Industrial Marketing Management 39 (2010) 372–380

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Industrial Marketing Management

A sensemaking perspective on network pictures☆

Ian Colville a,⁎, Annie Pye b

a School of Management, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY, United Kingdomb Centre for Leadership Studies, University of Exeter, United Kingdom

☆ We are very grateful to Karl Weick for his uniqcontribution to organization studies and for his thouincisive suggestions on earlier drafts of this paper.⁎ Corresponding author. Tel.: +44 1225 386688; fax:

E-mail address: i.d.colville@bath.ac.uk (I. Colville).

0019-8501/$ – see front matter © 2009 Elsevier Inc. Aldoi:10.1016/j.indmarman.2009.03.012

a b s t r a c t

a r t i c l e i n f o

Article history:Received 1 April 2007Received in revised form 1 October 2008Accepted 1 March 2009Available online 12 June 2009

Keywords:SensemakingNetwork picturesStorytellingRequisite varietyNegative capability

This paper examines the concept of network pictures through the lens of the organizational sensemakingperspective. Essentially it develops the concept of network pictures by suggesting we think of them asexercises in sensemaking. It does so by providing an introduction to organizational sensemaking beforeestablishing a degree of commensurability between network pictures and sensemaking. It suggests that whatwe may then see more clearly is that the concept of network pictures needlessly gets involved in reificationwhen talking of ‘the’ network picture whereas a more dynamic approach leads to ideas of network picturingin which the complete discrediting or collapse of extant sensemaking and network pictures provides aresearch opportunity that could be jointly explored by both perspectives. The paper concludes thatparadoxically ‘finding’ this new sense or new network picture appropriate to radically changed times isfacilitated by a process that involves first ‘becoming lost’.

© 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

“One thinks one is tracing the outline of nature over and overagain, and one is merely tracing round the frame through whichwe look at her…

A picture held us captive. Andwe could not get outside it, for it lay inour language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.”

Wittgenstein (1953) Philosophical Investigations I, 114–115

“This is not a time for outdated thinking or conventional dogma.Extraordinary times call for bold and far reaching solutions.”

Gordon Brown, British Prime Minister,

House of Commons, 7th October 2008.

ue, insightful and invaluableght-provoking comments and

+44 1225 386473.

l rights reserved.

1. Introduction

This paper examines the concept of network pictures, a notiondeveloped in industrial marketing research, through the perspective oforganizational sensemaking (e.g. Weick, 1979; Weick, 1995). It askswhat is it we seemore clearly if we think about the crafting and enactingof network pictures as exercises in sensemaking. In answering thisquestion, we seek to make a contribution to the conceptual develop-ment of network pictures by suggesting that sensemaking provides avaluable resource. For example, change is a relatively neglected areawithin network pictures while it stands at the core of the sensemakingand organizing perspective. The processual, dynamic aspect is signalledin the use of the gerund in sensemaking and organizing. Likewise, intalking about crafting and enacting of network pictures,we are disposedto seeing them in a less staticmanner, such that it ismore appropriate totalk of ‘network picturing’.

However, change or changing is by no means a settled issue withinthe sensemaking literature and because sensemaking is tested to theextreme when people encounter an event, the occurrence of which isso implausible that people don't believe what they are seeing (Weick,1995:1), we can learn more about sensemaking when we encountersituations inwhich sense collapses and the network picture fades out.We live in such interesting times and suggest there is at hand anopportunity to see sensemaking and network pictures more clearly.

Thepaper is in threemain sections. Thefirst provides an introductionto the organizational sensemaking perspective through definition andthrough stories which exemplify sensemaking. The second sectionconsiders the notion of network pictures within industrial marketingliterature and argues that there is a commensurability betweensensemaking and network pictures and enough theoretical overlap to

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suggest that they can inform each other. The third section seeks todemonstrate how such a fruitful relationship is possible through adiscussion of enacted environments and network pictures beforeconsidering issues of changing and picturing. The paper concludes withsome advice in the form of a modest proposal for advancing the studyof network pictures and, by extension, organizational sensemaking.

2. Sensemaking: an introduction

Damon Runyon was a reporter turned short story writer, whofirst chronicled then fictionalised the activities of the gangsters andcrooks who inhabited Broadway, the main artery and some say ‘thehardened artery’ of New York during ‘the Great Depression’ of the1930s (Bentley, 1977). Runyon, who would have asked what was sogreat about the Depression, was particularly adept at capturing howthese enterprising lovable ‘Guys and Dolls’ scratched a living against abackdrop of prohibition and the collapse ofWall Street. This enterpriseusually revolved around betting; whether it be illegal crap and cardgames, or as is most likely, horse racing. The language of bettinginformed everyday life for which it became an analogy with Runyonholding that: “all life is 6 to 5 against” (Runyon,1934). Erving Goffman(1967), who rivalled Runyon in terms of his ability to capture andaccount for the everyday in a riveting albeit a more social scientificmanner, twisted this by saying that life was less of a gamble thansocial interaction. Organizing and the process of sensemaking (Weick,1979, 1995; Weick, Sutcliffe, & Obstfeld, 2005), stripped to theessentials, is a synthesis of Runyon and Goffman. It is concernedwith the way people make bets on ‘what is going on’ and what to donext byway of (inter)action. For the people who inhabit Runyon's andGoffman's worlds, the outcomes of such bets, or sensemaking, reallymatter: for success/failure, money/poverty, mental health/mentalillness are the products of such action. Likewise for the rest of us,whether we are caught up in marketing networks or organizationallife in general, we are individually and interactively engaged in similarprocesses of sensemaking, placing bets on the possible answers tothe question ‘what is going on here?’ And similarly, the outcome ofsuch organizational sensemaking can be a serious matter e.g. networksurvival/extinction, profit/loss, u-stress/distress.

