LOS ARTÍCULOS TRANSITORIOS DE LOS DECRETOS DE REFORMAS AL PRESENTE

Schon (1983) describes the environment of professional practice where ‘professional knowledge is mismatched to the changing character of the situations of practices’ (p. 14). ‘Problems are interconnected, environments are turbulent, and the future is indeterminate’ (p16) and ‘practitioners are frequently embroiled in conflicts of values, goals, purposes, and interests’ (p17).

From an individual’s perspective, Schon (1983) posits the limitation of the ‘technical rationality’ perspective which portrays the process of problem solving as a selection amongst available solutions.

In real-world practice, problems do not present themselves to practitioners as givens. They must be constructed from the materials of problematic situations that are puzzling, troubling, and uncertain. In order to convert a problematic situation to a problem, a practitioner must do a certain kind of work. He must make sense of an uncertain situation that initially makes no sense. (Schon, 1983, p. 40)

To illustrate, Schon (1983) provides the example of building a road which appears to be deliverable from a technical perspective, e.g. structural design, but may have issues due to concerns on the destruction of a neighbourhood community. Under such conditions where ‘…situations are confusing “messes” incapable of technical solution’ [quotations in original], practitioners who ‘involve themselves in messy but crucially important problems…describe their methods…of experience, trial and error, intuition, and muddling through’ (pp. 42-43).

Sensemaking from a project practitioner’s perspective relates to the social aspects such as understanding stakeholder requirements, interpreting design guidelines and finding solutions to problems. This viewpoint focuses on ‘the processes of organizing projects rather than on the structure of projects or the capabilities and resources required to execute them’ (Alderman & Ivory, 2011, p. 19). There is also an emphasis on the ‘processes of action and interaction that enable individuals to make sense of organizational activities and how they interact to effect the emergent projects’ (Thomas, 2000, p. 42).

In the emergent context of complex projects, Alderman et al. (2005) suggest that sensemaking is a necessary process which facilitates the project manager as well as other stakeholders to make sense of the multiple meanings and their associated outcomes which need to be accommodated. They posit that the sensemaking process facilitates the project manager to better understand and overcome the project challenges where the conventional rationalistic PM approach would have been inadequate (p. 384).

Sensemaking is important in projects from a cultural perspective due to the inherent differences in core assumptions. Fellows and Liu (2016) assert that it can: 1) promote common understanding; 2) build trust and commitment; and 3) facilitate the recognition

of project interdependencies. Sensemaking studies have been undertaken in a variety of project scenarios of which a few are illustrated below.

In new product development, incorporating sensemaking capabilities will provide the team with ‘the right tool’ to understand the uncertainties of the environment (Ashmos & Nathan, 2002) in order to structure and share customer information, tacit knowledge, insights and ideas amongst team members (Akgün et al., 2007).

With the example of the implementation of strategic change projects, Gioia and Chittipeddi (1991) present ‘a process whereby the CEO makes sense of an altered vision of the organisation and engages in cycles of negotiated social construction activities to influence stakeholders…’ (p. 434). They describe the process to include: information gathering; assessing potentials and possibilities based on personal interpretations from previous institutional experience; commencement of the strategic initiative; assessing the activities and undertaking modifications based on feedback; then finally, gaining wider commitment and stronger impetus for the entire change effort.

Many respondents told of being new to the project team or the organisation. This newcomer experience involves a sensemaking period of socialisation, which is the ‘process by which an individual comes to appreciate the values, abilities, expected behaviors, and social knowledge essential for assuming an organizational role’ (Louis, 1980, pp. 229-230) and ‘how people acquire new skills, beliefs systems, patterns of action, and sometimes personal identities’ (Dubé, 2014, p. 20).

In project environments of complex, large-scale and high ambiguity, collective sensemaking may be stimulated where the ability to determine the product or service outcome may be hindered by the changing requirements which occur as the project progresses or issues are encountered (Drazin et al., 1999). Sensemaking in turn may then be translated into action, which then triggers the act of bricolage. Long-term service-led projects which are driven by a client’s business plan also need sense ‘to be made of future possibilities by reflecting on anticipated situations in order to influence design decisions made in the present’ (Alderman et al., 2005, p. 384).

Weick (2004, p. 76) remarks that actors being ‘thrown’ into the midst of a complex situation where one cannot avoid taking actions and where one’s effects cannot be predicted ‘…will cope more or less adequately in a pre-interpreted world depending on how skillful they are at bricolage, making do, updating transient explanations, staying in motion in order to uncover new options, improvisation, and tolerating ambiguity’. As actors pursue solutions under environments of imperfect understanding, diagnoses and actions co-evolve based on the feedback from the changing situation, evolving information and the associated decisions (Rudolph et al., 2009).

In order to examine how project practitioners make sense of their working environment and how they try to understand moments of ambiguity or uncertainty we refer to Weick’s seven interrelated properties of sensemaking. Examples were frequently observed in the interview material and illustrated in the following sections: