A ‘Fruitless Obsession with Accuracy’: The Uses of Sensemaking in Public Sector Performance Management

Abstract

Sensemaking provides a framework for understanding and interpreting managers' working lives, based on a thorough critique of rational choice models. It refutes rational choice, and aims not to predict, prove or control but simply to explain: the making of sense. This article, based on the author's original prizewinning MBA thesis, presents research undertaken in 2005–2006 on the uses of sensemaking in understanding local government organisations' contrasting experiences of performance management systems: an internal system in Canadian city government, and an externally-imposed system in the form of the now abandoned Comprehensive Performance Assessment (CPA) in British local government. Key literature utilised includes social and organisational psychologist Karl Weick, British complexity theorists such as Ralph Stacey, and a literature on the politics of organisational behaviour (such as Guy Peters et al.). A critique of rational choice and summary of sensemaking precedes an account of phenomenological case study research across two countries, undertaken using ethnographic field methods. The author argues that using sensemaking to understand performance management systems provides a further imperfect means of making sense of inherent organisational equivocality. These systems are radically interpreted as devices for making sense of experience in organisations in which human behaviour cannot be expected to be forever accurately predicted and controlled. Conclusions with enduring relevance for practising managers are presented on the personal, tactical, methodological and philosophical ‘uses’ of sensemaking in managers' working lives.

Key Words:

• Sensemaking
• performance management
• local government
• comprehensive performance assessment (CPS)
• rational choice
• management
• organisations

Notes

1. Such techniques typically include strategic planning, key performance indicators, value for money/cost-benefit analyses, and in-year/year-end performance management, and are widely reflected in standard textbooks on public sector management (see Doherty & Horne, 2002; Joyce, 1999).

2. Page references in this section are to Weick (1995) except where indicated.

3. Clegg has drawn attention to the influence of sensemaking on Peters and Waterman in overly sympathetic terms (see Clegg et al., 2005: 289–291). The critique of their 1982 book remains valid, given that it is unarguably a ‘manifesto’ promoting what the authors see as feasible control of the organisation as a rational system within a complex environment.

4. Case study organisations and participant quotations have been deliberately anonymised for publication; all are attributed and referenced in the original dissertation (Stannard, 2006).

5. Producing self-assessments – plausible, retrospective, reconstructed recent histories of the performance of the organisation – was a requirement at the start of the CPA inspection process.

6. For example, improving educational attainment and job creation, improving housing condition, redressing general environmental degradation, and an expectation of vastly improved response times from city services to public enquiries and complaints.