Sensemaking is concerned with the micro interactions of theseprocesses and their possiblemacro consequences: it is aboutmoments ofsensemaking and themoment of the outcome. It is not about certainty orknowing the future, it is about increasing the odds in your (here readvariously, individual, family, organization or network) favour in anuncertain world and unknowable future. It involves the carving out ofmoments from the ongoing stream of organizational life for closerscrutiny and reflection. This is why sensemaking has been defined as away station on the road to a consensually constructed and coordinatedsystem of action (Taylor & Van Every, 2000: 275).We take this definitionto stand as a usefulworking definition of networks, network pictures andnetwork outcomes, the triad that stands at the centre of the IndustrialMarketing and PurchasingGroup's (IMP's) viewof business relationships(Ford, Gadde, Håkansson, & Snehota, 2003) and the subject of this SpecialIssue. It may be replaced, elaborated or substantiated along the way butthe aim of this paper is to suggest howand inwhatway the sensemakingand organizing perspective can illuminate networkmarketing in generaland network pictures in particular.

The question ‘what is going on?’ is heard more clamorously andpersistently during periods of uncertainty. And just as it was forRunyon's characters against the backdrop of the Wall Street Crash, sowe see these resonate with contemporary events. As we prepare ourfinal draft, the global capital markets are in turmoil: venerable banksand investment houses who we thought knew ‘what was going on‘have gone, not least Bear Sterns, Lehman Brothers, Northern Rock,Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, the list goes on. And when this happensin a networked global world, then banks start failing around theworldwith the latest news of Icelandic banks having their UK assets frozen

before going, like the ice caps, into meltdown. Confidence vanishes,trust goes and nobody knows what is solid anymore nor as aconsequence what to do next. Ironically, as Marx and Engels (1888)famously put it, ‘all that is solid melts into air’ (40). There has been acollapse in collective sensemaking (Weick, 1993) and world leadersstruggle to establish a new plausible way forward. And where there isa collapse of collective sensemaking rather than simply a diminutionor partial loss, then there is no point in merely fixing the old way tomake it work again: this makes asmuch sense as pumpingmore bloodinto a dead heart. If the grip of the old picture of capital markets ormarketing networks is lost, thenwe need to find a new one thatmakessense to the various global stakeholders and networks. The old senseor picture may have been discredited but establishing a new one thathas never been tried before and getting engaged various actors, eachof whom may have a different picture of what is going on, is a notan easy task. Indeed this act of affirming or crediting an emergingnew order for the capital markets is the real credit crunch, in Weick,1979 terms. Note also in terms of leadership that such moments arethe perfect platform for new voices, untainted by the past, arguingfor change and promising a new form of sensemaking to come tothe fore.

2.1. Storied sensemaking

The guys, if not the dolls, of Damon Runyon's stories are always onthe lookout for news of a horse racing tip — a tip that tips the odds intheir favour. The genuine tipping point, however, is difficult to identifybecause unscrupulous people may have no genuine knowledge butare repeating rumours and gossip at best, or at worst, making it upto suit their own ends in the hope that you will buy their supposedinsider and expert knowledge. Our suggestion is that this ischaracteristic of all environments whether they are organizational,inter-organizational or networked: that is, they are suffused withequivocality and calling out for some ordering and hence stability. Intheir search for knowledge that might make the bet more certain onetactic of Runyon's characters was to pay special attention if therewas astory that went with the tip. Runyon (1934) captures this most clearlyin an episode in which a tipster, having failed to sell his information,declares as his potential clients or punters are walking away, thatthere is a story that goes with the tip. The clients stop and ask, ‘what isthe story?’ They are hooked. The story is told about the horse, itsowners and the circumstances which when brought to bear indicatethat this horse cannot fail to win.

The tale told bears all the hallmarks of Burkes' dramatism bywhichsocial action is made explicable, including the five elements of theact, scene, agent, agency and purpose (Burke, 1969). It also conformsto the canonical elements of a good story (Bruner, 1990). As such,the story provides a plausible history to a particular outcome and inso doing, generates a sequence of events that makes connectionsthat reduce equivocality (Weick, 1995). In short, a story becomes agood story when it seems to structure and stabilise the unknown.In Goffman's (1974) terms, it provides a framework for organizingexperience. But just as Goffman provides a frame that implies stories(and Goffman is a masterful storyteller), so too there are storiesthat exemplify frames (Weick, 1995: 131). And there is a story thatgoes with sensemaking that makes it more explicable.

Compare the following:

A. “sensemaking involves the ongoing, retrospective development ofplausible images that rationalise what people are doing. Viewedas a significant process of organizing, sensemaking unfolds as asequence in which people concerned with identity in the socialcontext of other actors engage ongoing circumstances from whichthey extract cues and make plausible sense retrospectively whileenacting more or less order into those ongoing circumstances”(Weick et al., 2005: 409).

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B. Sensemaking reminds me of a story. It concerns a small de-tachment of Hungarian soldiers who are sent out into the icywilderness of the Alps by a young lieutenant, only to get lost in asnowstorm. Just as they fear the worst, one of the detachmentfinds a map which calms them down. They pitch camp, lasting outthe snowstorm which blows for two days, and on the third day,they make their way back to the base station with the aid of themap. The lieutenant who had sent them out asks to see their map,only to find that on closer inspection, it is a map of the Pyreneesnot the Alps (précis from Weick, 1995:54).

A. provides a definition of sensemaking; B. provides a human ex-ample of sensemaking in action in the form of a story. If you areunfamiliar or only casually acquainted with the sensemaking perspec-tive, then A. is likely to increase equivocality as to what sensemaking israther than reduce it, i.e. youmay fail tomake sense of sensemaking as atopic of organizational scholarship. B. on the other hand, has a be-ginning-middle-end that provides a sequence that gets attention andmakes sense. And if B. doesn't spell out exactly what the story meansthen it also conforms to Bruner's view (1990) that to make a story good,you must leave room for the reader to impose some interpretation oftheir own: it should remain open to variant readings, subject to thevagaries of intentional states undetermined. A good story needs toachieve ‘requisite uncertainty’ which allows it to be tried on for psy-chological size, accepted if it fits, rejected if it pinches or competes withestablished commitments (Bruner, 1990: 54).

