“If we all worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true is really true, there would be little hope of advance.” -Orville Wright

A monumental part of preparing for the future, is our ability to not only question our assumptions and “this is always how we’ve done things,” but in updating our mental models so we are not overlaying outdated thinking, ideas, processes, and strategies on top of the future, often limiting thinking and new possibilities. Which, in general terms, refers to the choices and behaviors of previous generations or experiences that can and still shape our current actions and perspectives, even if the original situation no longer exists. Think of it as the “ripple effect” of past events on the present day.

We could refer to this as the “legacy effect” which is the lasting impact that previous conditions or past actions, decisions, or events have on current processes or properties, and/or continue to influence how we do things today. 

For example, the impacts that one generation leaves on the environment for future generations to inherit.

One of the things that is going to be difficult for many organizations and institutions, especially in this time of accelerated and often volatile change forces, is being able to break free from the assumptions and behaviors that lock them into “legacy” organizations, that are often caught up in the “legacy effect” that leaves them in a stable and unable to break free from the status quo situation(s) when considering when considering new possibilities for the future. 

Just like individuals, organizations and institutions are also in need of updating their mental models…

A good analogy for this, especially in education, comes from Jeremy Gutsche in his book, Create the Future: Tactics for Disruptive Thinking, and how the idea of “4 feet 8.5 inches” keeps us entrenched and dependent on thinking from the past, to the point of not even realizing why we are doing what we are doing. Much like that saying, “this is how we’ve always done things” which makes consider the cost of our inherited systems and the toll they take on the future.

As Gutsche shares, this “legacy effect” thinking, 4 feet 8.5 inches takes us all the way back to the days of the Roman Empire, when they controlled and patrolled their vast lands with two-horse Roman war chariot. However, these chariots often tore up and left deep ruts in the land, making it very difficult for farm wagons to travel easily and without damage. To avoid this damage and to make travel easier, the clever farmers built and designed their wagons to match the width of the Roman war chariots and the ruts they left, which was 4 feet 8.5 inches wide.

And as design has a tendency to catch on, soon all wagons were built to be 4 feet 8.5 inches wide, including, as time marched forward, the first railway mining carts that were built to be pulled by horses.

Now going forward further, when the first railways were built in England, engineers used the same spacing, which was the adopted gauge of the old carriage roads, 4 feet by 8.5 inches. Roads which were built to accommodate the width of the Roman chariots. Meaning that the dimensions of the Roman roads had become the invisible blueprint for modern transportation centuries later. It was an unintentional legacy, but one with both constraining and enduring consequences, all of the way up to the Space Shuttle.

Just imagine, building a railroad system that stretches across a vast, untamed land. You would naturally assume that every decision—from the size of the tracks to the materials used—would be made based on the needs of the moment, the landscape, and technological advancements of the time. Yet, the standard gauge of railway tracks in much of the world, which is the seemingly arbitrary 4 feet 8.5 inches, wasn’t chosen with forward-thinking precision. Rather, it was inherited, passed down from the dimensions of ancient Roman chariot tracks. This “legacy effect” shaped the entire rail industry, a decision from the distant past that was impacting present progress. 

Yes, in many ways, our progress into the future was held in place by the grooves of the past…

Or as Jeremy Gutsche expounds on the past overlaying the future, “Soon, smart people replaced all the train tracks for modern trains that were bigger, better, and faster. The new tracks remained the same size. Even when high-speed trains started going over 200 miles an hour, many of them continued on tracks that were 4 feet and 8.5 inches wide.”

And moving further forward, Gutsche continues that, “when NASA began making and transporting the Solid Rocket Boosters, they took into account that they needed to fit on tracks that were – you guessed it – 4 feet and 8.5 inches wide.”

Once again, the past constraining the future, with Roman war chariots keeping their hold on space travel…

The ruts that Roman war chariots carved into the ground, ended up being the same grooves that we find ourselves stuck in all the way up from farm wagons to the Space Shuttle. We found ourselves, often unknowingly, becoming dependent on past decisions placing their hold on future commitments. Conclusions, which were sometimes pushed forward blindly, without considering if and whether these were the best decisions for moving forward, for the future, but because that was they way we had always done it. 

In so many ways, when we fail to question and accept assumptions, the past can constrain and put its control on our future.

A phenomenon that we also see occurring in education.

