Stop making sense : Close scrutiny of situation awareness in organizations

Abstract

In this essay I discuss situation awareness and sensemaking in organizations with respect to mind. Variousmodels of mind are discussed and much effort is made to disprove Cartesian dualism as a viable theory. Gilbert Ryle’s model of mind as a disposition to heed as used by Karl Weick is used as the construct of collective mind. The research question is to prove situation awareness as essentially mind and thus the disposition to heed. Three small cases are investigated to show the interdependence between situation awareness and sensemaking. The dependencies between these elements are discussed regarding known epistemology and on the fundamental level. Using current ontological standings in organizational theory and ergonomics this proved to be difficult, because it gave no common consensus regarding the primitives of the mind construct. To resolve this I have made a suggestion to ontology based on a restricted view of Heidegger’s notion of dasein and existential time and existential space as n-dimensional Euclidean spaces as sole primitives. Both are properties of dasein and in physical world but restricted to human existence. Ontology should prove useful to other research areas than organizational theory as a model of human mind.