This view of a good story also means that it will work in a number ofplaces andas such, it is likely to travel (Czarniawska& Joerges,1996), justlike good jokes tend to travel quickly and invariably become dislocatedfrom their origins. For example, the story of the soldiers in the Alps wasretold to us recently by theHRDirector of Eli Lilly and Company, a globalpharmaceutical company, who had no idea of its origins. The story wasused to support the idea that following the unexpected loss of thepatentononeof its key revenue earners, Prozac, theorganizationwouldhave tobuild its way out of a difficult situation. The consequences of the un-expected outcome were as dramatic as they were swift, with thecompany ‘losing’ one third of its share value within a couple of hoursafter the announcement of the patent loss (Colville & Murphy, 2006). Ifthe company was ‘lost’ then it had better find itself pretty quickly or itmight not survive for much longer.

The story was used by the leadership of Eli Lilly to convey the idea toall staff that strategy could be blown off course very quickly anddramatically and that is why they relied on people to tack in response tothe ‘perfect storm of events’ and in so doing enact or create strategy asthey travelled. The story contained enough ‘requisite uncertainty’ to beused by Lilly to suit its specific circumstances but the story also retainedsufficient ‘requisite certainty’ that the gist of the story could endure andbe translated: i.e. people enact strategy; it is not the plan (Pye, 1995).

“Strategic plans are a lot like maps. They animate and orient people.Once people begin to act (enactment), they generate tangibleoutcomes (cues) in some context (social) and that helps themdiscover (retrospect) what is occurring (ongoing), what needs to beexplained (plausibility) and what should be done next (identityenhancement). Managers keep forgetting that it is what they dorather than what they plan that explains their success. They keepgiving credit to the wrong thing — namely the plan — and havingmade this error, they spendmore timeplanning and less time acting.”

Weick (1995:55)

In effect, Lilly were acting their way into meaning and in doingso, enacting a meaningful strategy. This is not suggesting that theorganization had abandoned the very idea of strategy or that thesoldiers could have survived without a map of any description: note,they still had a strategy/plan which was the product of a carefully

constructed, sophisticated four column planning exercise (see Colville& Murphy, 2006 for further details). But following the Prozac episode,the Lilly CEO and the senior management team were keenly awarethat events can be so dramatic or unexpected (or both) that the‘frame’ has to change. What is also intriguing is that the leadership, asit were, knew that it wasn’t a map of the Alps. They were cleverenough to know that it was what people did rather than the map thatmade strategy in such circumstances. The leadership was also smartenough to keep this knowledge to themselves.

As Watzlawick, Weakland, and Fisch (1974) put it, “what turns outto be changed as a result of reframing is the meaning attributed tothe situation, and therefore its consequences, but not its concretefacts” (95). In practical terms, the seven properties of sensemaking,bracketed in the above quotation, operate as resources which haveimplications for organizational design. If the design maintains orstrengthens these resources, then people will be able to continuemaking sense of what they face. If the design undermines or weakensthese resources, there is a corresponding question about the org-anizational form that coordinates their activities (Weick, 2001: 463).Put differently, if network pictures support these resources, theyshould lead to the reduction of equivocality (ambiguity) in theorganizing process and peoplewill have a clear understanding of whatsituation they are facing and what to do about it. If on the other hand,network pictures work against these resources, then peoplewill find itmore difficult to make sense of what is going on. This assertionholds equally for the practitioner as well as the academic trying toapprehend what it is the practitioner is doing. It is important to ourargument to realise that the answer to the question ‘what is going on?’is itself ‘on going’. That is, sensemaking is a dynamic process and if wetranslate this to network pictures we should be thinking not so muchof snapshot/static network pictures as of dynamic network picturing.

2.2. In summary

Section 2 has provided an appreciation of organizational sense-making that, like any old map, will get us started. Two different, yetnot totally dissimilar, tactics were adopted in order to achieve this aim.The first suggested that a minimalist and pragmatic definition oforganizing and sensemaking boiled down to asking: ‘what's the storyhere?’ This was followed by a detailed definition but it was a definitionlacking in colour and context. The second tactic suggested thatthe seven properties of sensemaking, not only functioned in thesame way as that of a good story but also there was a good storyabout sensemaking in the tale of ‘Getting Lost in the Alps’. Thisstory captured the essence of sensemaking and provided a graphicdepiction with colour and context which made the propertiesof sensemaking more comprehensible. Eli Lilly was quoted as anexample of an organizational story which had incorporated and usedthe sensemaking story to suit its own strategic and leadership needs.The conclusion is that “Stories that exemplify frames, and framesthat imply stories, are two basic forms in which the substance ofsensemaking becomes meaningful” (Weick, 1995: 130). We now turnto the substance of network pictures.

3. Network pictures and the IMP

The literature on organizational networks is a burgeoning one andhas been the subject of several reviews (e.g. Araujo & Easton, 1996;Gulati, Nohria, & Zaheer, 2000; Knight, 2002; Porter & Powell, 2006).Knight's Review is particularly helpful for our purposes as shedistinguishes between two approaches to understanding networksand specifically locates the IMP position. The first approach embracesthose who adopt network as an analytical perspective, stressing thelimitations of seeing actors as atomised and preferring instead toemphasise their embededness in networks of other actors. The secondapproach understands networks as an organizational form and it is

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within this approach that the rationale for network learning resides(Knight, 2002). Within this perspective, Knight (ibid) identifies fourtypes of such network forms: (i) intra-organizational networks inwhich businesses exist within a single legal entity, organized withinan organization; (ii) network organizations characterised by flex-ibility and adaptability, generated by high degrees of vertical,horizontal and spatial interrogation; (iii) groups of legally autono-mous organizations with high levels of interdependence and co-operative working, termed strategic networks; and (iv) more loosely-bounded collectives of organizations linked by similarity of activity orgeographic proximity.

