Discovering information behavior in sense making. III. The person

This article, the third of three, used the methods of an ethnography of communication to explore the individual information behavior in sense making of participants in the annual work planning of a unit of a public agency. In particular, this article focuses on how people capture and process meaning from their situation. The analysis identified personal sense making styles that included cognitive, affective, and conative (action instinct) elements. These styles seem to also reflect a person's role in the organization and the work planning task. Given that participants in the work planning process had their own personal sense making styles and that these styles tended to vary across participants, it is not surprising that there were clashes in style. This fact was both a strength and a weakness in the sense making that was required for work planning, a complex information intensive task. Diversity of approach, perspective, opinion, and interpretation led to the crafting of strategies that served the purposes of the organization in a richer way than did any individual strategy. Diversity of approach also led to frustration over the amount of time that it took to tie together the different senses and points of view into agreement on actions, only to have these agreements unravel as new cues from the environment suggested the need for modification to at least some participants. Understanding the nature and diversity of sense making styles among members of work teams may aid the team in taking advantage of the range of sense‐making skills that are present and lessen the conflicts that arise when different sense‐making skills clash. The three parts of the study dealing with time and timing, the social, and the personal are brought together in a brief conceptual synthesis at the end. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.