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Making Sense of the Organization

Volume 2

Making Sense of the

Organization Volume 2

The Impermanent Organization

K ARL E W EICK

University of Michigan

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Preface vii

Acknowledgments ix

2 Mundane Poetics: Searching for Wisdom in Organizational Theory 9

3 Faith, Evidence, and Action: Better Guesses in an Unknowable World 27

4 Managing the Unexpected: Complexity as Distributed Sensemaking 47

5 Information Overload Revisited

Kathleen M Sutcliffe and Karl E Weick 65

6 Organizing for Mindfulness: Eastern Wisdom and Western Knowledge

Karl E Weick and Ted Putnam 85

7 Making Sense of Blurred Images: Mindful Organizing in

8 Organizing and the Process of Sensemaking

Karl E Weick, Kathleen M Sutcliffe, and David Obstfeld 129

9 Impermanent Systems and Medical Errors:

Contents

PART IV ACTION 173

10 Hospitals as Cultures of Entrapment: A Re-analysis of the

Bristol Royal Infi rmary

Karl E Weick and Kathleen M Sutcliffe 175

11 Enacting an Environment: The Infrastructure of Organizing 189

14 Drop Your Tools: An Allegory for Organizational Studies 243

Epilogue 273

References 275

Index 281

Jill Hawk, former Chief Ranger at Mt Rainier National Park, described to me how Search

and Rescue units on Mt Rainier live by this credo: ‘ It is what it is, it is in front of me, and

I have to deal with it ’ That credo is stirring and action oriented It also has a lot of play

in it ‘ It ’ is mentioned four times, yet one wonders what ‘ it ’ refers to and imagines that

members of the rescue team have different interpretations ‘ Is ’ is mentioned three times,

suggesting a solidity that may be hard to fi nd ‘ Me ’ and ‘ I ’ are the people dealing with all

this, but those actors could be individual people or ‘ us ’ and ‘ we ’ as a group That credo,

in practice, is much less vexing to team members than it is to me That is comforting to

those hiking on Mt Rainier, but it is discomforting to me because it raises the question

of how people in general make sense of an indeterminate situation and how the ways

they are organized affect this sensemaking It is tough to craft intelligent conjectures

about how ‘ it ’ and ‘ us ’ get defi ned because situations are changing, experience is

stream-ing, and teams are transient John Dewey describes the fl ux this way: ‘ In every waking

moment, the complete balance of the organism and its environment is constantly

inter-fered with and as constantly restored Life is interruptions and recoveries At these

moments of a shifting of activity, conscious feeling and thought arise and are

accentu-ated ’ (1922, pp 178 – 179)

The focus of the following essays is on the fugitive quality of organizing and

sense-making The organizing is fugitive because people try to fold order into streaming,

changing experience My efforts to understand these ongoing efforts are guided by John

Dewey ’ s imperative for action: ‘ So act as to increase the meaning of present experience ’

(1922, p 283) I want to suggest that people in general try to follow this imperative

And I want to provide specifi c ideas and images that can become part of the reader ’ s

attempt to increase the meaning of his or her experience or to craft a more compelling

imperative

The streaming, the organizing, the sensemaking all are situated in what Taylor and

Van Every (2000) call ‘ the crucible of the quotidian ” (p x) That is hardly the language

of a search and rescue unit However, it is what they face The quotidian is the

common-place, the everyday, the recurring, which is the crucible where efforts to make sense and

hold events together are tested This crucible is ‘ the ultimately determining factor in what

the organization will be like ’ (p x) The commonplace is a steady stream of interruptions

Preface

viii PREFACE

and recoveries Talk, texts, and activity may produce the interruptions but they can also

stitch together the recoveries

With all this talk about transience and impermanence it seems only appropriate to acknowledge that my efforts to understand all of this are also transient Search and

Rescue team members as well as scholars trying to understand Search and Rescue

teams all construct what Richard Rorty (1989) calls temporary theories, ‘ a passing

theory about noises and inscriptions being produced by a fellow human being that

must be constantly corrected ’ (p 116) What this means is that the rescue team and

I are all in this together It is what it is

The word ‘ acknowledgment ’ always seems a little cold as a heading to set apart

statements of one ’ s gratitude for help given Writing is a seemingly solitary act, and

yet many people turn what seems solitary into something that is infused with energy,

conversations (imagined and actual), and encouragement Several people help me by

assuming this role and I want to honor their help Kathleen Sutcliffe is co - author with

me on three of these chapters, one on overload of which she is the senior author, one

on sensemaking where David Obstfeld joins us, and one on medical tragedies Kathie

has an uncanny ability to separate central arguments from potential distractions For

example, she summarized the 394 pages we wrote in our two editions of Managing the

Unexpected (2001) in one sentence: ‘ Managing the unexpected is curbing the

tempta-tion to normalize and dealing with the consequences when you do ’ Far be it from me to

craft something that compact

My appreciation for the help provided by the scholarship of others borders on awe

William James and John Dewey obviously inform much of what I write, but so do

Michael Cohen, James Taylor, Elizabeth J Van Every, Robert Chia, Hari Tsoukas, Gary

Klein, William Starbuck, Karlene Roberts, Reuben McDaniel, Dave Schwandt, Barbara

Czarniawska, Paul Schulman and the late Peter Frost While the physical act of writing

is solitary, it matters a great deal that I am part of an incredibly supportive, warm, and

bright set of scholars in the Management and Organization group at the University of

Michigan ’ s Ross School Also at Michigan you ’ ll fi nd a hearty band of inquirers

includ-ing Dan Gruber, Danielle Molina, Jude Yew, Lisa Guzman, Pete Bacevice, and Ryan

Smerek, who form the core of the Sensemaking Interdisciplinary Forum and stir up

new insights with great frequency

I count on durable help from the Wildland Firefi ghting community and it always

seems to be there My gratitude runs deep for conversations with Ted Putnam, Dave

Thomas, Paula Nasiatka, Paul Chamberlin, Paul Keller, Mike DeGrosky, Riva Duncan,

Dave Christenson and Anne Black

And then there ’ s family What surprises me is how those ties grow deeper and

broader with age, so much so that enumerating those ties and fearing to omit some

leaves one with gratitude for particulars but words of love for the assemblage The love

starts with my wife, Karen, and fans out from there

Acknowledgments

1 Organized Impermanence: An Overview

2 Mundane Poetics: Searching for Wisdom in Organizational Theory

3 Faith, Evidence, and Action: Better Guesses in an Unknowable World

I

Organized Impermanence:

An Overview

Suppose we took seriously the idea that ‘ Organization is a temporarily stabilized event

cluster ’ (Chia, 2003, p 130) What would we notice if we believed that? William James

provides an answer:

Whenever a desired result is achieved by the cooperation of many independent persons,

its existence as a fact is a pure consequence of the precursive faith in one another of

those immediately concerned A government, an army, a commercial system, a ship,

a college, an athletic team, all exist on this condition, without which not only is nothing

achieved, but nothing is even attempted A whole train of passengers (individually brave

enough) will be looted by a few highwaymen, simply because the latter can count on one

another, while each passenger fears that if he makes a movement of resistance, he will

be shot before anyone else backs him up If we believed that the whole car - full would rise

at once with us, we should each severally rise, and train - robbing would never even be

attempted There are, then, cases where a fact cannot come at all unless a preliminary

faith exists in its coming (James, 1992, p 474)

( See Quinn and Worline, 2008, for a stunning elaboration of this mechanism in their

analysis of the intentional crash of UA fl ight 93 on 9/11 )

The organized defi ance of the coach passengers is a relatively stabilized relational

order that is enacted into streaming experience When social order is acted into ‘ a sea

of ceaseless change ’ (Chia, 2003, p 131) that order continues to change but at a

slower rate The shorthand for this transient social order with a slower rate of change

is the ‘ impermanent organization ’ Event clusters with slower rates of change tend to

consist of a recurrent sequence (e.g Czarniawska, 2006) held together by a closed,

deviation - counteracting feedback loop

The phrase ‘ impermanent organization ’ may seem like a questionable choice of

words because it can be read as both trivial and ambiguous It sounds trivial because

it suggests that organizations come and go It sounds ambiguous because it fails

to make clear just what it is that comes and goes The essays in this book begin to

tackle that ambiguity and to do so in a way that makes impermanence less trivial and

more signifi cant If impermanence is inherent in organizations it matters greatly how

people try to organize portions of this impermanence and redo these organized

por-tions when they begin to unravel The argument is that people build recurrence into