The position of the IMP group is identified as being located in thelatter approach and views business markets as unbounded networksof interconnected business relationships (Håkansson, & Johanson,2001). It is the unbounded nature which distinguishes the IMPposition with other views of networks and particularly that of Knight.

Thus while prominent members of the IMP group such as Ford andGadde (2003) can define a network as “consisting of companies andthe relationships between them”, they also say that:

• “anetwork is not restricted to the setof companieswithinwhicha singlecompany deals, or even to the companies that they also deal with.

• a company-centred view of the network is likely to be limited to thosecompanies and influences within its immediate horizons. As such, itprovides an inadequate basis for understanding the dynamics of thewider world of the network.

• the network surrounding a company (environment) is difficult todefine and delimit. It has no objective boundaries and its contentswill be affected by both the purpose of the analysis and the startingpoint for that analysis.

• there is no simple objective network. There is no ‘correct’ or completedescription of it. It is not the company's network. No company owns it.No company manages it, although all try to managing in it. Nocompany is the hub of the network. It has no centre, although manycompanies may believe they are at the centre.”

Ford and Gadde (2003: 174–175)

Having considered thenetwork at the level of the interorganizational(whether the organization knows or is aware of all of the members ornot) and at the organizational level, Ford and Gadde (2003) address thequestion as to what the network looks like from the perspective of theindividual actor who is said to conceptualise it in terms of a picturewhere: “Network pictures refers to the views of the network held byparticipants in that network” (ibid, 176). And just as there is no simpleobjective network, so individualswill have a different viewof the extent,content and characteristics of the network, of who is doing what andwhat does and does not work (Burt, 1997). The network picture isimportant because the picture forms the basis for the individual'sanalysis and action (Ford & Gadde, 2003: 176).

This view of networks thus ranges from the macro (interorganiza-tional) to the micro (the picture an individual human actor holds) andimportantly, the micro has a particular ontological status because itis the basis which informs the actors' analysis and action. It is thenetwork picture which frames analysis and cues action and in thisrespect, it is analogous with the sensemaking and organizing model.Both invoke the questions what is going on here? (analysis) and whatdo we do next (action)? If we reduced sensemaking to ‘what's thestory here’, then the abbreviated version of network marketing is‘what is the picture here’? Put together, we arrive at a joint un-derstanding which suggests that every network picture tells a story.

Others within the IMP fraternity have noted similarity betweensensemaking and organizing, and network pictures and businessrelationships (Håkansson & Snehota, 1990). The connecting commentsare usually made through the notion of the picture being equivalent to acognitive schema (Hodgkinson, 1997; Neisser, 1976) or cognitive map(Eden, 1992; Ford et al., 2003; Huff, 1990; Weick & Bougon, 1986). For

example, Henneberg, Mouzas, and Naudé (2006) argue that networkpictures are managers' subjective mental representations of theirbusiness environment and “they work as sensemaking devices”(1). They go further in arguing that network pictures are retrospectivein the sense that they provide plausible representations of recent eventsand current positions: yet also prospective in that they shape futureactions (Henneberg et al., 2006: 8).

Organizing and sensemaking is thus part of the understanding ofnetwork pictures as promulgated by the IMP. There is an equivalencein their positionswhich, while not identical inmeaning, is sufficient toallow for joint action. This is a reflexive point which also applies tonetwork pictures themselves and how they work in producing jointcognition/action. Ford and other members of the IMP group placegreat store on the fact that each actor will have their own picture ofthe network. Furthermore because each person will have a differentposition in the network vis-à-vis others and a different history ofexperiences, then that network picture is idiosyncratic, if not unique(Ford et al., 2003; Ford & Håkansson, 2006).

However, in as much these pictures represent some elements ofcommon experiences then there is an equivalence of meaning thatallows for network action. Henneberg et al. (2006) argue thatmanagers who rely on their individual network pictures might beblinkered inwhat they see and that they run the risk of being divorcedfrom reality. That is, the picture of reality is not so much idiosyncraticas bizarre and heading on towards one of Goffman's Asylums (1961).Managers have that reality checked and tested in interaction withothers in exchanges in which they develop an appreciation for andlearn from other definitions as to ‘what is going on?’ For Henneberget al. (2006), this amalgamation of individual cognitive networkpictures to form a collective picture/understanding of the network is‘network insight’.

Our particular insight is that the organizing and sensemakingmodelwill produce an equivalent, i.e. not necessarily identical, view.And that isthe point. The mantra of the organizational and corporate cultureliterature which rose to prominence in organization studies (e.g.Smircich, 1983) and the popular business press (Peters & Waterman,1982) was one of ‘shared meanings’. This was widely interpreted assaying that everybody in the company had to share the same values,meanings and view of the company. This is unfortunate because sharedcanmeaneither to divide anddistribute somethingor tohold somethingin common (Cole, 1991; Weick, 1995).

Shared meanings understood as identical meaning is, as bothsensemaking and network pictures understand it, difficult to achievebecause no two individuals will have exactly the same histories,interactions and emotions. Even if it were achievable, it would not bedesirable because it would produce a blinkered myopic viewpointwith little variation in perspective. Shared meanings are therefore notpossible or desirable as a glue to hold organizations and networkstogether. All that is required is that people share experiences, actions,activities, moments of conversation, joint tasks, where they can thenmake sense, even if in an idiosyncratic way (Weick, 1995:188).

