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The purpose of this paper is to discuss how Dewey’s notions of experience, inquiry and reflection can increase managers’ capacity to cope with sustainability transitions.

Problem-based learning is discussed as an approach for enabling sustainable management learning. Dewey’s concepts of experience, inquiry and reflection are used to conceptualize learning as an iterative “self-corrective” learning process toward sustainability. Two public managers’ experiences of a personal development module in a management education program are used to discuss how Dewey’s concepts work to integrate practice and theory.

Dewey’s problem-based learning framework has the potential to increase managers’ capability to cope with complex and multifaceted challenges such as sustainability because of its focus on problem-solving.

Management is a social practice. Management education can support management learning if management is perceived as a practice.

Sustainable management learning is presented as an iterative and gradual learning process aimed toward settled inquiry that emerges when sustainable solutions work satisfactory in relation to the multiple and contradictory forces, which are in play in real-life situations.

This paper aims to contribute to the literature on distributed sensemaking by studying how the police establish and develop their new position as police contacts during the police reform.

The authors studied how the position of police contact, a cornerstone of the recent Norwegian police reform, was interpreted and practised. The authors interviewed police contacts at two different times during reform implementation to explore how they made sense of and practised their job.

The authors identified three interpretations of the position of police contact and describe them as ideal types: an administrative position, a professional position and a strategic position. The ideal types were reinforced rather than developing towards a shared understanding. Our data demonstrate that the sensemaking processes and experimentation to settle into the new position involved local actors internally in the police and externally in relation to local authorities, and reinforced local interpretations.

This study supports the notion of sensemaking as distributed but extends previous research by suggesting that “ideal types” help us understand the content of interpretations. This study also extends the understanding by showing that distributed sensemaking takes place as individuals make sense of more open-ended problems. This challenges the understanding of the term distributed, because unless challenged, distributed sensemaking in isolated pockets of the organization remain local, and the authors suggest that the term local distributed sensemaking captures this phenomenon.