How Organizations Understand: Situation Awareness, Sensemaking, and Learning in Practice — a book by Krishan Mathis (Tautai Press, open draft, 2026).
Most organizations are better at executing than at understanding. This book examines the cognitive work that comes before good execution: how organizations perceive, interpret, orient, decide, act and learn. It follows a single question throughout — whether investing in understanding improves an organization’s capacity to adapt — across attention and weak signals, situation awareness, sensemaking, the internal model, decision and commitment, individual and collective cognition, structure, leadership and sensegiving, knowledge creation, the skill development cycle, machines and design.
What’s inside
Fourteen chapters in four parts, plus two appendices.
Part I — The problem of knowing. Chapter 1, Understanding comes first; Chapter 2, Perceiving: attention and the signals at the edges.
Part II — Understanding the situation. Chapter 3, Knowing what is going on: situation awareness; Chapter 4, When the picture breaks: sensemaking; Chapter 5, Orientation: keeping the model alive; Chapter 6, Choosing: from understanding to commitment.
Part III — Understanding together. Chapter 7, Where understanding is held; Chapter 8, When groups understand more, and when less; Chapter 9, Structure as cognitive architecture; Chapter 10, Whose account counts: leadership and sensegiving.
Part IV — From understanding to capability. Chapter 11, Learning loops: how organizations create knowledge, and lose it; Chapter 12, The skill development cycle; Chapter 13, Making sense with machines; Chapter 14, Designing the understanding organization.
Appendices. Appendix A maps the terms of this book to The Tautai Principle and lists the points where the two books diverge; Appendix B is a glossary.
Availability
Available as a screen PDF and an EPUB. This is an open draft — version 0.3.0 — and has not yet been reviewed as a whole; the per-chapter references are a first draft. Read it as work in progress, and expect the text to change.