“People who do things together should build strong cultures, even ifthey fail to share a common interpretation of what they did. Given acommon experience, what they do share is a referent that can bereinstated descriptively. And if meaning is inferred from action, thenthe separate meanings may still be equivalent even if they are notsimilar. If I act on the basis of my understanding of that commonexperience, and you act on your different understandings of thatsame experience, we remain tied together by the common origin ofthose understandings. If eachof us is quizzed separately as towhywedid what we did, our answers flow from the same experience. Thecommonality is what binds us together and makes it possible foreach of us to understand the sense the other has made.”

Weick (1995: 189)

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4. Collective network pictures and enacted environments

The definition of sensemaking that was previously adopted as aworking definition of network pictures was “a way station on the roadto a consensually co-ordinated system of action” (Taylor & Van Every,2000: 275). In conjunction with the above, we now see the import ofthis when it comes to discussions of amalgamating network picturesto form something approximating a collective mind (Weick & Roberts,1993), or a collective network picture. This section takes up what arelive and contentious issues within network pictures and argues thatthe sensemaking perspective shows a way that avoids these twinperils of reification and reductionism.

There is no contradiction between a unique network picture held byan individual and the very idea of, say, knowledge of and an abilityto learn about a network which transcends the individual. Althoughsensemaking dealswith the individual andof necessity psychology, it is asocial psychology. Cognition and action take place in a social context andas such are oriented to and take into account social others. GeorgeHerbert Mead (1962) wrote of Mind, Self and Society while Weick andRoberts (1993) talk about a collective mind which is conceptualised aspatterns of heedful interrelations of actions in a social system (357). Weare particularly keen on the word ‘heedful’ which, according to theShorter Oxford English Dictionary, is defined as careful, attentive,watchful and mindful. There is a scent of an informed, intelligent andskilled action that takes into account the social context in which it isunfolding. Heedful is probably best understood by its opposite —

heedless. Analogously, an individual can have a network picture but inthe sense that it is arrived at heedfully, it takes into account and isoriented to other network pictures to the extent that it is possible to talkof a collective network picture.

In contrast, when talking of network insight, Henneberg et al. (2006)resort to working at different ontological levels. Following Mattsson(2003), theysuggest that inamalgamating individuals' networkpictures, atranslation takes place which results in the network pictures becoming“objectified” (Henneberg et al., 2006:12). From the sensemakingperspective, in moving between the individual and collective level, areification has taken place which is not necessary. This category mistakestems from a confusion as to how the environment is treated. In theorganizing/sensemakingmodel, the environment is an output rather thanan input. Just asRunyon's characters are trying toweighupwhatbits of theenvironment are worth paying attention to and then making sense ofwhat they have just put there, so also is it the case with organizations.

“A significant portion of the environment consists of nothing morethan talk, symbols, promises, lies, interest, attention, threats, agree-ments, expectations, memories, rumours, indicators, supporters,detractors, faith, suspicion, trust, appearances, loyalties and commit-ments, all of which are more intangible and more influential thanmaterial goods.”

Weick (2001: 49)

For short-hand, this is an attention-based view of the firm (Ocasio,1997; Weick et al., 2005) which suggests that unless something isattended to, it doesn't exist. This position is compatible with IMPviews of there being no boundaries to the network and that there is noobjective network to get hold of (e.g. Ford et al., 2003). Indeed, there issimilarity, even stylistically, between these two views.

“….a great deal of activity within companies and relationshipsconsists of discussion and bargaining about network pictures—whatdoes the network really look like and what does it mean for us?”

Ford et al. (2003; 188)

There may be aspects of a network that an individual does not havein his/her network picture (while others may have it), but because itisn't attended to, it doesn't affect interpretation or effect change.

Tsoukas and Chia (2002) similarly capture this point where theysay:

“..there is a world out there that causes organizations to respondbut the pattern of response depends on an organization's selfunderstanding — the historically rooted assumptions and inter-pretations of itself and its environment.”

Tsoukas and Chia (2002:578)

Thus the environment/network picture is an output of an enactedsensemaking process. The reality of a socially constructed world canbe all too real without having to slip into a realist ontology. Theproblem with the Henneberg et al. (2006) position is that as theymove from the individual idiosyncratic network picture to positing anobjective network, they effectively make network the end of analysisand having done so, implicitly have to introduce boundaries betweenthe network and the environment. More significantly, they change thedirection of the causation arrow back so that cause flows from theenvironment to the network/organization.

This instantiation of environment as cause creates an ontologicalconfusionwhich also undermines views of a network as an output andthe product of individual views with an unbounded nature: a mistakewhich is easily made as Ford and Gadde themselves acknowledge in afootnote (2003: 175) acknowledging their oscillation between talkingof the network or simply a network (emphasis in original). Thedefinite article calls up the notion of a definite concrete network whilethe indefinite article, a, has a sense of indeterminacy which we aretrying to convey.

The network (or environment) as an output is a network (orenvironment) amongst a multitude of possibilities and as such, ischaracterised by equivocality. The work of sensemaking is to reduceequivocality by turning ‘a’ into ‘the’ — the indefinite into the definite.This is not to suggest that an enacted environment/network picturewon't have consequences in a way that the objectified ‘out there’environment/network picture will. The enacted/socially constructedview is not a soft ‘wish it away’ alternative to a realist ontology (Berger& Luckman,1967) but it does remind us that asWI Thomas, a symbolicinteractionist, put it, ‘if men (sic) define situations as real, they are realin their consequences’ (Thomas & Thomas, 1928). Enacted environ-ments and network pictures have real consequences. The problem isthat in their desire to find a plausible answer to the question ‘what'sgoing on?’ and in an effort to quickly reduce equivocality, most peoplealso turn ‘a’ story into ‘the’ story. And having once got hold of ‘thestory’, they become so wedded to it that it is difficult to displace evenin the face of contradictory signals which are simply not seen(attended to) because they are not believed: thus, the frame becomesimmutable. Such signals are not believed because they are notcontained in the historically rooted assumptions and interpretationsthat Tsoukas and Chia (2002) talk of and which guides sensemaking.Just as sensemaking sees the environment as an output, so it alsoreverses the adage that ‘I will believe it when I see it’ to now read,‘I will see it when I believe it’.