1

4 THE IMPERMANENT ORGANIZATION

portions of ongoing experience by means of texts, conversations, and interdependent

activity The result is that the rate of change in these more organized portions is slowed

and therefore feels relatively stable Change is slowed but it does not stop completely

Recurrent patterns can lose their shape, they can become obsolete, and the pattern

can shift each time it is redone

So what does such organizing look like? A metaphorical answer is found in Taylor and Van Every ’ s (2000) use of Atlan ’ s (1979) contrast between smoke and crystal As will be

elaborated later in this book (p 33 of Chapter 3 on faith, evidence, and action), the

limit-ing conditions between which organizlimit-ing unfolds are smoke, which they equate with

variety, complexity, and conversations whose outcomes are unpredictable, and crystal,

which they equate with repetition, regularity, and texts that stabilize

Organization resides between smoke and crystal just as it resides between tion and text Organization is talked into existence when portions of smoke - like conver- sation are preserved in crystal - like texts that are then articulated by agents speaking on behalf of an emerging collectivity Repetitive cycles of texts, conversations, and agents defi ne and modify one another and jointly organize everyday life (Taylor and Van Every,

conversa-2000, p 31)

Atlan ’ s poetic depiction is not that far removed from more recent poetic tions that summarize complexity theory Christopher Langton, in discussing ‘ the edge of

descrip-chaos, ’ remarks that:

right in between the two extremes (of order and chaos), at a kind of abstract phase sition called ‘ the edge of chaos, ’ you fi nd complexity, a class of behaviors in which the com- ponents of the system never quite lock into place yet never quite dissolve into turbulence either (cited in Waldrop, 1991, p 293)

Organizing carves out transient order in the space between smoke and crystal Or stated more compactly, permanence is fabricated It is fabricated out of streaming expe-

rience Robert Chia (2003) provides one sense of what organizing means in the context

of streaming experience:

The idea that organizing could be more productively thought of as a generic existential strategy for subjugating the immanent forces of change; that organization is really a loosely coordinated but precarious ‘ world - making ’ attempt to regularize human exchanges and to develop a predictable pattern of interactions for the purpose of minimizing effort; that lan- guage is the quintessential organizing technology that enables us to selectively abstract from the otherwise intractable fl ux of raw experiences; that management is more about the taming of chance, uncertainty, and ambiguity than about choice; and that individuals them- selves are always already effects of organizational forces: all these escape the traditional organization theorist Thus, the broader organizational questions of how social order is achieved; how the fl ux and fl ow of our lifeworlds are rendered coherent and plausible; how individual identities are established and social entities created; how taxonomies and sys- tems of classifi cation are produced and with what effects; how causal relations are imputed and with what consequences; how systems of signifi cation are used to arbitrarily carve

up reality and with what outcomes; these are left unanswered by traditional organizational theory (Chia, 2003, p 123)

ORGANIZED IMPERMANENCE 5

One way to make the ‘ generic existential strategy ’ of organizing more concrete is

to propose that organization emerges in communication Taylor and Van Every (2000)

argue that conversation is the site for organizational emergence and language is the

textual surface from which organization is read Thus, organizations are talked into

exist-ence locally and are read from the language produced there The intertwining of text

and conversation turns circumstances into a situation that is comprehensible and that

can then serve as a springboard for action

The resulting network of multiple, overlapping, loosely connected conversations,

spread across time and distance, collectively preserves patterns of understanding that

are more complicated than any one node can reproduce The distributed organization

literally does not know what it knows until macro - actors articulate it This ongoing

articu-lation gives voice to the collectivity and enables interconnected conversations and

con-versationalists to see what they have said, to understand what it might mean, and to

learn who they might be

For an organization to act, its knowledge must undergo two transformations: (1) it has

to be textualized so that it becomes a unique representation of the otherwise multiply

dis-tributed understandings; (2) it has to be voiced by someone who speaks on behalf of the

network and its knowledge (Taylor and Van Every, 2000, p 243) One has to be careful

here not to presume that there is a fi xed sequence in which conversing produces texts

that then produce action Frequently, action is the pretext for subsequent conversations

and texts that interpret the enacted event Alternatively, to pose the question in the

ver-nacular of sensemaking, how can we know what we think (texts) until we see (listening)

what we ’ ve done (conversing)? Communication, language, talk, conversation, and

inter-action are crucial sites in organizing Phrases such as ‘ Drop your tools, ’ ‘ We are at

take-off, ’ ‘ If I don ’ t know about it, it isn ’ t happening, ’ ‘ This virus looks like St Louis Encephalitis, ’

‘ Our pediatric heart cases are unusually complex, ’ and ‘ These fi ngerprints are a close

enough match to the prints at the Madrid commuter train bombing, ’ all represent textual

surfaces constructed at conversational sites where people make sense of prior actions

in ways that constrain subsequent actions

The resulting picture of impermanence and organization looks something like this:

We perceive the processes of organization to be a restless searching to fi x its structure

through the generation of texts, written and spoken, that refl exively map the organization

and its preoccupations back into its discourse, and so, for the moment, produce

regular-ity It is the existence of such texts and the text - worlds they constitute that makes the

organization visible and tangible to people (Taylor and Van Every, 2000, p 325)

‘ Restless searching ’ (in an early draft I mistakenly (?) typed ’ reckless') and ‘ generation

of texts ’ both presume that action is a force on conversations and texts If cognition lies

in the path of the action, then texts and conversations also lie in its path

The preceding line of analysis is a composite of several familiar ideas Most obvious

is the affi nity with several ideas in pragmatism To depict impermanent organizing is to

presume that people have agency, that there is an ongoing dialetic between continuity

and discontinuity from which events emerge, that humans shape their circumstances, and

that minds and selves emerge from action (Maines, 1991, p 1532) Frequent citations to

the work of William James and John Dewey will attest to the pragmatic grounding of this

6 THE IMPERMANENT ORGANIZATION

argument Discussions of organizing that take the form of a garbage can (e.g Cohen,

March, and Olsen, 1972), temporary system (Meyerson, Kramer, and Weick, 1995), a

site for self - organizing (e.g Kramer, 2007), and an impermanent collaboration (Ferriani,

Corriado, and Boschetti, 2005), all presume ongoing fl ows of experience punctuated by

moments of relative order The notion of ‘ impermanence ’ is prominent in Eastern

psychol-ogy and philosophy, as is apparent in our discussions of mindful organizing in Chapters

6 and 7 Impermanence in Eastern thought ‘ is the quality of experience that everything is

shifting, going to pieces, slowly dissolving, rising and falling, and that moment - to - moment

experience is all there is ’ (p 93 in Chapter 6 )

In the face of all of this shifting, dissolving, and discontinuity, people are not sive They enact as well as search for anchors They anchor by means of sensemak-

pas-ing, as we discuss in chapters on the properties of sensemaking (Chapter 8 ), doubt

as a trigger for sensemaking (Chapter 15 ), information overload as both the occasion

and the product of sensemaking (Chapter 5 ), enactment as a means of structuring

fl ux (Chapter 11 ), and an example of collective sensemaking grounded in efforts by

the Centers for Disease Control to make sense of the strange virus that was eventually

recognized as West Nile Virus (Chapter 4 ) People also anchor by means of

recur-rent processes, as we discuss in chapters on distributed organization at NASA and

how that distribution hindered prevention of the Columbia shuttle tragedy (Chapter 7 ),

systems that are implemented to coordinate medical care but which are also

vulner-able to error (Chapter 9 ); temporary organizing under extreme conditions of danger

and uncertainty in wildland fi re (Chapter 12 ), and what it means to organize change

when change is already underway (Chapter 13 ) People also anchor by efforts to learn

new patterns, hold recurrent patterns together, and bounce back when those patterns

begin to unravel This form of anchoring is discussed in chapters on faith as the glue of

organizing (Chapter 3 ), dropping one ’ s tools as a means to preserve patterns (Chapter

14 ), mindful attention as a way of keeping up with change (Chapter 6 ), and the

lia-bilities that can occur when processes are held together too tightly and too narrowly

(Chapter 10 )

