Seminar – Distributed Sense-Making: Split Updating in the Baltic Ferry Industry

Professor Claus Rerup, Frankfurt School of Finance & Management

To examine distributed sense-making across the “sharp-end” and “blunt-end” of the Baltic ro-ro ferry industry, a longitudinal, inductive study was conducted of 59 bow-door locking incidents that occurred over 25 years prior to the Estonia ferry accident in 1994 where 852 people died. The analysis identified three patterns of updating (editing, priming, and triggering) that actors engaged in to make sense of minor, moderate and major incidents. The study observed that one or more fractures in updating occurred in each of the three patterns of adaptive sense-making, leading the research to develop the new construct “split updating”. Split updating shifts focus away from the idea that adaptive sense-making is a monolithic process. This shift highlights the distributed and variegated nature of adaptive sense-making and highlights the importance of studying boundary crossing sense-making processes. The findings and theoretical insights make two contributions. First, the research expands sense-making research from a bifurcated “micro” or “macro” phenomenon to a distributed phenomenon that stretches across the sharp-end and blunt-end. Second, we extend existing work on adaptive sense-making by showing how incidents can lead to updating of some aspects of sense-making while cause others to remain stable. This adaptive instability can lead people to falsely conclude that the cause of a problem has been addressed through updating, and disguise unsafe practices.

Speaker bio

Claus Rerup is Professor of Management at the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management, Germany, Visiting Professor of Strategy at St Gallen HSG, Switzerland, and Otto Mønsted Visiting Professor of Management at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. Before returning to Europe in 2017 he was an Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior at Western University, Ivey Business School, Canada. Claus studies organisational routines, sensemaking and learning from a process perspective. He is particularly interested in how people balance conflicting demands and attend to, make sense of and learn from rare events and ambiguous feedback. His work has been published in Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, Journal of Management, and several other journals and handbooks. Claus has served on the editorial boards of Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, Organization Studies, and Strategic Organization. He received his PhD from Aarhus University, School of Business and Social Sciences, Denmark, and completed his postdoctorate research at University of Pennsylvania, The Wharton School.