This rewriting of the adage alerts us to the primacy afforded to thesearch formeaning as away to deal with uncertainty (Mills, 2003: 44).People and theorists both engage in sensemaking in an active searchfor meaning (Bartlett, 1932) and this effort of sensemaking involvesconverting any old story into the story. Ontologically, this can lead toconfusion with a mixing of levels and categories. Burrell and Morgan(1979) describe what they call a slipping of a realist ontology throughthe back door on top of the subjective assumptions of phenomenol-ogy, hermeneutics and symbolic interactionist stances, as ‘ontologicaloscillation’. For theorists, this is a mistake but people in their everydaylives who neither know nor care about ontology, oscillate all the timein order to make sense. As a consequence, those who study peopleengaged in sensemaking — theorists — must also oscillate in order tomake sense of peoples' sensemaking (Weick, 1995: 35).

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4.1. In summary

There is a rapport and resonance between the organizing andsensemaking perspective and the IMP understanding of networkpictures. This is not surprising as they both stem from interactionistand interpretivist foundations. Indeed, the metaphor of networkpictures is not dissimilar to that of cognitive maps which has longbeen part of the sensemaking approach (Weick & Bougon, 1986). Inasserting the social dimension to psychology and cognition, we avoidreductionism. Similarly to the extent that individual network picturesare heedful and mindful of others, we can talk of collective networkpictures without reification. But the question remains as to havingestablished a certain equivalence between the IMP position onnetwork pictures and sensemaking as a search for a story, can wesay more? Can we advance our understanding of sensemaking andnetwork pictures in industrial marketing beyond establishing reso-nance and rapport, to suggesting a way forward for both sensemakingand network pictures? This will be the focus of the next section.

We have suggested that a key way in which the sensemakingperspective can shed light on network pictures is by emphasising thedynamic of network picturing rather than the static snapshot impliedby network pictures. As such, we see how the processual nature of thesensemaking model can usefully be incorporated in understandingnetwork pictures. Tsoukas and Chia (2002) capture this ongoingnature of social reality in terms of ‘becoming’. In the next two sections,we couple becoming with becoming lost followed by becoming found,in part as a way of revealing the frame that holds the picture which inturn, governs believing. In the end, all analogies and metaphors breakdown (Morgan, 1986) but here we argue that the loss of sensemakingcan lead to the possibility of change and the finding of sense that isn'tout of joint with the times.

5. Becoming lost

The story of the soldiers in the Alps is often told without con-sideration to the moral of the tale, which is that; “…when you are lost,any old map will do” (Weick, 1995: 55). Even where the moral hasbeen pursued, those aspects which dwell on the ‘any old map’ aspecttend to be to the fore rather than those associated with being ‘lost’. Weseek to redress that balance by suggesting that becoming lost can be away station on the road to becoming found, drawing attention toframing en route to a powerful example of transformational change.Being lost and found does not refer to a passive mode but to whatprocessual analysts such as Tsoukas and Chia (2002) refer to as‘becoming’. The use of the gerund in becoming emphasises bothgetting lost and finding oneself as an active process of change, not asan act of ineptitude or sloth. In such a view, change is more properlyunderstood as a dynamic process of changing and organizing ratherthan change and organization (Mangham & Pye, 1991).

This section considers what it is to be lost and the following oneaddresses what it means to be found. How through sensemaking dopeople become lost and how, subsequently do they become found?Howdo they find themselves and what guidance does the map of theequivalent network picture play in this? Our point of departure forexploring getting lost is appropriately entitled ‘A Field Guide to GettingLost’ (Solnit, 2006). Somewhat ironically, the book is often purchased bymistake by those looking for a commentary on the successful televisionseries Lost. For Solnit, getting lost has to do with leaving the door openfor the unknown and the unforeseen and not being thrown by it. EdgarAllan Poe (1840) argued that it is the unforeseen upon which we mustcalculate. But how can we ‘calculate’ on the unforeseen?

Solnit evokes John Keats' (1817) negative capability as a way ofdealing with such a paradox:

‘…and several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struckwhat quality went to form a Man of Achievement…especially in

literature… I mean Negative Capability, that is when man iscapable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without anyirritable reaching after fact and reason.’

Keats, quoted by Solnit (2006: 6)

This particular meaning of negative capability describes a rareattribute. The majority of us reach for the first plausible story toexplain events, and in doing so, we reach backwards into memory andpast successful sensemaking: we reach for what we know and whatwe have seen rather than leaving the door open for the possibility ofthe unknown and unforeseen. According to Solnit (2006), the word‘lost’ comes from the old Norse, ‘los’, meaning the disbanding of anarmy and this origin suggests soldiers falling out of formation to gohome. She worries that many people never disband their armies andas such, never go beyond what they know and have seen. The negativein negative capability is about not being stressed by the unknown andby the unforeseen, and not reaching after the first plausible fact thatcomes to mind. Negative capability is standing down the stressedarmies of habit and panic and paying attention to i.e. being mindful of,the emerging moment.

Solnit (2006) quotes the philosopher–essayist Walter Benjaminthat “not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting andbanal — it requires ignorance, nothing more” but “to lose oneself in acity — as one loses oneself in a forest — that calls for quite differentschooling” (54). This type of being lost involves a voluptuoussurrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed inwhat is present so that its surroundings fade away. To be lost inBenjamin's terms and those of Keats is to be fully present and to befully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery. Onedoes not get lost so much as one loses oneself (or platoon), as in‘letting go’. For the soldiers, the map forestalls the inevitable reachingafter the fact: it enables the platoon in the Alps to be in uncertainty, itinduces a kind of collective negative capability (as defined by Keats), itis a provisional proxy for panic.