If we reinvoke the image of smoke and crystal, attempted anchoring by means of organizing is a move away from the impermanence of smoke toward the permanence

of crystal That movement, however, is slowed and counteracted by conditions such

as continuing change, reorganizing, forgetting, and adaptation All of these limit efforts

to establish permanence Organization, therefore, embodies continuing tension in the

form of simultaneous pulls toward smoke and crystal Under such dynamic conditions

of continuous rise and fall, it makes sense to study processes of organizing and to treat

organization as a reifi cation in the service of stabilizing an event cluster

Organizations struggle to preserve the illusion of permanence and to keep surprise

at a minimum People create fi ctions of permanence by means of practices such as

long - term planning, strategy, reifi cation of temporary structures, justifi cation,

invest-ments in buildings and technology, and acting as if formal reporting relationships are

stable When people drop some of these fi ctions, the fi rm doesn ’ t dissolve Fictions

can be selectively imposed on subunits, imposed with full appreciation of what they do

and don ’ t accomplish, updated regularly, and sometimes enacted into relative

perma-nence through processes that resemble self - fulfi lling prophecies Aside from working

with fi ctions, there is the option of mindful organizing

ORGANIZED IMPERMANENCE 7

When we talk about organizing rather than organization, we acknowledge

imperma-nence (we accept that coordination and interdependence are not stable but need to

be reaccomplished) To view the life of organizations as organizing is also to notice and

reduce the discontent triggered by futile clinging to the impermanent as if it were

perma-nent The need to reorganize is not seen as a failure of strategy but as the inevitable rise

and fall of patterns that are not rooted in one ’ s own personal agency Organizing, viewed

as an emergent unpredictable order, replaces a distinctive, stable self as the actor with

dynamic relationships as the actor Taken together, impermanence, discontent, and

absence of ego suggest that the presumed solidity of organizations is not so obvious

and nor are ways to manage within impermanence

If experience is impermanent, then the issue of organizing becomes an issue of

freezing, not unfreezing If you assume that improvisation is a fundamental means to

cope with impermanence (e.g Weick, 1987, pp 284 – 304), then the question people

face is ‘ How do I get a sequence of events to recur? ’ not ‘ How do I get a sequence to

change? ’ (Weick and Quinn, 1999; see Chapter 13 in this book) The big deal is not

unfreezing so that we can change and then refreeze Instead, the big deal is to freeze

some segment of an ongoing fl ow, learn how to make some portions of it happen

again, and then unfreeze those portions not incorporated into the recurrent sequence

Sequences vary in the ease with which they can be made repetitive Situations that

are easy to convert from improvisation into repetition may well become the fi rst and

most basic organizational routines It is the ease with which sequences of action can

be extracted from improvisation and converted into routines, not mimesis, that may

explain why organizations look so much alike All organizations start out differently with

idiosyncratic improvisations, but then they all also try to enact recurrence in the

inter-est of predictability and uncertainty reduction Now they begin to look and act alike as

they fi nd similar stretches of action to stabilize Organizations look most alike in those

sequences that are easiest to routinize

One form of organizing implied by these ideas closely resembles organizing for

high reliability High reliability organizations (HRO; see Chapter 7 for a description) pay

more attention to failures than success, avoid simplicity rather than cultivate it, are

just as sensitive to operations as they are to strategy, organize for resilience rather

than anticipation, and allow decisions to migrate to experts wherever they are

located These may sound like odd ways to make good decisions, and that may be

true, but decision making is not what HROs are most worried about Instead, they

are more worried about enacting a structure that makes sense of the unexpected

In the context of ceaseless change, processes associated with attention to failure,

simplifi cation, operations, resilience, and expertise make perfectly good sense Those

fi ve processes are important because they mobilize resources for sensemaking

(see Chapter 7), resources such as interaction and conversation (social), clearer

frames of reference (identity), relevant past experience (retrospect), neglected details

in the current environment (cues), updating of impressions that have changed

(ongo-ing), plausible stories of what could be happening (plausibility), and actions that

clarify thinking (enactment) When these sensemaking resources are mobilized,

peo-ple are better able to spot the signifi cance of small, weak signals of danger implicit

in the unexpected and to spot them earlier while it is still possible to do something

about them

8 THE IMPERMANENT ORGANIZATION

Effectiveness in uncertain times lies as much in the capability for sensemaking as it does in the capability for decision making Capabilities for making sense of the unex-

pected get activated, organized, strengthened, and institutionalized more or less

effec-tively depending on how people handle failure, simplifi cation, operations, resilience,

and expertise In compact form, the guidance implicit in these fi ve is:

1 Scrutinize small failures

2 Refi ne the categories you impose

3 Watch what you ’ re doing and what emerges

4 Make do with the resources you have

Active perceptual organization and the astute allocation of attention is a central feature of the managerial task (Chia, 2005, p 1092)

Whether managers construct recurrent action sequences or talk organization into existence, they attend, interpret, act, and learn (Daft and Weick, 1984; see Chapter 10

in Weick, 2001) We use these four activities to impose a crude order on the following

chapters All four activities help stabilize event clusters, including the cluster wherein

pas-sengers mobilized by faith in one another resist highwaymen who are up to no good

Before we get to these four sections, we include two chapters that show why ple like William James, Robert Chia, James Taylor, and Elizabeth Van Every are valua-

peo-ble touchstones and exemplars Chapters 2 and 3 preview the style of analysis used

throughout the remainder of the book Chapter 2 describes crucial assumptions, styles

of thinking, and predecessors whose infl uence pervades the chapters Chapter 3

pro-vides a conceptual overview of key ideas and illustrates these ideas by applying them to

the gradual discovery of the battered child syndrome

Setting the Scene

Chapter 2 is an overview of ideas, a mindset, a way of thinking, and the style of analysis

that defi nes this book Fragments of biography are used to illustrate the way in which

assumptions infl uence how impermanence can be described

The title ‘ mundane poetics ’ calls to mind the close ties between theory and poetry

described by the famous economist, G L S Shackle Shackle, writing to Henry Boettinger

on July 15, 1974 said:

I have been a theoretician because that was the nearest I could get to being a poet

A theory is a poem, at any rate literally, a thing made, a work of art The Greeks, you will tell

me, believed that the poet told more truth than the historian I have long thought that truth

was too elusive and remote to be the real goal The goal for the theoretician is beauty The

theoretician in excelsis, the mathematician, is all for beauty (elegance of proof and result)

My wife has a book of crochet patterns, one of which is called ‘ a supple trellis ’ It is a shawl

of very fi ne, gossamer wool with structure and coherence, yet with no rigidity, its

mathe-matics are topological Such is economic theory It must stretch and twist, but must not

tear (the invariants of topology are these) But this book I speak of is full of shawls, of all

colours, designs, conformations and structures (stitches) We need that too Find the one

that fi ts the scene, is the only way (Littlefi eld, 2000, pp 354 – 355)

The title of this essay contains three important words: mundane, searching, wisdom The

word ‘ mundane ’ signals a focus on ordinary, everyday organizing as the context for

impermanence (recall ‘ the crucible of the quotidian ’ mentioned in the Preface) That focus

on the mundane may seem out of place in this book given the scale and drama of

the events that are explored in subsequent chapters, events such as child abuse

(Chapter 3 ), fi refi ghter fatalities (Chapter 12 ), space shuttle destruction (Chapter 7 ),

adverse events in pediatric surgery (Chapter 10 ), and the West Nile Virus (Chapter 4 )

Dramatic breakdowns, however, are presumed to show explicitly the patterns that unfold

less explicitly in mundane breakdowns

2

A pattern often associated with impermanence involves the sequence that starts with streaming experience, followed by interruption, recovery, and mundane streaming The

shorthand that we often use for this pattern of impermanence is borrowed from Heidegger

(e.g see Chapter 5 in this book) Streaming ⫽ ready - to - hand immersion in activity,

inter-ruption ⫽ unready - to - hand disruption in activity, and recovery ⫽ either present - at - hand

ato-mistic analysis of the activity or resumption of ready - to - hand immersion As will become

clear, the restored mundanity seldom resembles the initial mundanity, a difference that is

captured by scholars of emergence (e.g Plowman et al , 2007) It is a linguistic challenge

to create descriptions of these streaming patterns without the help of a ‘ poetic ’ voice This

was evident to Clifford Geertz who coined the word ‘ faction ’ to describe social science

description as ‘ imaginative writing about real people, in real places, at real times ’ (Horgan,

1998, p 155)

Part of the craft of ‘ searching ’ for fl eeting social order involves careful choice of one ’ s assumptions Since these assumptions constrain what one will see ( ‘ believing is seeing ’ ),

it is important to be explicit and deliberate about such choices There is a note of wishful

thinking in my use of the verb ‘ choose ’ since many assumptions we impose are invisible

hard - wired templates created by socialization That is partly why I try in this chapter to

be clear about some of those whose assumptions have socialized me

Among the assumptions that I have found useful are those involving continuity, lution, ambivalence, complexity, and levels of analysis The assumption of continuity, in

evo-Putnam and Saveland ’ s words (2008), says that:

Our mental routines go with us wherever we go We don ’ t suddenly act differently when organizations are involved We routinely go off on mental ‘ side trips ’ (such as daydream- ing) throughout the day and seem surprised at our capacity to miss situational cues that can result in poor decisions in environments where the consequences are more severe (Putnam and Saveland, 2008, p 107)

The assumption of evolution supplies a mechanism that orders and edits fl ux The assumption of ambivalence highlights a criterion for editing fl ux, namely preserve adapta-

bility The assumption of levels does away with the distinction between macro and micro

and grounds organizing in relationships rather than individuals Finally, the assumption of

complexity highlights the variety in both internal and external environments Mismatched

variety increases the frequency of impermanence These fi ve assumptions are developed

in Chapter 2 , and their infl uence is visible in subsequent chapters

The fi nal key word in the title, ‘ wisdom, ’ points to a growing emphasis in tional theory (e.g Kessler and Bailey, 2007) on ‘ the acquired ability to create viable reali-

organiza-ties from equivocal circumstances and to use informed judgment to negotiate prudent

courses of action through the realities created ’ (Gioia, 2007, p 287) The ‘ creation of

viable realities ’ is a continuing activity which means that no one reality is permanent The

‘ wisdom ’ of impermanence lies in not clinging to that which will vanish anyway It also

lies in accepting the necessity to reaccomplish realities that seemed to be stable and in

action that refl ects an awareness of incomplete information, action that blends

knowl-edge with ignorance

The following article was published in Organization Studies , 2004, 25 (4), 653 – 668

Vita Contemplativa

Mundane Poetics: Searching for

Wisdom in Organization Studies

Karl E Weick

The fi nal, defi nitive version of this paper has been published in Organization Studies, Issue 25(4), Copyright © 2004 SAGE Publications Inc Reprinted with permission

Abstract

The craft of idea generation is explored autobiographically, using as the core

princi-ple the theme that ideas generate their own contexts for development Ideas generate

their own contexts by means of conceptual affi nities, as is illustrated by the author ’ s

movement from ideas about unintended consequences to ideas about cognitive

disso-nance, enacted environments, organizational failures, and wisdom Ideas also generate

their own context by means of the assumptions they entail, in the author ’ s case, these

entailments being assumptions of continuity, evolution, ambivalence, complexity, and

levels of analysis When activated, these diverse resources may generate portraits of

human organizing that have poetic overtones, but that resemblance simply mirrors

the fact that people do poetry in their everyday living

Keywords: idea generation, assumptions about organizing, organizational process,

breakdowns

Barbara Czarniawska (2003) describes six styles of organizational theory including

sci-entistic (e.g Thompson), revolutionary (e.g Burrell), philosophical (e.g March),

educa-tional (e.g Silverman), ethnographic (e.g Van Maanen), and the one she identifi es with

my work, ‘ poetic ’ 1 It is true that some of the more popular parts of the organizational

behavior books I ’ ve written have been the poems I cite How I work and who I am may

be refl ected in those choices more candidly than I realized or intended The poems in

the 1995 book on sensemaking (Weick 1995) would introduce me as a person of many

selves ( ‘ We are Many ’ : Pablo Neruda, pp 18 – 22) concerned with crafting words that

imaginatively capture the human condition in organizations ( ‘ What I Remember the

Writers Telling Me ’ : William Meredith, p 196) Those many selves, realized within

writ-ing, continue to reveal themselves in additional poems contained in The Social Psychology

of Organizing (Weick 1979) Here we fi nd the author pursuing journeys to gain a new

understanding of his confusion ( ‘ In Broken Images ’ : Robert Graves, p 224), journeys

that are their own reward and will make sense only when they are viewed retrospectively

( ‘ Ithaca ’ : C P Cavafy, pp 263 – 264)

What makes the poetic designation tricky, however, is that a poetic style is hard

to describe and imitate because ‘ uniqueness forms part of what is perceived as elegant ’

(Czarniawska 2003: 255) Furthermore, poetic stylists ‘ need not know how they

are doing what they are doing in order to do it brilliantly ’ These hurdles

notwith-standing, I want to discuss ideas, their contexts and their development, with an eye

to illustrating one ‘ logic of creation ’ The result may not be imitable, but at least it will

demystify

I take my lead for this essay from Paul Val é ry

‘ We say that an author is original when we cannot trace the hidden transformations that others underwent in his mind; we mean to say that the dependence of what he does on what others have done is excessively complex and irregular There are works in the likeness

of others, and works that are the reverse of others, but there are also works of which the relation with earlier productions is so intricate that we become confused and attribute them to the direct intervention of the gods (To go deeper into the subject, we should have to discuss the infl uence of a mind on itself and of a work on its author) ’ (Paul Val é ry, cited in Bloom 2002: 494)

As a fi rst anchor, let me mention some predecessors who have undergone ‘ mations ’ in my mind The identity of those ‘ others ’ is not hidden, nor is my dependence

transfor-on them hard to spot Harold Garfi nkel and Letransfor-on Festinger taught me about retrospect,

Gregory Bateson and Magorah Maruyama taught me about systems, Floyd Allport

taught me about interaction, George Mandler taught me about interruption, Donald

Campbell taught me about social evolution, Dick Neisser taught me about cognition,

Alfred Schutz taught me about interpretation and expression in everyday life, James

March taught me about organizations, Gary Klein taught me about experience and

expertise, Marianne Paget taught me about mistakes, William James taught me about

the human condition, and Norman Maclean taught me about the human condition in

Mann Gulch These teachers had their impact largely through contexts created by their

writing In order to make myself more open to these contexts, I read, imagine, connect,

practice virtual ethnography in the armchair, write, and edit Those are moves of the

imagination working within soft constraints

The variety of these 13 topics — retrospect, systems, interaction, interruption, tion, cognition, interpretation, organizations, experience, expertise, mistakes, the human

evolu-condition, and Mann Gulch — suggests that Val é ry is probably right My dependence

on the works of others is complex, irregular, intricate, and fi lled with ‘ hidden

trans-formations ’ The problem then is that any effort on my part to talk about the

develop-ment of ideas will be a plausible rendering at best Hidden means hidden But the author

does deserve a say, since he or she has access to a different set of data such as activities

underway, places where writing occurred, books that were spread out on the desk, the

content of notes and marginalia, not to mention well intentioned aspirations and

the improvisations that followed when those aspirations collapsed I want to talk about the

development of ideas largely by talking about the contexts that ideas and assumptions

themselves set up Since both of these contexts exert pressure simultaneously, often in

ways that are contradictory, it is not surprising that one ’ s work lurches between

top-ics and within toptop-ics due to complex dependencies Analysts are basically thrown into

the middle of ongoing intellectual traditions, styles, people, and problems It ’ s all pretty

chaotic The trick is to make sense of the chaos, and in my case to then make sense of the

making sense of chaos

There is certainly more to idea development than ideas and assumptions, but I have

discussed these other autobiographical inputs (e.g Weick 1993) and tactical inputs

(e.g Weick 1992) elsewhere Here, I want to focus on ideas

Ideas as Context

Ideas can serve as their own context If ideas are equated with plans or blueprints or

patterns, then they are pragmatic tools that direct activities, including the activity of

their own expansion and development

In my own case, Robert Merton ’ s discussion of unanticipated consequences, as

sum-marized by March and Simon in Organizations (1958), was a powerful initial anchor

that triggered several subsequent variants I was fascinated by the idea that there were

orderly but unintentional progressions by which people got into trouble, progressions

that arose from situational complexity and selective perception This fascination with

Merton is already a bit ironic because I learned about his ideas while reading the classic

work Organizations Thus, I came away from a classic intrigued by the ideas of a person

the authors of the classic were trying to replace

The idea of unanticipated consequences fi rst became a tool for me in the context of a

study of productivity in two research teams working on the design of heart valves and

semi - conductors (Pepinsky et al 1966) In both cases, team members spent

consider-able time doing what we came to call ‘ fa ç ade maintenance ’ The teams were more

con-cerned with metrics that demonstrated their productivity to project monitors than with

the problem itself More fa ç ade maintenance was practiced by the less productive team,

which meant that the better they looked, the worse they were doing Looking

produc-tive didn ’ t serve to create latitude and autonomy to do the real work, as many thought

it would Instead, fa ç ade maintenance became the work Tied to the then current idea

of impression management (Goffman 1959), what we were watching was an initial

separation between front - stage fa ç ade maintenance and backstage research, a

separa-tion that began to break down as people spent more time and effort maintaining the

fa ç ade A potential vicious circle was set in motion in which more maintenance meant

less productivity which necessitated more maintenance which led to even less

pro-ductivity, all triggered by the mundane requirement to fi le quarterly progress reports

