How to make sense of it all...

In chapter 4, the text talks about systems and its perspective on organizations and communication. Karl Weick developed theories and explored sense making. He developed a sense-making model and in that model, the assumption is that making decisions is retrospective sense making (p. 115), meaning that people act first and later think about their actions to try to explain meaning. This makes sense to me.... because I know sometimes I personally act/react rather impulsively... and then analyze it later to explain its meaning, or justify my actions. I found the "properties of sense making" he identified to be interesting:
[Excerpted from pp 115-116]

• Identity construction "Who I am is indicated by how and what I think"
• Retrospection "To learn what I think, I look back over what I said earlier"
• Enactment "I create an object to be seen and inspected when I say or do something"
• Socialization "What I say, single out, and conclude are determined by who socialized me and how I was socialized, as well as by the audience that will audit the conclusions I reach"
• Continuation "My talking is spread across time, competes for attention with other ongoing projects, and is reflected on after it's finished (which means my interests could have already changed)"
• Extracted cues "The 'what' that I single out and embellish as the content of the thought is only a small part of the utterance that becomes salient because of the context and personal dispositions"
• Plausibility "I need to know enough about what I think to get on with my projects, but no more, which means sufficiency and plausibility take precedence over accuracy"

Weick calls this a "recipe". I think that I sometimes follow this... but maybe not with the exact same measurements every time. When I take an action, I think about who I am, why I think that, looking back at what I did, create something that is in accordance with what I said or did, make it appeal to the receivers... and by the time I try to make my case, sometimes we've already moved on from it. These properties are applicable to organizations if you change the "I" to "we", allowing for people who aren't planners to still make sense of what work they do. But not everyone in an organization would follow this because there are some of us who like making plans, and sticking to it, rather than learning in retrospect.... or in other words, hindsight.