Sensemaking and Organizational Search

Though the literatures on organizational search and organizational sensemaking both attempt to understand how organizations adapt, thus far there has been limited cross-fertilization between these literatures. In this paper we propose a formal model, where agents "make sense" of their prior search efforts in order to determine their future course of action. We also find that sensemaking agents perform better than agents who perform local search. More interestingly, we also find that the more complex the situation, agents who use less information perform better than those who use more information in their sensemaking.