In their efforts to see how people were doing, project monitors made it impossible for

people to do things

The idea of unanticipated consequences set up a context in which I welcomed cognitive

dissonance theory (Festinger 1957) as a more compact, more psychological, more

man-ageable way to think about unanticipated consequences Dissonance research produced

fi ndings such as decreased incentives for doing an activity led to increased attraction to

the activity; disconfi rmed expectations led to intensifi ed adherence to the expectation;

effort expenditure led to heightened evaluation of worthless activities in which the effort

was invested All of these seemed like instances of unanticipated consequences triggered

by insuffi cient justifi cation So I was still watching the unexpected materialize, but now

I had a way to think about it In my dissertation I combined dissonance theory with a

14 KARL E WEICK

concept attainment task that modeled research team activity, and saw how

productiv-ity could be pressed into the service of dissonance reduction In this microcosm were the

precursors of an enacted environment, sensemaking under pressure, confi rmation bias,

mutual reinforcement of thought and action, and commitment In other words, cognitive

dissonance was and continues to be 2 a way of thinking that serves as an entry point into

all sorts of problems, including persistent medical errors such as occurred at the Bristol

Royal Infi rmary, wildland fi re entrapments such as occurred at South Canyon, and

with-held communications such as occurred at Tenerife

But, while vestiges of the idea of dissonance persist (e.g Harmon Jones and Harmon Jones 2003), so too does the idea of unanticipated consequences Concurrent with

-studies of dissonance, I did work on unanticipated consequences associated with

over-load, stress, interruption, breakdowns, and cosmology episodes The bulk of the

unan-ticipated consequences tended to be negative and included outcomes such as regression,

fl ight, tunnel vision, self - justifi cation, compartmentalization, and denial But a more

complicated story has also been developing Unanticipated means just that, something

that is not foreseen And one could fail to foresee positive outcomes, recoveries, and

learning just as much as more negative outcomes

I still fi nd myself intrigued by what seem to be mistakes, errors, and adverse events, but now they seem to be a whole lot less straightforward I marvel at Marianne Paget ’ s

(1988) nuanced argument that actions become mistaken, they don ’ t start as mistakes

James Reason ’ s (1997) conceptualization of chains of errors speaks to systems that

set up failure, as is true also for Charles Perrow ’ s (1984) work on normal accidents

Interruptions, when viewed in the context of Heidegger ’ s ‘ unready to hand ’ moments,

become ideal sites where practice and theory meet and inform one another (Weick

2003) When people seem to forget the lessons they ’ ve learned, this may represent an

adaptive move in which they discredit some of their experience because they fi nd

them-selves in what seems to be a novel environment This possibility shows up in discussions

of the ‘ attitude of wisdom ’ , which is acting as if one both knows and doesn ’ t what is

happening and what to do about it

The stream of ideas here runs from unanticipated consequences, through dissonance and interruptions, and is currently visible in discussions of wisdom, becoming, and

recovery This progression seems to qualify as mundane poetics since it basically

reca-pitulates what pragmatists, especially John Dewey, view as the natural logic by which

people evaluate and reconstruct their experience To see this, consider Thayer ’ s

sum-mary of Dewey ’ s ideas about truth

‘ Inquiry is initiated in conditions of doubt; it terminates in the establishment of conditions

in which doubt is no longer needed or felt It is this settling of conditions of doubt, a ment produced and warranted by inquiry, which distinguishes the warranted assertion The purpose of inquiry is to create goods, satisfactions, solutions, and integration in what was initially a wanting, discordant, troubled, and problematic situation In this respect all intelligence is evaluative and no separation of moral, scientifi c, practical, or theoretical experience is to be made ’ (Thayer 1967: 434 – 435)

So, as I weave my way from ideas about unanticipated consequences to ideas about the attitude of wisdom, I simply act like any pragmatist who moves from conditions

MUNDANE POETICS 15

where doubt is paramount, to conditions where it is assimilated, accepted, and

con-verted into coping and organizing and into warranted assertions about how people cope

and organize

The point is, ideas shape ideas, they lead on to other ideas, they enact their own

con-texts Tactically, to follow these leads one must trust in the power of free association to

reveal unexpected connections Mundane poetics may consist of warranted assertions,

but the intelligence to get there is helped along by intuition (Klein, 2003), System 1

think-ing (Kahnemann 2003), and trust in the plausibility of initially puzzlthink-ing connections

Assumptions as Context

Assumptions provide a reality that is taken as given, a reality that exerts infl uence over

what one notices and ignores and labels as signifi cant My work on topics such as

sense-making, organizing, and heedful interrelating hangs together (albeit tacitly) through

many assumptions, a few of which I want to make explicit

Assumption of Continuity

This assumption was made explicit in 1969 (Weick 1969: 25 – 27) when I criticized the

phrase ‘ organizational behavior ’ because it tempted us to look for uniqueness in reifi ed

places, and drew attention away from the fact that behavior is behavior The argument

went like this

‘ Events inside organizations resemble events outside; sensitivities of the worker inside are

continuous with sensitivities outside Since people have as much desire to integrate the

various portions of their life as to compartmentalize them, what happens inside affects

what happens outside, and vice versa This is a roundabout way of saying that

continu-ity from setting to setting is more likely than discontinucontinu-ity Rather than searching for

unique behaviors that occur within an organization and then building a theory about this

uniqueness, it seems more useful to build theories about particular ways that enduring

individual dispositions are expressed in an organizational setting, and about the effects of

this expression ’ (Weick 1969: 25 – 26)

A good example of this is found in the behavior of aircraft pilots (Allnut, in Weick

1995: 103 – 104):

‘ A pilot may say that he does not allow his work and his domestic life to mix: but the

state-ment can only be partly true Human beings are 24 hour - a - day people, possessing only

one brain with which to control all of their activities; and this brain has to cover both

work and play In sum, events which happen in one segment of daily life may therefore

infl uence what happens in other segments The pilot who has just quarreled violently is in

a dangerous state, for although he may have moved away from the person with whom he

has quarreled, and climbed aboard his aircraft, the physiological and psychological effects

of the quarrel may last well into the fl ight, and the crushing retort which he wishes he

had thought of at the time of the argument may crowd his single decision channel to the

exclusion of more important information ’

16 KARL E WEICK

To put this assumption of continuity into practice is to treat all lived experience as relevant data for organizing and to presume that refl ection on those data is relevant

to organizational life To assume continuity is to pay more attention to situations,

con-texts, roles, and processes of structuring by means of actions and perceptions, and less

attention to structures, entities, boundaries

One effect of the assumption of continuity is that it favors an additional assumption, namely, ‘ response repertoires control noticing ’ (Weick 1969: 26) That implication con-

tinues to underlie my thinking about change, interpretation, and failure Originally, the

idea of response repertoires and noticing came from a gloss of George Herbert Mead ’ s

assertion that ‘ An act is an impulse that maintains the life process by selection of

cer-tain sorts of stimuli it needs Thus, the organism creates its environment The stimulus

is the occasion for the expression of the impulse ’ (Mead 1956: 120) If people notice

stimuli that permit them to do what they want to do, then as wants vary so too do the

features that are noticed But ‘ impulses that maintain life ’ are broader than wants, and

also include such things as abilities, functional attitudes, and values This suggests that

behavior can be viewed as responses in search of excuses for expression Thus, people

tend to see those problems and opportunities that their repertoire can handle, but they

are reluctant to see those it can ’ t Organizations now become salient as one among many

sites of potential stimuli that will be noticed or ignored depending on the response

reper-toires that people activate Organizational socialization, training, and culture can modify

repertoires, but they seldom wipe out everything that was there before

Taken even further, assumptions about continuity and response repertoires affect inquiry about organizational life

‘ If one gains an understanding of response repertoires and the conditions under which attention is controlled by the content of these repertoires, then a more substantial theory about organizations and behaviors can be built The theory would concentrate on atten- tion rather than on action It would essentially ask the question, “ How are the processes and contents of attention infl uenced by the conditions of task - based interdependency found in those collectivities which we conventionally designate as organizations? ” ’ (Weick 1969: 26)

