Making sense of uncertainty

Abstract

Organizational change often creates uncertainty for managers who are expected to provide direction, maintain coordination and keep everyday work moving while broader conditions remain unsettled. This study examines how managers make sense of and give sense to uncertainty during organizational change. Drawing on a qualitative and inductive research design, the study is based on 28 semi-structured interviews with managers across different organizational contexts. The analysis follows the Gioia methodology and uses sensemaking and sensegiving as the main interpretive lens. The findings show that managers do not experience uncertainty as a broad or abstract condition. Instead, uncertainty becomes visible through concrete organizational problems related to responsibility, authority, priorities, decision-making and the translation of broader change into everyday work. Three closely connected dimensions capture how managers handle uncertainty in practice: interpreting uncertainty, communicating uncertainty and working with uncertainty. The study shows that managers often make sense of uncertainty and give sense to it at the same time, while also trying to keep work moving under incomplete clarity. Rather than eliminating uncertainty, managers often organize around it by creating temporary structures, provisional priorities and workable directions that make coordination possible. The study contributes to research on uncertainty and organizational change by offering a more concrete understanding of what managers become uncertain about in practice and how they handle it. It also contributes to sensemaking and sensegiving research by showing that these processes often unfold in parallel under continued operational pressure.