Making Sense of Change Through Simulation: Organizational Futures at Play

ABSTRACT

Simulation can be a powerful vehicle for prospective sensemaking, especially in organizational change processes where actors’ ability to engage with possible futures is essential. Yet, the way that actors enact different potential futures together via simulation has not been fully explored nor investigated across different contexts. We report on a qualitative study of how healthcare staff in an emergency department (ED) made sense of a planned change process via a simulation tool to explore how moving into a new building might impact their work. We observed simulation sessions and interviewed managers and staff. Using sensemaking theory, we analyse how actors engaged in iterations of different forms of prospective sensemaking together, both in the simulated organizational change and of the organizational change process itself. We found that the way actors used their bodies and the simulation tool to experience potential changes in work environment and work processes elicited emotions such as worry and excitement and deliberations about consequences and potential actions. Our study highlights the interwoven embodied, material and emotional elements of prospective sensemaking: through simulation, we experience and feel the possible futures that can arise from change.

MAD statement

This article demonstrates how simulation tools can facilitate sensemaking of organizational change in and between individuals. It shows how simulations of work in future physical surroundings can elicit strong emotions such as worry and hope for the imagined futures. The findings shed light on how people, who are trying to explore what organizational change might mean for them and their work, relate to desired and undesired futures through their bodies and physical surroundings. Such prospective sensemaking is a significant driver of organizational change. Therefore, understanding the embodied, material and emotional aspects underpinning such processes is important for both scholarship and practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Organizational change
• simulation
• prospective sensemaking
• temporality
• qualitative case study

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all the participants in this study for their patience and willingness to share their experiences and reflections. We thank Kasper Bjørn from the Central Denmark Region for his collaboration and helpful feedback in the initial stages of this research. As one of the developers of the simulation tool studied here, his knowledge of the tool and its purpose provided us with indispensable detailed insights, which served as an important background for investigating how our participants engaged with it.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This artefact consists of large vinyl tablecloths on which blueprints of the layout of the new location are printed.

2 During 2015–2016, when we conducted this research, the hospital was not yet built.

3 Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ninna Meier

Ninna Meier is Associate Professor at Department of Sociology and Social Work at Aalborg University. She is a qualitative researcher who studies leadership, organizing, and work practices in the public healthcare sector. She has published on the relationship between context, action, and change, the role of context qualitative research, configurations of leadership practices in hospital units, collaboration and boundary work, organizational coherence in patient pathways, and how clinical managerial work is practiced in different clinical contexts.

Karen Ingerslev

Karen Ingerslev is head of office of Corporate Human Resource Development at Central Denmark Region. Karen is a rare combination of a serial social entrepreneur, a researcher, an innovator and a manager, who is interested in exploring mechanisms for facilitating mind shift through empathy and relational interactions.