While I cringe at my earlier subordination of action to attention, since acting one ’ s way into understanding is a hallmark of later work, I continue to use the idea that

capabilities, especially linguistic capabilities of categorizing, affect what one notices

To understand organizations is to start with the premise that organizations are

note-worthy for the forms of interdependent action that they favor and discourage These

forms serve as repertoires that affect what people notice, affi rm, label, and act upon

as well as the stories they construct retrospectively to make sense of their actions As

forms of interdependence change (e.g they become more or less heedful, they shift

from pooled interdependence to reciprocal interdependence), so too do perceptions,

actions, stories

Continuing infl uence from the assumptions of continuity and repertoires is ible in several recent co - authored discussions where we argue that collective mindful-

vis-ness is constituted by processes that enhance capability, and this enhancement then

allows earlier detection of weaker signals that unexpected events are unfolding, which

increases the likelihood of recovery and continuing reliable performance

MUNDANE POETICS 17

Assumption of Evolutionary Epistemology

Nowhere are the pragmatics of poetics more evident than in my handling of

evolution-ary epistemology I say that simply because evolution as I use it (and ‘ use ’ is the key word

here) consists of an immense debt to Donald Campbell ’ s thinking which I tend to use

as a platform rather than a vessel Said differently, my thinking within an evolutionary

framework retains less of Campbell ’ s stunning nuance than does the thinking of people

like Azevedo (2002) and McKelvey (2002)

An evolutionary epistemology highlights a distinctive set of themes in organized

life The context of evolution draws attention to such things as the inherent tension

between retention and variation, the wise but wasteful practice of blind variation, the

enactment of selection environments, imagination as simulated trial and error, life as

the experience of thrownness where higher variation rates and playing the percentages

increase chances for survival, requisite variety as a mechanism for adaptation that may

produce a better match between variation and selection, and artifi cial selection based

on deliberate intentions rather than natural selection based on exogenous determinants

as a potential feature of organizational life Organizing emerges as an ongoing stream

of failed experiments and relentless mortality, updating, surprise, adaptations that

threaten to reduce adaptability, winnowing, and occasional convergence

When an assumption about evolution is used to think about organizing, here, in Wanda

Orlikowski ’ s (1996) artful description, is what one sees Orlikowski watched what happens

when people in a computer customer service center phased in a system of Lotus Notes to

keep better track of the problems that were being phoned in

‘ Each variation of a given form is not an abrupt or discrete event, neither is it, by itself,

discontinuous Rather, through a series of ongoing and situated accommodations,

adap-tations, and alterations (that draw on previous variations and mediate future ones),

suf-fi cient modisuf-fi cations may be enacted over time that fundamental changes are achieved

There is no deliberate orchestration of change here, no technological inevitability, no

dra-matic discontinuity, just recurrent and reciprocal variations in practice over time Each

shift in practice creates the conditions for further breakdowns, unanticipated outcomes,

and innovations, which in turn are met with more variations Such variations are

ongo-ing; there is no beginning or end point in this change process ’ (Orlikowski 1996: 66)

How can I know what I think about evolution until I see what Wanda says? Notice

several features of these last two paragraphs What I think comes in part from seeing

what I say, but also in part from seeing what others say I pick a quotation that helps

me think, ponder why I think it is helpful, and then try to write in the spirit of what

I ’ ve just read That ’ s mundane poetics executed through the use of others ’ well - turned

phrases and arguments as ‘ touchstones ’ (Stinchcombe 1982) that shape rhythms,

connections, and extensions in my own writing

That is an instance of style as theory But it is also an instance of evolution itself In the

recipe, how can I know what I think until I see what I say, saying equates to variation,

seeing equates to selection of meaning in what was said, and thinking equates to

reten-tion of an interpretareten-tion The retained interpretareten-tion may then be imposed subsequently

to interpret similar saying (retention is credited) in order to construct cumulative

under-standing, test past labels for their validity, or generalize older labels to newer events

18 KARL E WEICK

But the retained interpretation may also be set aside (retention is discredited) in

order to create newer meanings that produce greater differentiation, uncover

pre-viously taken - for - granted qualities, or raise new questions about what the story is

Sensemaking is evolution writ small Just as adaptation can preclude adaptability on

a larger scale, repetitive saying and seeing on a smaller scale can blunt sensitivity to

changing circumstances The same old saying enacts the same old seeing which enacts

the same old thinking

Poetics can be an antidote to that sameness, but it runs the opposite risk that ability will preclude adaptation A system that produces only variation and remembers

adapt-nothing is not demonstrably better than a system that produces only retention and

remembers everything The fi rst system is overcome by events because efforts to produce

one variation after another soon lag behind current demands for a swift response The

second system is overcome by events because repetition of older routines lags demands

for updating to address unique contingencies The evolutionary wisdom that avoids such

a trap involves ambivalence, and that is the assumption to which we now turn

Assumption of Ambivalence

A byproduct of my exposure to evolutionary thought has been a deepening

apprecia-tion of ambivalence I know how that must sound To make things appear even worse,

that appreciation extends even further to the assumption that ambivalence is the

opti-mal compromise The phrase is Donald Campbell ’ s (1965) The inspiration for the

phrase comes from William James

First, the inspiration

‘ The whole story of our dealings with the lower wild animals is the history of our taking advantage of the way in which they judge of everything by its mere label, as it were, so as to ensnare or kill them Nature, in them, has left matters in this rough way, and made them act

always in the manner which would be oftenest right There are more worms unattached to

hooks than impaled upon them; therefore, on the whole, says Nature to her fi shy children,

bite at every worm and take your chances But as her children get higher, and their lives

more precious, she reduces the risks Since what seems to be the same object may be now

a genuine food and now a bait; since in gregarious species each individual may prove to be either the friend or the rival, according to the circumstances, of another; since any entirely

unknown object may be fraught with weal or woe, Nature implants contrary impulses to act

on many classes of things , and leaves it to slight alterations in the conditions of the individual

case to decide which impulse shall carry the day Thus, greediness and suspicion, curiosity and timidity, coyness and desire, bashfulness and vanity, sociability and pugnacity, seem to shoot over into each other as quickly, and to remain in as unstable equilibrium, in the higher birds and mammals as in man ’ (James 1890, Vol 2: 392)

‘ Curiosity and fear form a couple of antagonistic emotions liable to be awakened by the same outward thing, and manifestly both useful to their possessor The spectacle of their alternation is often amusing enough, as in the timid approaches and scared wheelings which sheep or cattle will make in the presence of some new object they are investigating

I have seen alligators in the water act in precisely the same way towards a man seated on the beach in front of them — gradually drawing near as long as he kept still, frantically

MUNDANE POETICS 19

careering back as soon as he made a movement Inasmuch as new objects may always be

advantageous, it is better that an animal should not absolutely fear them But, inasmuch

as they may also possibly be harmful, it is better that he should not be quite indifferent to

them either, but on the whole remaining on the qui vive , ascertain as much about them,

and what they may be likely to bring forth, as he can, before settling down to rest in their

presence Some such susceptibility for being excited and irritated by the mere novelty, as

such, of any movable feature of the environment must form the instinctive basis of all

human curiosity ’ (James 1890, Vol 2: 429)

Here is Campbell ’ s (1965) interpretation of James

‘ The presence in moral codes, proverb sets, and motivational systems of opposing values is

often interpreted as discrediting the value system by showing its logical inconsistency This

is a misapplication of logic, and in multiple - contingency environments, the joint presence

of opposing tendencies has a functional survival value Where each of two opposing

ten-dencies has survival relevance, the biological solution seems to be an ambivalent

alter-nation of expressions of each rather than the consistent expression of an intermediate

motivational state Ambivalence, rather than averaging, seems the optimal compromise ’

In the world of wildland fi refi ghting, one of my favorite microcosms of organizing,

ambivalence is visible in the minimal design for organizing that is practiced by fi re

crews This design was fi rst formulated by the late Paul Gleason (1991) whose LCES

system prescribes that a crew should not attack a fi re until its l ookouts, c

ommuni-cation links, e scape routes (at least two), and s afety zones are in place and known to

everyone What ’ s interesting about an LCES design is that it is an optimal compromise

of knowledge and doubt The placement of lookouts and the activation of

communica-tion imply that one knows what is going on and how the local condicommunica-tions are related

to the bigger picture of an active fi re The attention to escape routes and safety zones,

however, implies that what one knows may be incomplete and that this potential

igno-rance needs to be recognized and hedged The crew is simultaneously confi dent and

cautious Escape routes and safety zones preclude hubris Lookouts and

communica-tion links preclude timidity The combinacommunica-tion of these four structures is respectful of

both knowledge and ignorance, which means that this confi guration exhibits both the

ambivalence of wisdom and the wisdom of ambivalence

Meacham (1990) underscores my conclusion in his discussion of wisdom

‘ The essence of wisdom lies not in what is known but rather in the manner in which

that knowledge is held and in how that knowledge is put to use To be wise is not to know

particular facts but to know without excessive confi dence or excessive cautiousness [to]

both accumulate knowledge while remaining suspicious of it, and recognizing that much

remains unknown, is to be wise ’ (pp 185, 187)