Education, like the railways, struggles with its own form(s) of the “legacy effect.” Many of the behaviors, strategies, frameworks, systems, structures, and practices we see in schools today are very often entrenched relics, caught in the grooves of a different time, of a different era—an era when the world was vastly different, when access to information was limited, when the skills and competencies required to thrive were not what they are today.

As Gutsche shares in his work Create the Future, “If you want to create the future, you need to dodge the traps keeping you fixated on the path that you are already on. Escape the traps, and you will find new paths of opportunity.”

But those traps can often be the sirens of status quo calling us into the shores of yesterday.

Let’s consider, for example, the traditional classroom setup: rows of desks facing a teacher. A classroom format that traces back to the industrial age, where schools were designed for a different time and ultimately to train students for an era when factory work held sway on the masses. The emphasis was on discipline, uniformity, and memorization; not creativity, critical thinking, or digital literacy. Yet, despite the radical changes we are witnessing across society, this classroom model, in many ways, remains a widespread phenomenon, often replicated, difficult to surrender, even in modern times.

How about the academic calendar? Which, to this very day still revolves around and remains fixated on the agrarian schedule, with long summer breaks originally intended to allow children to help with farming and the harvest. Another relic of a bygone era, as we no longer live in an agricultural society. However, the rhythm and rhyme of education has yet to willing determine how to completely dispose of this antiquated approach to the school year schedule.

These examples highlight how education can find itself caught in the ruts that keep it tethered to path’s from the past, making it both difficult and challenging to adapt to the context and demands of current times and the emerging possibilities of an uncertain future.

Much like the rail industry’s reliance on 4 feet 8.5 inches as a sustaining marker, education’s adherence to outdated and often irrelevant systems can include a tendency to stifle creativity and innovation, making it difficult for the “new” to emerge and flourish. Today’s students are preparing for a very different world and non-obvious future driven by technology, artificial intelligence, and global interconnectedness. Yet, they often find themselves caught up in a model designed to prepare them for the work and systems found in a 19th-century factory, rather than for an exponentially shifting world of work we see emerging across all of society.

The legacy effect leads to curriculum structures that can feel rigid, testing methods that prioritize rote memorization over real-world problem-solving, and one-size-fits-all approaches to learning that ignore the diversity of students’ needs, talents, and even expectations. While these systems may have made sense at one time in the past, it is difficult to say that 4 feet 8.5 inches effectively serves their needs for the future.

Just think: If the railroad industry had the luxury of starting from scratch, would it still choose 4 feet 8.5 inches? Most likely not. Similarly, if education were to reinvent itself for the 21st century, would it likely look very different from the system we’ve inherited? Most likely.

To overcome the legacy effect in education, we must critically examine our long-held traditions and be willing to let go of what no longer works, to retire the irrelevant, and explore the unknown with a greater sense of imagination, curiosity, creativity, and openness to experience. 

This doesn’t mean discarding everything but rather being intentional about what we keep, what we bring forward, as well as what we discard, what we put away, to discover what changes, and why. 

We need flexible learning environments, curricula that reflect modern challenges, capacity and skill building that closes widening gaps, as well as assessments that value creativity, emotional intelligence, and critical thinking over rote thinking and memorization.

The story of 4 feet 8.5 inches offers a powerful reminder: just because something has always been done a certain way doesn’t mean it’s the best way. Or the only way. Very often, it reminds us how powerful the past can be in placing its finger on the future, especially when we aren’t aware of our mental models, our assumptions, and why we do the things we do.

When we fail to ask questions. 

As we look to the future of education, we must challenge the legacy systems that no longer serve us and reimagine a learning experience that prepares students for the world as it is—and as it will be. Just as trains aren’t confined to ancient chariot roads, education should no longer be bound by the assumptions of the past and a 19^th century factory model. 

It’s time to set a new gauge for learning.

