Sense making. “Sense making involves turning circumstances into a situation
that is comprehended explicitly in words and that serves as a springboard into
action” (Weick, Sutcliffe, & Obstfeld, 2005, p. 409). According to Weick et al.
(2005), the process of sense making addresses three fundamental questions:
How does something come to be an event? What does the event mean? What
should I do relative to the event? The ability to be attuned to each of these
questions and organize the answers in a way that leads to credible action during the signal detection phase is a defining competency during this precrisis
stage. Beyond these questions, though, the ability to manage a crisis involves
not only sense making for individual discrete events, but the ability to make
sense of a series of events that, superficially, may seem unrelated.
In the Coca-Cola discrimination lawsuit, there were several warning signals
to which leadership should have been attuned prior to the lawsuit. For
example, the firm’s leaders had been told explicitly that there was a need for
greater diversity throughout the organization. There was also a report by an
external consulting firm that provided data on a glass ceiling—the invisible
barrier preventing minorities from advancing beyond certain levels within the
organization