Thus, ‘ the essence of wisdom is in knowing that one does not know, in the

appre-ciation that knowledge is fallible, in the balance between knowing and doubting ’

(Meacham 1990: 210) Wisdom is a quality of thought that is animated by a

dialec-tic in which the more one knows, the more one realizes the extent of what one does

not know

20 KARL E WEICK

However, ambivalence should not be confused with indecisiveness Ambivalence concerns co - existence of competing tendencies, and can be seen as simultaneous

efforts to adapt yet retain adaptability and to treat past experience as a guide as well

as a trap Oxymorons such as ‘ controlled burn ’ epitomize ambivalence, which

sug-gests the odd possibility that systems so characterized may be highly effective in

rap-idly changing environments since they retain a wider range of ways to adapt Jerry

Salancik (1977) worries that ‘ commitment is too easy ’ since any action that is public,

irreversible and volitional tends to be binding and prods people to come up with

rea-sons that justify the binding action Success in fi nding such rearea-sons aids sensemaking,

but also predisposes to escalation, unwarranted persistence, and biased reasoning If

commitment is ‘ too easy ’ , then one way to make it ‘ harder ’ is through ambivalence

Ambivalence weakens irreversibility, scales down the importance of the choice, and

provides a ready - to - hand justifi cation (e.g I did what I did in order to stay agile)

Assumption of Complexity

The idea that people need to complicate themselves and that it takes a complex

organi-zation to cope with a complex environment fl ies in the face of the counsel that people

need to focus, simplify, and keep it simple Why all the clamor in favor of complication?

Why is it dangerous to dwell on simplicity?

I take seriously William Schutz ’ s (1979) argument that understanding progresses through three stages: superfi cial simplicity, confused complexity, profound simplicity

I am not against simplicity per se , but I am against mistaking superfi cial simplicity for

simplicity that is profound That ’ s what I fi nd fascinating about more effective high

relia-bility organizations (HROs) (Weick et al 1999) HROs strive for profound simplicity They

understand that the means to move toward profound simplicity is through doubting the

completeness of their assumptions, through experimenting, and through entertaining

a wider variety of possibilities They realize that when they distrust their simplifi cations

they will feel confused, but they also know that out of that confusion may come fuller

understanding of what they face

When we are confused we pay closer attention to what is happening in order to reduce the confusion Later, all we remember is that this period of confusion was an

unpleasant experience What we often fail to realize is that we also learned a lot of

details while struggling with the confusion Those struggles and their consequences

comprise learning, even if momentarily they don ’ t feel that way After a period of

con-fused complexity, we often see that many of our initial simplifi cations were superfi cial,

but we also see that a handful of those initial simplifi cations still hold true, although for

different reasons than we fi rst thought And we also see that a handful of new simplifi

-cations help us make sense of the earlier confusion These outcomes are the profound

simplicities that are sometimes labeled ‘ wisdom ’

If people examine mindful HROs, those organizations often appear to be no more complex than mindless organizations What people miss, however, is the fact that

mindful organizations have struggled through periods of confused complexity on the

way to their profound simplicities (e.g they looked closely at their own failures and

have examined them with candor) Mindless organizations, however, tend to settle for

MUNDANE POETICS 21

the fi rst superfi cial simplicities they stumble onto, and as a result know neither

them-selves nor their environment very well This by the way is why benchmarking seldom

works You can borrow the simplicities but you can ’ t borrow the confused complexity

that gives meaning to the profound simplicity Without that background, you have no

idea why the simplifi cations are profound, why they work, or what lessons they

summa-rize Hence, the borrowing is superfi cial It fails to come to grips with either your own

resources or the environment, and typically fails when implemented

Most people would agree that the business environment is complex The complexity

is due in large part to the fact that the environment is unknowable and unpredictable

In the face of all of this complexity, everyone simplifi es the data they receive But there

are better and worse simplifi cations Better simplifi cations arise from deeper knowledge

of the environment and deeper understanding of what the organization is and what it

can do That deeper knowledge develops when people attend to more things, entertain a

greater variety of interpretations, differentiate their ideas, argue, listen to one another,

work to reconcile differences, and commit to revisiting and updating whatever profound

simplicities they settle on as guidelines for action Practices such as these are

institution-alized in the better HROs But they don ’ t come easily It takes a complex organization to

see the value of confused complexity, to weather the messiness of confused complexity,

and to have faith that confused complexity is not terminal but can lead on to the hard

won lessons summarized in profound simplicity It also takes a complex organization to

retain and value the diverse resources needed to spot which assumptions are superfi

-cial and to tolerate the mess when people contest different interpretations of what the

organization faces

The assumption of complexity is also simply another take on the theme of

adapta-tion and adaptability which pervades much of my writing Complexity is important

because it fosters adaptability Complex organizations have extensive response

reper-toires, which means they are in a better position to cope with environments that failed

to show up in their forecasts People are not very good at forecasting, as Bill Starbuck

keeps showing If that ’ s the case, then it makes more sense to invest in generalized

resources that can fi t a variety of new environments than in better models of

forecast-ing The problem with better models of forecasting is that they tend to move away from

generalized resources toward specialized resources And specialized resources may

pro-duce better adaptation to current problems, but less adaptability to handle future

prob-lems In a dynamic environment, future problems materialize swiftly and unexpectedly

Generalized, adaptive resources are more likely to be retained in complex structures

Thus, complex structures preserve both adaptation and adaptability, proving once

again that ambivalence is the optimal compromise

Assumption that Levels Impede Inquiry

If behavior is behavior, then what is gained by arbitrarily carving that continuity

back into the discontinuity of micro and macro phenomena? Latour (1987) asks this

question Taylor and Van Every (2000) ask this question And I address the question

by ignoring it That choice may hinder my work, but it is a deliberate choice And it is

choice that may seem to breach a postmodern sensitivity

22 KARL E WEICK

I assume that distinguishing among levels of analysis is of minor importance, and I

do so for several reasons To be concerned with processes means that one is attuned

to sequences, unfolding, generative settings, amplifi cation, and small events with large

consequences Small beginnings generate unanticipated consequences, as is argued

by people who adopt complexity theory But those same small beginnings often don ’ t

stay small They change size, constrain other events, and spread through what others

reify into groups, organizations, and institutions For example, at the time of this

writ-ing, the report of the shuttle Columbia Accident Investigation Board (Gehman 2003)

has just been released A one - pound piece of foam has triggered questions about

the future of space exploration, the space industry, and space science Those ‘ larger ’

questions and institutions will eventually be translated into budget decisions made

by smaller units ‘ Macro ’ enters into this scenario in the form of presumptions that

actors make about constraints and meanings and consequences Some of these

pre-sumptions are material, some are not But it is the prepre-sumptions that shape and are

shaped by actions Larger sets of actors come under the infl uence of much smaller

sets, due in part to presumptions about one ’ s allies This feature of organizing was

cap-tured in the fi rst ‘ poem ’ that anchored my writing, Piet Hein ’ s poem ‘ Majority Rule ’

(Weick 1969: 2 – 3) Hein depicts a larger world, an ‘ entire state ’ in his imagery, where

the majority that rules turns out to be ‘ one alone who stood at the peak ’ Presumptions

set the stage for this unanticipated outcome in the poem, just as they do in everyday

organized life

The macro – micro distinction also seems dispensable in the sense that there are ideas that fi nesse the distinction This happens when people postulate generic qualities

of systems (e.g Miller 1978), work within an evolutionary epistemology, or propose

fi rst principles that involve social rather than ‘ individual ’ action For example, in 1969

I mentioned that

‘ an important caution must also be introduced [into analyses] Even though we have used the phrase “ observable individual behavior, ” this should not be read as the “ observ- able behavior of a single person ” Given that interdependence is the crucial element from

which a theory of organizations is built, interacts rather than acts are the crucial

observ-ables that must be specifi ed The unit of analysis is contingent response patterns, terns in which an action by actor A evokes a specifi c response in actor B which is then responded to by actor A This is the pattern designated a “ double interact ” Since organizing involves control, infl uence, and authority, a description of organizing must use the double interact as the unit of analysis for specifying observable behavior ’ (Weick 1969: 33)