“Even if we hear something and we don’t understand we make assumptions about what it means and then believe the assumptions. We make all sorts of assumptions because we don’t have the courage to ask questions.” Don Miguel Ruiz

“It was such a lost learning experience, because the pandemic itself has been a great opportunity for students to figure out who they are and to question their assumptions about continuity, their ideas about identity, what it means to be a citizen and how to take care of the elderly. There’s so many beautiful questions hidden in this crisis that could have been woven into curricula to provide meaning to what we are going through. The issue is that education is all about planning and preparing students for certain markets and jobs, and only to a lesser extent about exploration. And by closing our eyes to the present, we end up being not prepared for anything. To bring education into the 21st century, we need to let go of that path dependency, and create more space for failures, pilots, experiments, and explorations.” -Loes Damhof, UNESCO Chair in Futures Literacy via Teaching Futures

In many ways, if feels as if we have worked very diligently to try and put the pandemic in our rear-view mirror, even at the risk of not learning the many lessons it has provoked and provided for us. We talk about a “new” normal, but that often serves as code for getting back as close as possible to some semblance of what we did or were doing pre-pandemic. To getting back to the “certainty” of the known. We talk about creating the individual and organizational capacity to lean into the rising complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity of these current times, while spending our time chasing the illusion of and assurance of certainty. We continue to probe at solving the expanding, and often unsolvable, dilemmas and adaptive challenges of our times with veneer, ready-made solutions, when we need to begin to focus on building the fortitude and capacity towards learning how to “manage” these challenges more effectively.

It often feels as if we are intent on trying to forget and put the pandemic behind us, rather than engaging in reflection upon and learning from the myriad of lessons that the struggles of what we’ve gone through have uncovered, projected, catalyzed, and/or has shown and unveiled to us over the last few years.

Maybe what we have to realize, is that in many ways, the pandemic has changed our image of the future. How we now think about it? How we consider it? How we picture and visualize it? Even how we determine our dreams, hopes, and possibilities of and for the future? While it is not always readily apparent to us, what we have come to recognize is that our post-pandemic image of the future is quite often challenging our pre-pandemic view of the future. And unfortunately, in this age of extreme busyness and accelerated change, we rarely have or take the time to intentionally engage in considerations of how, why, and what that means for us moving forward, both individually and organizationally.

Which engages the thought from Kees Van Der Heijden for us, both individually and organizationally, which he shares in his book Scenarios: The Art of Strategic Conversation, “The prime question to be addressed is whether the organization is well-equipped for the futures we can see coming?”

Which is a much deeper question than we probably consider upon first glance, of what is well-equipped and what do we see coming? How are we equipping ourselves individually and organizationally for these emerging futures? What competencies and capacities have we already built up, and what ones do we need to engage and expand? How are we rigorously scanning the horizon, both individually and organizationally to determine the weak and strong signals of what is coming? What kind of processes and systems do we have in place to sustain that work, decipher what those signals may mean for us individually and organizationally, and then have the internal and external network aptitude to spread that information to better prepare for the futures we see coming?

For which Epamindondas Christophilopoulos, the Head of Foresight and Tools at the Foundation for Research and Technology shares in What Is Futures Literacy and Why Is It Important? “We need to give people this skill to deal with a future full of uncertainties, and to emancipate them by helping them understand how we can anticipate and how we can use the future in the present to provide hope.” Which is effectively pushing us to move those concepts of – complexity, ambiguity, and uncertainty – from where we’ve hidden them in the rear-view mirror, and to place them out in front of us, in full windshield view for us to see and confront head on. To putting them right out there, front and center of where we are heading towards, knowing that in today’s VUCA world, they will be traveling with us anyways. And to add, this “skill” that Christophilopoulos is referring to, is our capacity to become more comfortable with the future and our ability to then anticipate the future in a way that is more futures literate.

Which, especially in discussing literacies, is not often a term that we are familiar with or have heard of in reference to literacies. And yet, we live in a world where the term “literacy” is expanding beyond what we’ve previously considered in terms of literacy. There’s digital, cultural, financial, and social, just to name a few. As well as futures literacy…

As there is not just one way to think about the future, just as there is not just one future.

It is when we consider the future or futures from a literacy perspective, we can find ourselves more open to visualizing how we approach the future and “use” the future as something that can be cultivated and learned. It is something that we can build capacity with, both individually and collectively.

