Understanding distributed sensemaking in crisis management: The case of the Utrecht terrorist attack
In: Journal of contingencies and crisis management, Band 30, Heft 4, S. 401-411
ISSN: 1468-5973
AbstractOn Monday morning March 18, 2019 a terrorist opened fire inside a tram in the middle of the city of Utrecht. A key challenge in the Utrecht attack was making sense of the situation and organizing a coherent response in a distributed command and control structure. This is a recurrent challenge in crisis management. As command structures expand, sensemaking becomes distributed when groups at different locations develop partial images of a complex environment. While most sensemaking studies focus on how specific groups attempt to collectively construct a plausible representation of the situation, few accounts of distributed sensemaking have appeared. This study explains how crisis managers made sense of the volatile situation across different command structures. Twenty‐five crisis managers from different teams were interviewed by making use of the critical decision methodology. The analysis points to five factors that influence the quality of distributed sensemaking: type of interdependence, sensitivity to operations, plausibility, hierarchy, and identity. It signals that updating one's sensemaking does not only require noticing discrepant cues but is especially related to key social‐cognitive and organisational processes that stimulate doubt, questioning, and a plurality of perspectives.