Obvious as all of that now sounds, it still gets ignored by analysts who equate acts with a micro, psychological, individual perspective Double interacts apply as much

inter-to interactions between contentious nations as inter-to interactions between individuals

Thompson ’ s (1967) pattern of task interdependence that he labels ‘ reciprocal

interde-pendence managed by mutual adjustment ’ is basically a double interact constrained

by the nature of the task What is sometimes missed in discussions of the double

inter-act is that Actor B is already doing something when Actor A ‘ starts ’ the sequence Thus,

any double interact is also an interruption (p 34), which suggests that an undercurrent

of arousal pervades most organizing

MUNDANE POETICS 23

To focus on double interacts is also to fi nd larger meanings in smaller

occa-sions such as the Mann Gulch fi re, Naskapi use of cracks in caribou bones to decide

where to hunt, or a military unit lost in the Alps during a snowstorm Careful

atten-tion to small short moments often brings the realizaatten-tion that, in fact, these moments

are microcosms of larger, recurrent, fundamental processes That realization

obviously is affected by the quality of the ideas one carries to the microcosm and ‘ sees ’

in its unfolding (believing is seeing) But in many ways, ‘ it ’ s all there ’ if one looks

at an event patiently, mindful of the fact that it takes variety in the ideas imposed

to sense variety in the event itself Microcosms disregard the boundaries of levels

of analysis, and in so doing may be responsible for producing what looks like a

poetic style

Ending

William James (1897/1956) concludes his essay The Will to Believe with a quotation

from Fitz James Stephen that captures the elusive quality of a poetic style But more

important, it suggests that a poetic style may well be universal At a fundamental level,

what I do and how I do it is not all that different from what you do Here ’ s what I mean

by that

‘ What do you think of yourself ? What do you think of the world? These are questions

with which all must deal as it seems good to them … In all important transactions of life

we have to take a leap in the dark If we decide to leave the riddles unanswered, that is

a choice; if we waver in our answer, that too is a choice: but whatever choice we make, we

make it at our peril Each must act as he thinks best; and if he is wrong, so much the

worse for him We stand on a mountain pass in the midst of whirling snow and blinding

mist, through which we get glimpses now and then of paths which may be deceptive If

we stand still we shall be frozen to death If we take the wrong road we shall be dashed to

pieces We do not certainly know whether there is any right one What must we do? “ Be

strong and of a good courage ” Act for the best, hope for the best, and take what comes ’

(James 1897/1956: 30 – 31)

People do that Organizations do that Poetic stylists do that It ’ s mundane But it ’ s

also wise

Notes

I am grateful to Barbara Czarniawska, Karen Weick, Kyle Weick, and Kathleen Sutcliffe for their

comments on this essay

1 ‘ Poetic ’ comes from the latin poeticus and the Greek poietikos , meaning ‘ inventive ’ ( American

Heritage Dictionary , 3rd edn.) The term is variously used to refer to ‘ literary criticism that

deals with the nature, forms, and laws of poetry, a study of poetry or aesthetics, the practice

of writing poetry ’ (p 1397)

2 See Weick (1995: 11 – 13) for ways in which my discussion of sensemaking owes a debt to

cognitive dissonance theory

24 KARL E WEICK

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Setting the Scene

Chapter 3 describes an infrastructure that makes impermanent organization possible

That claim may seem surprising since words like organization, sensemaking, and

organ-izing are not in the title Instead, words like ‘ faith, ’ ‘ guesses, ’ and the ‘ unknowable ’ imply

a set of refl ections on the human condition rather than presumptions about

organiza-tional life However, if you blur the line dividing the human from the organizaorganiza-tional, as

I did in 1969 (Weick, 1969, pp 25 – 27), then you begin to see how organizing wraps

around the fl ow of human experience When you bring organizations back in on human

terms, this fosters a richer appreciation of how to live with and manage organized

experience

Consider the fi ve words in the title: faith, evidence, action, guesses, and unknowable

They provide a synopsis of organizational experience Faith points to expectations,

pre-sumptions, future perfect thinking, beliefs, self - fulfi lling prophecies, all of which, under

the press of culture and institutional logics, can convert the imagined into the material

Action often generates evidence that retrospectively strengthens these outcroppings

of faith When people say things to see what they think, that action of saying stirs up

evidence that is seen selectively and fi nally thought about in the form of conjectures

and presumptions This edited thinking then informs subsequent saying There is a

steady progression from the less orderly saying, through the more ordered editing that

occurs when people selectively see what they say, to the even more selective ordering

bestowed by controlled inference and conjecture Organizing increases as we progress

from saying to seeing to thinking The organizational context provided by norms, culture,

and organizational logic shapes the substance of what is said, seen, and thought ‘ Faith ’

in organizations takes the form of a future perfect presumption that ‘ actions ’ will have

made sense ‘ Evidence ’ in organizations typically consists of traces, clues, and

frag-ments that are made sensible by actions that combine cues and ‘ guesses ’ into

mean-ingful patterns These are the basic tools we have to construct transient meaning in an

unknowable world

3

There are regularities in the experience of organizing, as the six headers in Chapter 3 suggest The routines, agreements, and goals in impermanent organizations, by defi ni-

tion, are subject to unraveling Impermanence forces people to redo patterns that keep

falling apart To organize is to reaccomplish a sequence of acts and get them to recur

Recurrence is the source of order and redoing is the means to preserve that order

Labeling imposes order, but often at a cost When organizations generalize and

com-pound their abstractions, they put increasing distance between direct perceptions of

continuous fl ow and indirect recasting of those perceptions into discrete conceptions

The benefi ts of compounded abstractions are that they facilitate shared images and

allow collective coping The cost of compounded abstractions is that people lose sight

of differences that make a difference Discarding is about the practice of dropping one ’ s

tools in order to adapt to changed circumstances Discarding reverses the

compound-ing of abstractions and moves closer to mindful perception of change Enactcompound-ing

reiter-ates the basic notion that people organize and create the environments that provide

many of their constraints and opportunities Enacting resembles improvisation, albeit

‘ wary improvisation ’ lest the order already achieved be entirely abandoned Believing

recapitulates many of the dynamics already suggested by our quick gloss of the word

‘ faith ’ However, believing is more than faith (e.g Weick, 1995, pp 133 – 154) In the

face of ceaseless change, people who organize strive for simultaneous belief and doubt

since change is not total Today ’ s truth may be partially false tomorrow Finally,

substan-tiating points to organizing as ongoing efforts to hold collective action together despite a

relentless fl urry of interruption and recovery (p 39)

These fi ve themes and six regularities are all in play in the story of how child abuse was discovered, itself ‘ a story of impermanence ’ (p 32) Ron Westrum ’ s (1993) published

account of the surprisingly recent articulation of the ‘ battered child syndrome ’ was the

lead incident (p 1) in my book about sensemaking (Weick, 1995) I later met Westrum,

a remarkably insightful man, and he asked, ‘ Would you like to hear the rest of the abuse

story? ’ I then learned about how an expansion of treatment team capability through

the addition of social workers helped pediatricians ‘ see ’ the child abuse they had

pre-viously explained away as brittle bones, spontaneous brain bleeding, and poor

mem-ory for details of injuries Today ’ s truth, crystallized by social workers who knew how to

deal with abusing parents, turned yesterday ’ s evasive rationalizations into falsehoods

Previously pediatricians and radiologists had organized a recurring diagnostic sequence

that shielded them from darker possibilities When they redid their recurring pattern of

medical care, and changed the personnel and interactions, they made better guesses

about the source of problems because the evidence became more meaningful The

takeaway that Westrum crafted from these data is a cornerstone of the perspective that

is articulated throughout this book: ‘ A system ’ s willingness to become aware of

prob-lems is associated with its ability to act on them ’ (Westrum, 1993, p 340) How can

I know what I face until I see what my limited actions uncover Limited actions lead to

limited seeing leads to limited awareness Limited awareness is a big liability in times of

impermanence Mindful practices and mindful structures remove some of these limits

(see Chapter 6 )

Diagnosis followed by treatment is a generic sequence that is inherent in most izing (e.g Patriotta, 2003, on ‘ breakdowns ’ ) However, the crucial twist, implied by the

organ-idea that people act their way into cognition, is that diagnosis follows treatment; it lies in