As Riel Miller, Head of Futures Literacy at UNESCO shares, “Futures literacy helps us understand how the future is created, how we imagine the future to be, and what the impact is of imagining the future? Our ability to anticipate future outcomes tends to shape our choices, our strategies, and our long-term plans.” To add, UNESCO puts forth, “Futures literacy is a capability. It is the skill that allows people to better understand the role of the future in what they see and do. Being futures literate empowers the imagination, enhances our ability to prepare, recover and invent as changes occur.” To which Riel Miller adds, “Futures literacy helps us to be more sophisticated in how we use the future as a lens. It is a way of opening our perception and allows us to anticipate. Which provides us another way into resilience. To negotiating shared meaning. As we need to be more sophisticated in how the future is used by us. Uncertainty is a resource, not something we can eradicate.”

All of which is incredibly important to our current context and times, especially for our educational and societal systems, as we consider the future that is coming at us. The way that we’ve considered how the world works have become murky myths that are challenging our long-held assumptions. Especially as many of the rites of passage, rituals of change, even our mental models and maps that have guided us in our lives and within our organizations, systems, and society for so long, are either being reframed or are seen as crumbling pillars falling all around us. All of which are creating greater levels of uncertainty, broader breadths of unknowns, especially in how we view, envision, and anticipate the future. As Riel Miller shared previously, this will require us, both individually and organizationally, “to be more sophisticated in how we use the future.” That “sophistication” becomes more valuable, vital and important as these coming societal shifts accelerate change, expand complexity and ambiguity across our societal landscapes, and instigating a plethora of growing instabilities within our systems, as both the weak and strong signals on the horizon of our future increases the myriad of unknowns and scenarios that we must consider facing in both the short- and long-term.

So, if we are going to be able to support our students, families, stakeholders, educators, and educational leaders to anticipate the future, to be open to emergence and novelty in those futures, to lean into the complexity and uncertainty of our current context and times, then we have to be able to not only stretch ourselves cognitively away from our need and assurance for certainty, but to see this as a creative moment. An opportunity for imagination and innovation to take the front seat, especially if our images, visions, and narratives for the future are to be more preferable in realizing our collective hopes, than giving into our often dystopian fears.

Thereby, allowing us to use the future as a vehicle to drive us towards better decisions in the present, by being more “sophisticated” in how we consider and use the future, we can create new and more preferable images of the future we want and are willing to strive for, allowing us to backwards map those images towards improving the thinking, actions and decisions we are making in the present, both as individuals and as organizations. For it is that anticipation of, supported by a willingness to discover, explore, and experiment, driven by our individual and collective imaginations, that we see that there is no “one” future, but a myriad and diversity of futures constantly emerging, and the more “sophisticated” we are in using the future, the more apt we are to move towards those preferable futures we imagine and envision.

It is in this space that we are able to ask questions, challenge our assumptions, and embrace the learning that lies in that chasm between our pre- and post-pandemic world. 

As the world changes, often in accelerated and in unanticipated ways, so do our considerations and assumptions, much of which are grounded in the past. Shifting our mental models and maps from the rear-view mirror to the windshield allows us to release thinking we’ve entrenched in a world that no longer exists, so we can begin to creatively confront the uncertain and unknown futures that now await us. And the more sophisticated we can be in that journey, the more open we will be to the emergence of the diversity of futures that lie down the road.

“If you feel that you’re approaching the future with fear, you have to come to understand where that fear comes from. We tend to have this inherent fear of uncertainty because we simply don’t like it, and not knowing can make us scared. Mind you, that holding on to one scenario, one image of the future, may give you security, but it’s a false sense of security. I think it’s important to see that uncertainty is a friend. It’s not something to be scared of or something to eliminate, it’s something to embrace. Not knowing means that there’s still a lot of opportunities. Always try to accept more than one idea of what the future could be, and remind yourself that it does not exist. So, whenever you’re confronted by this, ask yourself: Whose future is it, anyway?” -Loes Damhof, UNESCO Chair in Futures Literacy via Teaching Futures

“Sensemaking starts with chaos.” -Weick, Sutfcliffe, and Obstfeld via Organizing and the Process of Sensemaking

Which is exactly where we are at, in the very midst of chaos. If not, it certainly feels like it. Inundated with a steadily increasing number of adaptive challenges, dilemmas, polarities, and unknowns to be faced.

However, be that as it may, today’s leaders can ill-afford to find themselves and their organizations immobilized by these circumstances and challenges. While the current volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity can feel just a bit overwhelming, it cannot be allowed to be all-consuming. Chaos cannot be incapacitating nor debilitating. Rather it must serve as a catalyst for seeking out new opportunities rising up and out from what many want to term as our “new normal.” Which will ultimately require new understandings, new thinking, new frames and maps, and new abilities and skillsets from our leaders and our organizations.

