Sensemaking, a New Entrepreneurial Approach for Today’s Uncertain Business Environment

Sensemaking has gained substantial attention from scholars in various fields like organizational studies, information technology and chaotic environments. In the field of entrepreneurship, sensemaking earned significance in explaining entrepreneurial opportunity creation and enactment of opportunities as well as entrepreneurs’ rhetoric, metaphors and narratives in justifying their decisions for other stakeholders by engaging in direct negotiations with them. When faced with ambiguity and while dealing with uncertain environments, sensemaking enables entrepreneurs to hold their ground by identifying salient elements of the environment, giving them meaningful labels and therefore enacting their own environment. Sensemaking has not been given adequate attention in entrepreneurial studies. This paper acknowledges previous efforts to link entrepreneurship and sensemaking but claims that there are important undiscovered sensemaking applications relevant to entrepreneurial activities, the most important of which could be failure prediction and failure prevention. On the other hand, lack of sensemaking among the entrepreneurial team in a given enterprise could not only deprive it of identifying or exploiting lucrative and profitable opportunities but also under severe circumstances lead to its final failure and collapse. The main goal of this paper is shedding more lights on those undiscovered field by conducting a comprehensive survey of not only sensemaking but also relevant entrepreneurial fields and claiming that sensemaking capability reduces the chances of entrepreneurial failure.