Conflict, Doubt & Sensemaking
Where our ways of understanding and acting are interrupted, conflict and doubt emerge, and we engage in sensemaking. In external conflicts, our habits, views, or interests clash with those of others; in inner conflict—or doubt—our own habits, views, or interests conflict or break down as we encounter new situations. In either case, we cannot proceed as we are used to: we have to struggle for re-orientation amidst competing meanings and motives. Conflict and doubt pose two critical questions: “What is going on here?” and “What should I (or we) do next?”.[1] In other words, they incite efforts for sensemaking.
Sensemaking is the process by which we gain orientation in the world. We narrate and interpret events, test these interpretations, and thereby create intersubjective meaning.[2] Most of the time, we are successfully interacting with others and the environment without having to manage these interactions consciously. Shared practices and meanings allow us to live together; a red light is collectively taken as a sign to stop and green to go. At other times, however, our habitual involvement breaks down and we must consciously work out what to do in an unexpected situation; for instance, when the new colleague is embarrassingly noisy. We interpret the situation so as to find a way of dealing with it, and our way of dealing with it, tests and enacts our interpretation; thus, we may presume that the new colleague is not aware of the local culture’s appreciation for silence and inform him kindly. (The process is complicated by the fact that testing an interpretation already shapes the environment—a friendly reminder usually produces a more friendly colleague).
Importantly, our interpreting is directed at acting. It has to keep us going. If it doesn’t tell us what to do, our unrest isn’t settled. The pragmatist philosopher Charles Peirce, therefore, described doubt as "privation" and a "condition of erratic activity"[3] that only ceases when orientation for action is recovered.
When doubt and conflict resist resolution, they paralyze us or provoke forced resolution through rigid assertions. We might try to avoid conflicted subjects or situations or fall into an endless back and forth on the same issues, meanwhile keeping options open and postponing a decision. Indecision, however, far from being impartial, creates its own environment that cannot be undone. Opportunities pass us by while we are caught in the frame of an either-or-choice.
To avert anxious disorientation and disorienting ambiguity altogether, however, we routinely revert to rigidly held convictions, or frames. For instance, people and organizations make huge efforts to construct (shared) identities that tell them who they are and what they should do. Where identities are unstable, we usually hold on for dear and go out of our way to retain them. Accordingly, “in many organizational settings, a more or less implicit or even hidden identity-telling agenda overlaps, interferes with, or dominates over the official or surface agenda.”[4] If we are unaware of such efforts for orienting narratives, they easily detract us from what we care for and confine us to narrow perspectives that we eagerly maintain by blocking out all dissonant voices.
Rigidity, following in the shadow of doubt, is difficult to recognize and likes to disguise itself as determination or authenticity. Such virtues, however, find resoluteness amidst ambiguity and uncertainty whereas rigid responses to these conditions attempt to suppress or avoid them. They suppress or avoid them at the cost of openness and adaptability.
Disorientation and rigidity pose threats of burnout and escalation. When we cling rigidly to precarious convictions, events will matter to us insofar as they confirm or imperil these convictions. For instance, our self-value or trust that we are in the right job might depend on the conviction that our work has great impact or that we are one of the few who’s fit for it. Setbacks at work will question this belief and then undermine our trust that we are on the right track. We will likely react with intense negative emotion and compulsive attempts to salvage our orienting beliefs and our faith in “the sensibility of life’s arrangements.”[5] As we seek vehemently for meaning in the blows we receive, they might suddenly appear, with deceptive clarity, as invitations ‘to prove ourselves,’ our unique skill or commitment, our ability to turn the setback into an inspiration that propels us forward. The greater the fear of disorientation, the more extreme will be our attempts to cope with it, and the more volatile will become the environment we are cocreating—as when we escalate commitment to a project that would be better abandoned[6] or isolate ourselves from the good counsel of others and push beyond exhaustion.[7]
When we lose the ground below our feet, we turn to ever more precarious meanings to satisfy our needs. Although these offer temporary relief, we will henceforth be obliged to continually prove them right in our choices and actions. Struggling to maintain our increasingly elaborate constructions while exposed to the crossfire of competing meanings is exhausting. And when they collapse—which sooner or later they will—they unleash all doubt and anxiety they were built to ward off. The same will happen analogously to organizational decisions in contested subject matters dictated by authority. While a vision or course of action is forced through, conflict simmers under the surface, manifesting resistance, or straightforward sabotage, until it finally erupts with the force of numerous accrued frustrations. Rigid adherence to narratives, therefore, poses the threat of burnout and escalation. Rigidity is, unsurprisingly, the opposite of resilience because resilience is nothing else than adaptability.
