Distributed imagining processes in organizational change sensemaking

Purpose: The role of imagination (Gioia et al., 2002; Weick, 1995, 2005, 2006) and the potential of distributed sensemaking (Weicket al., 2005) are highlighted in existing sensemaking studies in a distinct manner. The purpose of this paper is to articulate these two perspectives by observing a specific sensemaking process defined as “distributed imagining process (DIP)” in this paper. Design/methodology/approach: From an observation conducted in 2016 within a French public organization regarding an operation that invited all organizational actors to imagine the future of their work life, this study analyzed 777 collected texts, through an inductive and qualitative approach, for understanding DIP’s functioning and results. Findings: This study identified that what actors imagine about the future is a self-contextualized observation and an interpretation of the present incorporated into an imagined future. With a distributed modality, individual imagining processes might interact with collective processes for contributing organizational change sensemaking. Originality/value: Adopting a temporality that positions the future as an imagined interpretative prolongation of the present and the past (Gioiaet al., 2002), this study suggests that the combination of self-contextualized imagining process and distributed modality might be inspiring for exploring more inductive and enriched organizational sensemaking through, on the one hand, the reduction of cognitive constraints implicitly imposed by organizational and temporal contexts and, on the other hand, the incitation of interactions in and between individual and collective sensemaking processes.