Quality as sense-making

Sense-making is a process of engaging with complex and dynamic environments that provides organisations and their leaders with a flexible and agile model of the world. The seven key properties of sense-making describe a process that is social and that respects the range of different stakeholders in an organisation. It also addresses the need to account for the history and context of the organisation while also acting to change that context. This paper describes a conception of quality framed by sense-making. It explores the possible insights and guidance it can provide to leaders and others seeking a model aligning quality with forward-looking organisational change and capable of reflecting the complex relationships between educational organisations and their diverse stakeholders. Quality as sense-making flows from a recognition that education is too complex and too important to be defined by a small number of qualities relevant to a privileged group of stakeholders, or by limited performance indicators such as financial efficiency, instead it is experienced through an ongoing conversation challenging complacency and the status quo.