Decision Making and Sensemaking

Decision making and sensemaking may at first seem to be an odd pair of terms to reconcile. The two have very different perspectives on quite dissimilar domains of human behavior. One quality that does unite them, however, is that decision making and sensemaking are intimately related to the human being as an actor. Decision making is concerned with evaluating alternative courses of action and making a choice among them. It is prior to and culminates in the action of a human being. Sensemaking, on the other hand, is concerned with making things that have already happened meaningful to us. It follows from, and is based on, the prior action of a human being. In this chapter we explore the different perspectives of these two traditions as they relate to the human action, and discuss the possibility of reconciling their divergent qualities with the emerging developments in design science.