To ground this chapter, we develop the following scenario derived from an informal interview with a manager in June of 2020 as the COVID-19 lockdown was being lifted in the United States. Elaine, a manager at a retail store sits down at her computer to read yet another email from her company. The email from the store’s CEO reads, “You are required to wear a mask that covers your nose and mouth completely at all times in and around our buildings. Note: this is a new policy, and a change from what was required last week.” Elaine sighs and tells her partner, “I’m so tired of having a different policy every week. I suspected we needed to wear masks even when the U.S. Center for Disease Control said they weren’t required.”

Risk can be defined in many ways, so here we use Stern and Fineberg’s (1996) broad definition of risk as the “things, forces, or circumstances that pose danger to people or what they value” (p. 215). It is also helpful to realize that risk can be subjective, objective, real, observed, and perceived (Althaus, 2005) and thus, people and organizations can differ in their understanding of what constitutes a risk. In addition to understanding risk, several related constructs are also important. Risk perception can be considered as an individual’s subjective judgement of the severity of the risk, the probability of the event happening to them, and the emotions they feel in response to the risk (Wilson et al., 2018).

Before people seek information about a risk, there needs to be some form of social or environmental cue that makes them aware they are at risk. In the case of Elaine, the retail manager, the cue was an email from her manager. But it is important to realize that just providing information from an organization or other source is not enough to motivate people to take some protective actions concerning these risks. Weick’s (1979) work on information theory offers some key terms to help us understand what happens as organizational members process risk information. Once people are aware of a risk, they are often in need of information; a situation Weick (1979) calls uncertainty. As people begin receiving and seeking information, they tend to receive conflicting information, and thus they find themselves experiencing equivocality or ambiguity (Weick, 1979) around their understanding of risk. This is an important state because as people try to understand this conflicting information, they tend to talk with others and engage in sensemaking (Weick & Sutcliffe, 2007). During COVID-19, there were high levels of both uncertainty and conflicting information, and these were key precursors that nudged people to engage in sensemaking. Sensemaking is a process that allows organizational members to develop meaning and understanding, retrospectively, following an experience (Weick, 1993, 1995). Organizations are in an ideal place to facilitate sensemaking since organizational members are often connected to one another through varied communication channels (Jahn, 2016; Weick, 1979).