As we move deeper into dealing with the chaos of current times, it begins with the realization that we are and have been moving from a complicated to a much more complex world. In many ways, it is very reminiscent of the difference between dealing with a technical problem as opposed to tackling an adaptive challenge.

As author of It’s Not Complicated Rick Nason shares in Inc., “A complicated issue is one in which the components can be separated and dealt with in a systematic and logical way that relies on a set of static rules or algorithms.” Nason adds, “It may be hard to see, but there’s a fixed order in something that is merely complicated and that allows you to deal with it in a repeatable manner.” Whereas, according to Nason, “A complex issue is one in which you can’t get a firm handle on the parts and there are no rules, algorithms, or natural laws.” Nason continues that, “Things that are complex have no such degree of order, control, or predictability. A complex thing is much more challenging – and different – than the sum of its parts because its parts interact in unpredictable ways.”

Much like adaptive challenges and dilemmas, complex problems often don’t have an easily identifiable answer, and most often don’t have a set solution at all. Which requires a different approach from the answer view that we take to solving technical problems and complicated issues. In fact, a lot of organizational frustration and even dysfunction arises from approaching these adaptive and complex challenges with the same sets of frames, maps, and solutions that are applied to technical problems and/or issues that tend to fall more to the complicated. As Nason adds, the mindset needs to shift in regards to moving from complicated to complex with the approach of, “Think manage, not solve.” Which is a very different approach and mindset, but one that will be more and more necessary of today’s leaders for our modern organizations.

Furthermore, in realizing that our organizational ecosystems have become increasingly more complex, it is then understanding that the idea of “Sensemaking” will become a much more needed and necessary ability and skillset for traversing the volatile, chaotic and unknown conditions and contexts that today’s organizations and leaders are currently facing. As Deborah Ancona shares, “Sensemaking, a term introduced by Karl Weick, refers to how we structure the unknown so as to be able to act in it. Sensemaking involves coming up with a plausible understanding – a map – of a shifting world; testing this map with others through data collection, action, and conversation; and then refining, or abandoning the map depending on how credible it is. Enabling leaders to explore the wider system, create a map of that system, and act in the system to learn from it.” In many ways, sensemaking gives us a frame for making greater “sense” of the rising complexity across today’s organizations and organizational ecosystems. Or as Ancona adds in her article Sensemaking: Framing and Acting in the Unknown, “Sensemaking is the activity that enables us to turn the ongoing complexity of the world into a situation that is comprehended explicitly in words and that serves as a springboard into action. Thus sensemaking involves – and indeed requires – an articulation of the unknown.” Which takes us back to the opening paragraph and the need for leaders and organizations to not let the current VUCA context to paralyze them into inaction. Rather, it is in this willingness to attempt to articulate and map out the unknown that organizations can begin to become more adaptable and agile moving forward. Especially as sensemaking requires constant awareness of the organizational context and situational scanning to better move the organization towards action. Too often, especially in the midst of chaotic and disruptive times, organizations allow static processes and status quo thinking to entrench and insulate them, which will do little towards mapping out the unknown and engaging the organization in the experimental and discovery learning necessary for creating of these maps.

In fact, sensemaking, has seven properties that work interdependently for making meaning and creating coherence towards constructing new understandings, especially as the world around the organization becomes less understandable and more unknown.

Below we find a representation of the seven properties of sensemaking (italicized) provided by Laura McNamara from her article, Sensemaking in Organizations: Reflections on Karl Weick and Social Theory:

• Sensemaking is a matter of identity: it is who we understand ourselves to be in relation to the world around us.
• Sensemaking is retrospective: we shape experience into meaningful patterns according to our memory of experience.
• How and what becomes sensible depends on our socialization: where we grew up in the world, how we were taught to be in the world, where we are located now in the world, the people with whom we are currently interacting.
• Sensemaking is a continuous flow; it is ongoing, because the world, our interactions with the world, and our understandings of the world are constantly changing. You might also think of sensemaking as perpetually emergent meaning and awareness.
• Sensemaking builds on extracted cues that we apprehend from sense and perception. Cognition is the meaningful internal embellishment of these cues. We articulate these embellishments through speaking and writing – the “what I say” part of Weick’s recipe. In doing so, we reify and reinforce cues and their meaning, and add to our repertoire of retrospective experience.
• Sensemaking is less a matter of accuracy and completeness than plausibility and sufficiency. We simply have neither the perceptual nor cognitive resources to know everything exhaustively, so we have to move forward as best we can. Plausibility and sufficiency enable action-in-context.

