Readings MOD Essay

Submitted By nasrmaya
Words: 3341
Pages: 14

Readings

Not mentioned as important’’’’

Mentioned as important

Reading 1

Managing Desing / Designing Management (Dumas, Mintzberg 1989)

Reading 2 - Stigliani and Ravasi (2012), “Organizing thoughts and connecting brains”

In the last few years, however, a series of studies has highlighted how individuals rely on a variety of material practices and artifacts, such as drawings and prototypes (Bechky, 2003; Carlile, 2002; Sutton
& Hargadon, 1996), slide presentations (Kaplan,
2011), visual maps (Doyle & Sims, 2002), and even
Lego bricks (Oliver & Roos, 2007; Heracleous &
Jacobs, 2008), to support the conversational practices through which they exchange, combine, and construct interpretations as they collectively engage in the less investigated form of prospective sensemaking (Gioia, Thomas, Clark, & Chittipeddi,
1994; Cioia & Mehra, 1996) underpinning future oriented group processes, such as strategy making. new product development, and the planning of organizational change. Design as sensemaking. The essence of design has been described as "making sense of things"
(Krippendorff, 2006: i). Particularly in the initial stage of concept development, design can be considered as open-ended problem solving, characterized by a high level of ambiguity with respect to both final solution and context (Clark, 1985). As one of our informants observed, at the beginning of a project "things are not defined at all": multiple possible directions may be taken, and multiple interpretations about the final solution seem plausible.
Accordingly, our informants described the structure of projects as a "funnel": an iterative process based on the continuous refinement of emerging ideas. Data Analysis

Step 1. Tracing individual and group-level practices of sensemaking.

Step 2. Tracing cognitive subprocesses of sensemaking.

Step 3. Building a grounded theoretical framework.

YOYOYO

FINDINGS
Collective sensemaking at Continuum rested on the interplay between conversational and material practices. Informants traced connections between the production and use of material artifacts and specific cognitive subprocesses that allowed them to gradually combine cues into tentative understandings of their task and to integrate and refine provisional interpretations into a more complex set of interrelated mental structures.

4 phases of sense making: 1) Noticing and bracketing 2) articulating 3) elaborating

Phase 1: Noticing and Bracketing
An argument of sensemaking theory is that individuals are constantly immersed in a flow of stimuli, only few of which are attended to (Weick,1995). Senseinaking starts wben tbese stimuli, or
"cues," are extracted from the flux of experience
("bracketed") for further cognitive work (Weick et al., 2005). Gonsistently with this idea, in the three projects we observed, designers initially immersed themselves in task-related experiences intended to feed reconceptualization of task elements. They interviewed relevant stakeholders and filmed or photographed how they interacted with relevant objects.
They collected samples of products and cut botb product-related and more general images out from magazines. All these artifacts represented
"embodied experiences" that would be made permanently available for the interpretive process that occurred later, as members—first individually, then in groups—produced new provisional interpretations of elements of the task, in the form of emerging mental models.
Phase 2: Articulating
The early sign of members' attempts to bring order to this flow of experience was the combination of bracketed cues into tentative and ill-defined new understandings of various elements of the task—a phase we refer to as articulating. In sensemaking theory (e.g. Weick, 1995; Weick et al.,
2005), articulation generally refers to verbal exprès-sion of tentative interpretations. In fact, as displayed in Figure 2, at this stage, members relied on