Making Sense of the Organization Volume 2 ppt

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Making Sense of the Organization
Volume 2
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Making Sense of the
Organization
Volume 2
The Impermanent Organization
K
ARL E. WEICK
University of Michigan
A John Wiley and Sons, Ltd, Publication
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Weick, Karl E.
Making sense of the organization : the impermanent organization / Karl Weick.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-470-74220-4 (pbk.)
1. Organizational change. 2. Executives—Psychology. 3. Leadership. I. Title.
HD58.8.W446 2009
658.4'06—dc22

2009013321
Set in 10/12 and HelveticaNeue & PhotinaMT by Macmillan Publishing Solutions.
Printed in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, Wiltshire
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Preface vii
Acknowledgments ix
PART I INTRODUCTION 1
1. Organized Impermanence: An Overview 3
2. Mundane Poetics: Searching for Wisdom in Organizational Theory 9
3. Faith, Evidence, and Action: Better Guesses in an Unknowable World 27
PART II ATTENDING 45
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
PART III INTERPRETATION 107
7. Making Sense of Blurred Images: Mindful Organizing in
Mission STS-107 109
8. Organizing and the Process of Sensemaking
Karl E. Weick, Kathleen M. Sutcliffe, and David Obstfeld 129
9. Impermanent Systems and Medical Errors:
Variety Mitigates Adversity 153
Contents
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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
12. Positive Organizing and Organizational Tragedy 207
PART V LEARNING AND CHANGE 223
13. Emergent Change as a Universal in Organizations 225
14. Drop Your Tools: An Allegory for Organizational Studies 243
15. Leadership as the Legitimation of Doubt 261
Epilogue 273
References 275
Index 281
vi CONTENTS
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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

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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.
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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
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Introduction
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
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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
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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 organizing 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 conversa-
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,
2000, p. 31).
Atlan ’ s poetic depiction is not that far removed from more recent poetic descrip-
tions that summarize complexity theory. Christopher Langton, in discussing ‘ the edge of
chaos, ’ remarks that:
. . . right in between the two extremes (of order and chaos), at a kind of abstract phase tran-
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).
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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
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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 pas-
sive. They enact as well as search for anchors. They anchor by means of sensemak-
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.
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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.
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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.
5. Listen.
As these fi ve increase, transient organizing becomes more mindful and more respon-
sive to the unexpected at earlier points in its unfolding.
What does it mean then to manage under conditions where what you manage is an
impermanent fabrication? It means that you need to get good at attentive action.
Managing is fi rstly and fundamentally the task of becoming aware, attending to, sorting out,
and prioritizing an inherently messy, fl uxing, chaotic world of competing demands that are
placed on a manager ’ s attention. It is creating order out of chaos. It is an art, not a science.
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 peo-
ple like William James, Robert Chia, James Taylor, and Elizabeth Van Every are valua-
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.
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Mundane Poetics:
Searching for Wisdom in
Organizational Theory
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
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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 ϭ ready - to - hand immersion in activity, inter-
ruption ϭ unready - to - hand disruption in activity, and recovery ϭ 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, evo-
lution, ambivalence, complexity, and levels of analysis. The assumption of continuity, in

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 organiza-
tional theory (e.g. Kessler and Bailey, 2007) on ‘ the acquired ability to create viable reali-
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.
10 THE IMPERMANENT ORGANIZATION
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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).
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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 ‘ transfor-
mations ’ in my mind. The identity of those ‘ others ’ is not hidden, nor is my dependence
on them hard to spot. Harold Garfi nkel and Leon 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, evolu-
tion, cognition, interpretation, organizations, experience, expertise, mistakes, the human
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 topics due to complex dependencies. Analysts are basically thrown into
the middle of ongoing intellectual traditions, styles, people, and problems. It ’ s all pretty
12 KARL E. WEICK
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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
MUNDANE POETICS 13
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