Distributed sensemaking is the collective production of shared understanding across multiple actors and organizations under conditions where no single actor has complete control over information or action [@kendrawachtendorf2006sensemaking].
Within emergent disaster response, the term matters because coordination often depends on many participants discovering meaning and capacities for action through their emerging relationships rather than receiving a single authoritative picture from above [@kendrawachtendorf2006sensemaking].
Related terms
- Convergence Behavior - one condition that makes distributed sensemaking necessary
- Improvisation - the adaptive action that often follows collective sensemaking
- Communication and Distributed Sensemaking in Emergent Disaster Response - a research text on this process