It is also in recognizing, as Samdanis and Lee share in Uncertainty, Strategic Sensemaking and Organizational Failure in the Art Market, that strategic sensemaking necessitates and includes the ability of a leader to continuously “scan, interpret, strategize, act, and adjust” according to the chaos and constantly changing context that most organizations are facing. Which in today’s current volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous environments, is similar to the Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act (OODA) loop frame that fighter pilots have utilized to make fast and accurate decisions while operating in these VUCA-infused environments. Or even the Plan, Do, Study, Act (PDSA) cycle that we find utilized in most continuous improvement efforts across organizations. Engaging a variety of frames allows us to become more adaptable, more agile, and more able to adjust to constantly changing organizational situations and contexts. Or as John Boyd, the U.S. Air Force Colonel who designed the OODA loop for thinking in complex and chaotic situations adds, “We can’t just look at our own personal experiences or use the same mental recipes over and over again; we’ve got to look at other disciplines and activities and relate or connect them to what we know from our experiences and the strategic world we live in.”

Engaging sensemaking, creating maps, enabling a variety of frames, as well as engaging foresight abilities, allow leaders and organizations to begin to become much more aware of the signals on the horizon. Signals that may and can have great effect on our organizations, both in the present and the future. Which requires leaders and their organizations to constantly be aware of and always monitoring the horizon for signals (weak or strong) and engaging sensemaking strategies to determine what those signals may mean. It allows leaders and their organizations to be much more aware of what is emerging, both in the present and for the future. Which will not only require new maps and framing, but ongoing reframing as new learning, new knowledge and new data makes itself available and known. As Maree Conway shares in Foresight Infused Strategy, “The environments in which organizations now exist are moving so quickly that future outcomes can no longer be assumed. Because our worlds are mired in complexity, there are often no obvious choices. A different approach to strategy development is needed.” For which she adds, “The future is characterized by uncertainty, complexity, and much that we simply can’t yet know. Foresight has value because it allows us to acknowledge uncertainty and seek to better understand it, not to try and explain it away with predictions. Done well, using foresight moves thinking beyond the status quo and helps organizations prepare to respond to change proactively.” 

In the chaotic and often disruptive spaces of our current context, the future is constantly emerging in often unexpected and unforeseen ways, bringing new meanings, new interpretations, and new understandings toward this new reality we are experiencing. A space where our current maps, frames and mental models try to make sense of and guide us through our new reality, but often come up short and remain insufficient and lacking towards the challenges that we are facing and lie ahead.

As Weick, Sutcliffe and Obstfeld share, “There are truths of the moment that change, develop, and take shape through time. It is these changes through time that progressively reveal that a seemingly correct action “back then” is becoming an incorrect action “now.” And it is with that reveal that this new normal pushes us to acknowledge the insufficiency of our past maps, frames and mental models in overlaying them upon our current context. Maps, frames and mental models that must not only be updated, but  transformed toward closing the gap between that insufficiency of what was and the adjustments necessary to meet the new reality of what is emerging. As Weick shares from the properties of sensemaking, “People extract cues from the context to help them decide on what information is relevant and what explanations are acceptable. Extracted cues provide points of reference for linking ideas to broader networks of meaning and are simple, familiar structures that are seeds from which people develop a larger sense of what may be occurring.”

Which will be the leadership and organizational work for moving forward, especially in world overrun with too much information and data. We will all have to become much more equipped to engage in sensemaking in our organizations, as well mapmaking and frame braiding, out of which new narratives for the future can be created to guide our way. Or as Weick shares, “People enact the environments they face in dialogues and narratives. As people speak, and build narrative accounts, it helps them understand what they think, organize their experiences and control and predict events and reduce complexity in the context of change management.” Which will be paramount for growing complexity of today’s organizational ecosystems. 

Or as Weick adds, “The basic idea of sensemaking is that reality is an ongoing accomplishment that emerges from efforts to create order and make retrospective sense of what occurs.”