Purpose – The role of imagination (Gioia et al., 2002; Weick, 1995, 2005, 2006) and the potential of distributed sensemaking (Weick et 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 (Gioia et 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.

Introduction

From a temporality accentuating the articulation of the past and the present, most sensemaking studies are interested in how organizational actors’ sensemaking is accomplished in the past for understanding their enactment in the present. Fully recognizing the relevance of retrospective processes in the construction of “what happened” and in the understanding of “what we did”, this research attempts to extend this approach by exploring a sensemaking process based on a temporality that articulates the present and the imagined future (Colville et al., 1999; Gioia et al., 2002; Wright et al., 2013) in the context of organizational change. More specifically, this research is interested in a distributed imagining process (DIP), which the author considers to be a specific sensemaking process. DIP could be defined, in the sensemaking context, as an inductive interactive process aimed to stimulate individuals’ sensemaking regarding to organizational change through their interpretation about imagined future, in order to trigger or enrich collective sensemaking toward organizational change. Around this definition, the first point to clarify is about the temporality of DIP in this study. The research question of this study focuses on organizational actors’ sensemaking at the present through what they imagine and interpret about the future. From this sense, beyond its apparent future-oriented form, DIP is not a prospective process seeking to predict the future from the present or the past. Neither is it a prescriptive process by which actors look to communicate, influence or convince. In a distributed future-imagining process, there is not a previous dominant story (Näslund and Pemer, 2012). The materialization of the process is more antenarrative (Boje, 2011) rather than narrative. It is composed of different puzzles resulted of an interpretative work (Weick, 2012) accomplished at two levels: the micro level and the meso level. At the micro level, sensemaking is an individual process from which an interpretative work is accomplished through the clues and connections (Weick, 1995) perceived by every individual. At the meso level, organizational actors trigger, conscientiously or unconscientiously, a dominant or sometimes a polyphonic (Cunliffe and Coupland, 2012) interpretation in an organizational context.