Instrumenting Weick’s Seven Properties to Measure Collective Sensemaking in Engineering Teams

As engineering systems become more complex, there is a growing need for interdisciplinary collaboration to achieve design and business objectives. Individuals with hetergoenous mental models are under pressure to optimize and make trades across performance, quality, cost and time. Engineering of complex systems requires these teams to work together effectively, which in turn necessitates collective sensemaking. Collective sensemaking is defined as an ability to gain sufficient shared understanding of a system so that taking effective action is possible. Current research has focused on qualitative approaches to capture sensemaking over time and to evaluate that data after the fact. Accordingly, research of sensemaking processes in real-time remains a challenge, with underlying operating mechanisms of collective sensemaking not yet well understood. This research proposes and prototypes measurements that map sensemaking concepts to sensemaking phenomena during systems work by cross-functional teams. An experimental approach is proposed. An initial study deploys a questionnaire that correlates instances of teamwork sensemaking to team-level observable practices. Next steps are described for integration of these measures into engineering team workshops for non-intrusive detection of sensemaking in real time.