ABSTRACT
Sensemaking is not about contributing to rational decision-making. It is about retrospectively rationalizing decisions taken, which could even appear to an observer to be quite irrational decisions. It is more about rationalizing actions already taken. In this sense it shares thinking with cognitive dissonance theory in that it focuses on post-decisional efforts to revise the meaning of decisions that have negative cognitive consequences. Cognitive dissonance is the next element of sensemaking and influences how people generate that which they then make sense of. Cognitive dissonance theory was developed by Festinger and is both an individual cognitive and a social psychology perspective that has strong relevance to organizational sensemaking. Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance proposes that psychological discomfort is created when there is an inconsistency between ‘what a person knows or believes and what he does’.
