We are performing a masterpiece-something by Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, perhaps Mozart. The quartet mechanism is functioning smoothly-tightly and solidly. A symbiosis emerges between the ethereal power of the music and the expressiveness of each of the quartet's members, lubricated by the sweat of a decade of hard work. The power of the resulting eloquence is more than the sum of its parts." 1 Why do musicians consistently succeed in achieving a degree of organizational perfection that many business leaders can only dream of? What makes some music ensembles function so seemingly flawlessly? What roles do learning and sense-making play in this? How do learning and sense-making occur in organizational settings that are characteristically transient, varying, ephemeral, and ambiguous-in other words, organizational settings typically experienced by ensembles? The authors explore the notions of learning and sense-making in a string quartet. The string quartet is viewed as a complex learning organization characterized by a dual dichotomy comprising individual-collective interactions and tacit-explicit knowledge processes. A construct describing the string quartet's field of interaction in terms of learning and sense-making is derived and deployed to analyze learning and sense-making in complex organizations such as the string quartet. The construct and analysis developed in this paper are based on a case study of the Carmina Quartet of Zürich, Switzerland.

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