Understanding distributed sensemaking in crisis management: The case of the Utrecht terrorist attack

Abstract

On Monday morning March 18, 2019 a terrorist opened fire inside a tram in the middle of the city of Utrecht. A key challenge in the Utrecht attack was making sense of the situation and organizing a coherent response in a distributed command and control structure. This is a recurrent challenge in crisis management. As command structures expand, sensemaking becomes distributed when groups at different locations develop partial images of a complex environment. While most sensemaking studies focus on how specific groups attempt to collectively construct a plausible representation of the situation, few accounts of distributed sensemaking have appeared. This study explains how crisis managers made sense of the volatile situation across different command structures. Twenty-five crisis managers from different teams were interviewed by making use of the critical decision methodology. The analysis points to five factors that influence the quality of distributed sensemaking: type of interdependence, sensitivity to operations, plausibility, hierarchy, and identity. It signals that updating one's sensemaking does not only require noticing discrepant cues but is especially related to key social-cognitive and organisational processes that stimulate doubt, questioning, and a plurality of perspectives.

How Did Corona Crisis Managers in Germany Make Sense of the Psychosocial Situation?

“…However, based on our data, it is not possible to make more precise statements about interaction and communication processes within crisis management work, especially in crisis team meetings. The research literature on sensemaking, however, suggests that, especially in temporary social formations that come together (such as crisis teams), for example, linguistic aspects (Cornelissen et al 2008 ; O’Leary and Chia 2007 ), role structure (Bechky 2006 ; Bigley and Roberts 2001 ; Meyerson et al 1996 ), and interaction practices (Maitlis and Christianson 2014 , p. 94f) are relevant factors to understand sensemaking processes in specific situations with different stakeholders (see, for example, Wolbers and Boersma 2013 ; Wolbers 2021 ). Thus, questions about patterns of communicative negotiation of meaning across psychosocial aspects must remain unanswered in this study.…”

From strangers to social collectives? Sensemaking and organizing in response to a pandemic

“…Previous research has highlighted a number of factors or mechanisms that influence and enable distributed sensemaking. Such research explores the type of interdependence, sensitivity, plausibility, hierarchy, and identity of groups ( Wolbers, 2022 ); the presence of an independent central hub connecting stakeholders ( Ansell et al, 2010 ); the use of visual and multimodal text ( Höllerer et al, 2018 ); the logic of tact ( Kornberger et al, 2019 ) and shared knowledge base, norms and culture ( Kendra & Wachtendorf, 2006 ).…”

Pandemic publishing: A bibliometric review of COVID‐19 research in the crisis and disaster literature

“…By contrast, disaster research focuses on natural hazards with concrete and tangible consequences for, typically, “physical human well‐being, or to property and infrastructure” (Kuipers et al, 2019 , p. 389). Journals of the third type focus on a specific aspect of crisis and disaster management: emergency management, that is, the work emergency services routinely do as a fast response organization (Wolbers et al, 2018 ), but also in preparation for, and during a crisis or disaster (Wolbers, 2022 ).…”