ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the activity of navigation as a form of sensemaking. The concept of sensemaking came into prominence with the publication in 1995 of the book Sensemaking in Organizations by Karl Weick. The process of sensemaking is to understand a situation against a noisy background where the cues themselves are not given but must be constructed. Sensemaking requires the person to determine which signals to discard, and which to emphasise. Corruptions are inevitable, given our buggy mental models of the world, our inaccurate stories about how things happen, our flawed scripts, our mistaken maps. In many settings, guidance is given in point-to-point navigation but not to recovery. The pilot started with a good frame, in the form of a map and knowledge of how to use basic navigational equipment. The cycle of corruptions and recovery can also have some benefits.