Merely being lost, in the usual sense of having lost one's bearings, is acall to arms that releases adrenalin and stress and results in a narrowingof vision and ransacking of history in search of an old solution. However,getting seriously lost as outlined above is an opportunity to stand downyourarmyof habitual response and to bemindful of the unknownand toencourage requisite variety in search of an imaginative solution.

6. Finding yourself

Contemporary organizations find themselves making difficultjourneys. ‘Find’ should be read here in two ways: first in the sensethat an organization finds that the context withinwhich it is operatingis increasingly hazardous in contrast to earlier journeys; and thesecond, in the more important sense that an organization finds out‘who’ it is, what its identities are, what existence means, using asresources the ambiguity found in journeys that blend the familiar withthe unfamiliar (Colville, Waterman, & Weick, 1999b).

The soldiers in the Alps found themselves on a difficult journey inwhich they became lost before finding themselves by making sense oftheir situation using a blend of the familiar and the strange. Thesoldiers found themselves by dint of their own activities rather thanbeing found through a rescue attempt. Analogously, Lilly were also tofind themselves on a difficult journey, the like of which they had neverknown. What they did know however was that no pharmaceuticalcompany had ever survived such a dramatic loss without beingrescued via a take-over, usually resulting in a loss of extant identity.Instead, the Lilly case illustrates an organization ‘finding itself’, in thesense developed in this paper, using its own resources and discoveringwhat it was capable of doing through distributed leadership.

Because future journeys are resembling less and less thoseundertaken in the past, organizations are becoming more like

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explorers, finding themselves in uncharted territories. Classically,explorers were always lost because they had never been to theseplaces before and they never expected to know where they were orthey wouldn't be explorers. That is, they had negative capability andbeing lost was part of the process of finding themselves as explorers.Contemporary organizations would seem to be engaged in ananalogous journey where you have to be able to deal with theunknown and the uncharted. Solnit (2006) adopts a slogan from thepre-Socratic philosopher, Meno, as a means of underscoring the point:“howwill you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totallyunknown to you?” This has a stylistic resonance with Weick's (1969,1979, 1995) sensemaking and organizing recipe: “how can I knowwhat I think until I see what I say?”

The sensemaking and organizing recipe can be used as a templateto parse the story of the soldiers into the seven properties ofsensemaking. It can also be used to look at the activities of theexplorers: Bateson's view that ‘an explorer never knows what he isexploringuntil he has explored it’has beenused in this context (Weick,1979: 165).What the phrase fromMeno does in amore obviousway tothe sensemaking formula is to draw our attention to the prospectiverather than the retrospective element of sensemaking.

Kirkegaard said that life was lived forward and understoodbackward (quoted by Dru, 1958) and while this has been incorporatedinto the sensemaking world, the living life forward aspect with itsemphasis on acting rather than thinking, on the new rather than theold and on leading rather than following, has not received fullattention. Rehabilitating the question asked by Meno allows us toaddress more specifically that underplayed aspect of sensemaking. Itis important because it is not just explorers, platoons and organiza-tions that find themselves dealing with situations they haven'tencountered before and experiencing difficulty in recognizing it.

One plane flies into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre inNew York on 9/11: what do most people see?

An accident. Why?Because the memory has not a trace of anything like this, other

than an accident.The second plane flies into the other towerminutes later. What can

people now see?A terrorist attack. Why?One plane is unfortunate. Two is a plan.You begin with the unknown and you start to structure it as the

moment emerges. And people habituate fast.A plane crashes in New York a few days later. What do most people

see as having happened?The tendency is to get a plausible story which is usually based

on remembering and turn it into the story. You stop paying closeattention to the ongoing moment, stop asking each other questionsand, as such, miss or stop paying attention to a wide possibilityof answers to the question, ‘what is going on here?’ They put theirmoney on past performance and the favourite.

The Commission on 9/11 concluded that many clues and cues weremissed and were not paid enough attention because they were eitherin the peripheral field of vision rather than the focal field or just notseen at all. The same is probably true of the current global economiccrisis. The 9/11 Commission called for “bureaucratised imagination” tocombat this tendency (Weick, 2005). This sounds paradoxical butwhat it amounts to is building in a corrective of the natural tendencyof bureaucracy and organization to drive out uncertainty. The problemis that sometimes this is done at the expense of missing signs ofmistakes or errors which go undetected in blind spots which areamplified and compounded until they apparently come out of the bluewith devastating consequences (Turner, 1978; Vaughan, 1996).

What the sensemaking perspective alerts us to is that we need todeliberately insert requisite variety into our conclusions as to what isgoing on here. It reminds us thatwhen adverts for stock and shares saythat past performance is not a guide to future performance, they are

not kidding. But who would ever have believed an innocuous, if notnon-sense, phrase ‘sub-prime market’ would come to haunt popula-tions around the world, now making all too much sense? We becomeso wedded to the outline of nature, as we believe it to be, that we areheld captive by the picture. We only seem to be divorced from ourbeliefs when they are demonstrably wrenched from our grasp and theflawed frame becomes illuminated. As a model of change, this crisisengenders revolutionary change. The real credit crunch is the changethat follows when an over-credited worldview or picture is revealedas no longer plausible. The discrediting is swift and leads leaders suchas Gordon Brown (2008) to say ‘this is not a time for outdated thinking… extraordinary times call for bold and far-reaching [i.e. frame-breaking] solutions’.

We need a new story that allows us to answer the question ‘what isgoing on here?’, and indicates lines of sensible action. Let us hope thatthe story that emerges has enough requisite uncertainty, in Bruner's(1990) sense, so that different pictures can form from it andsustainable networking emerges. Let us also hope that it containsenough requisite variety so that we remain open to the future notbeing the same as the past. We need to learn the lessons of the future,not the past: we need to close the gap between living forward andunderstanding backwards.

7. Conclusion

If we think about the crafting and enacting of network pictures asexercises in sensemaking then we see more clearly that: ‘to deal withambiguity interdependent people search for meaning, settle forplausibility and move on’ (Weick et al., 2005: 419). These aremoments of sensemaking which, it has been argued, are analogousto the concept of network pictures. Both involve practical reasoningand theorizing about the world (Garfinkel, 1967); are concerned withsnapshots and moments in time; and both provide the resourcesfor answering the question ‘what is going on here?’ However,sensemaking and network pictures are analogous not identicalconcepts. From our analysis in this paper, we conclude that thesensemaking perspective draws attention to and usefully deals withissues that perhaps network pictures are beginning to address andwhich are contained in unpacking the compact three part process ofthe search for meaning, settling for plausibility and moving on.

The search for meaning, like the search for excellence (Colville,Waterman, & Weick, 1999a), is a search that is always provisional andnever concluded. As Geertz (1973) puts it, you never get to the bottomof things — you never exhaust potential meanings and becausemeanings result from an individual's experience of the world and notwo people will have identical experiences, then no two networkpictures will be identical. The network picture theory of meaning willalways be an idiosyncratic one. This poses problems of aggregationand integration as you raise the level of the analysis from theindividual to the collective in search of network insight, while it alsoasks how network action is possible if not predicated on sharedmeanings.

While sensemaking talks of individuals, it is an avowedly socialprocess stressing the social side of social interacting to a greater extentthan is typical of conceptions of network pictures. Meanings may beunique but they are learned in interaction and come from a culturalstock of recipes that supply typical interpretations and actions fortypical situations. People act on the basis of the meaning that thingshave for them (Blumer, 1969) and while people don't act alone, theiractions are interdependent, so you don't need shared or identicalmeanings to act. What people do have to share are experiences thatproduce equivalent meanings that are enough to prompt and prodfurther action. Plausibility rather that accuracy of meaning is sufficientto get you going. Another reasonwhy you can never get to the bottomof meaning is that it is not so much uncovered as discovered throughongoing action, itself an act of creation. Sensemaking moments are

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carved out of and are interruptions to the stream of what Ricoeur(1983) calls ‘life in action’. Moments of sensemaking as foregroundhave to be seen against the background of momentum. If you wait foraccurate and shared meaning rather than plausible ones you will waitfor ever. This dynamic processual nature of sensemaking is anotherdimension which is not emphasised in the imagery of networkpictures.

If network pictures are snapshots equivalent to the moments, thenthey need to be understood against some concept of moving picturesakin that of momentum. This draws attention to thewhole question ofchange which is again more easily dealt with in the process view ofsensemaking which assumes that change is the rule and stasis isinterruptions to flow along the way. That is why Taylor and Van Every(2000) describe moments of sensemaking as way stations along theroad to action. We used this as a provisional definition of sensemakingand network pictures at the outset of this paper. We conclude thatit is still a good working definition because it draws attention to theprovisional, to the travelling, finding, exploring and changing whichcould be usefully developed further in work on network pictures. Atone level, what is being concluded is that network pictures shouldencompass changing by focusing on picturing. At another and morecomplex level, this does not involve abandoning the idea of a networkpicture: what we see more clearly from the sensemaking perspectiveis that the process of picturing is punctuated by the carving out ofmoments or snapshots that momentarily freeze the picturing toproduce a network picture. Moving on, and moving on along the roadof changing, is integral to sensemaking and relatively absent fromnetwork pictures: developing this process analysis further could helptransform network pictures into more dynamic, ongoing stories. Andlikewise, the sensemaking canon is far from complete and some of theconceptual complexity may be awaiting a further phase of resolutionin to profound simplicity or wisdom (Schutz, 1979; Weick, 2007).

In the story of sensemaking, we concluded while the moral of thestory of the soldiers in the Alps was that when you are lost ‘any oldmap will do’, not enough attention had been paid to what it meansto get lost. Increasingly organizations find themselves on changejourneys in which they have to contend with unpredictable events.The suggestion was that this threw even greater reliance on questionsof identity and resilience in order to deal with the uncertain and theunknown and face the need, on occasions, to change frame. Thisfinding out who you are on such a journey and being able to recogniseand deal with the unknownmay involve a period of getting lost. And ifSolnit's take on paradise lost and found may have pinched a bit atpoints, we believe it still had enough requisite uncertainty to make it agood enough story for thinking about network pictures lost and found.

In the spirit of Solnit we close with a modest proposal forsensemaking and network pictures to go and get lost. In that way youwill find out more about who you are, the frame(s) you've beenusing and what you should be doing next. As John Maynard Keynes(1935) prophetically pointed out, “the difficulty lies not so much indeveloping new ideas as escaping from old ones”: and that's makingsense of network pictures although it isn't easy.

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Ian Colville is senior lecturer in organizational change at the School of Management,University of Bath. He is director of The Change Management Forum at the Universityof Bath which aims to provide a place where thinking practitioners and academicsinterested in doing practice can meet to exchange perspectives on change andleadership. His research explores sensemaking and changing in organizationalcontexts. He has published with Karl Weick and Bob Waterman in the journal Orga-nization. Previous publications have appeared in such places as Public Administration,Organization, Long Range Planning and Accounting Organization and Society. He is on theeditorial board of Organization Studies.

Annie Pye is Professor of Leadership Studies at the University of Exeter BusinessSchool. She wrote her PhD on negotiating identities in industrial buyer–sellerrelationships. She has subsequently built her research career around a series ofESRC-funded, ten-yearly studies of top management teams and boards leadingcomplex organizations. In between these projects, she continues to develop otherresearch interests in network leadership and learning, and director/leadershipdevelopment. Weick's work on sensemaking has continued to provide a goldenthread throughout. Her work is published in a variety of journals including Organi-zation Science, Journal of Management Studies, Human Relations and the FT. She is aneditorial board member of Leadership and Organization Studies.