Making Sense of the Organization, Volume 2: The Impermanent Organization

Part I

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

Chapter 1

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 flight 93 on 9/11.)

The organized defiance 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 significant. If impermanence is inherent in organizations it matters greatly how people try to organize portions of this impermanence and redo these organized portions when they begin to unravel. The argument is that people build recurrence into 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 limiting 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 conversation and text. Organization is talked into existence when portions of smoke-like conversation 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 define 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 descriptions 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 transition called ‘the edge of chaos,’ you find complexity, a class of behaviors in which the components 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 experience. 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 language is the quintessential organizing technology that enables us to selectively abstract from the otherwise intractable flux of raw experiences; that management is more about the taming of chance, uncertainty, and ambiguity than about choice; and that individuals themselves 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 flux and flow of our lifeworlds are rendered coherent and plausible; how individual identities are established and social entities created; how taxonomies and systems of classification are produced and with what effects; how causal relations are imputed and with what consequences; how systems of signification are used to arbitrarily carve up reality and with what outcomes; these are left unanswered by traditional organizational theory (Chia, 2003, p. 123).

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 existence 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 articulation gives voice to the collectivity and enables interconnected conversations and conversationalists 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 distributed 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 fixed 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 vernacular of sensemaking, how can we know what we think (texts) until we see (listening) what we’ve done (conversing)? Communication, language, talk, conversation, and interaction are crucial sites in organizing. Phrases such as ‘Drop your tools,’ ‘We are at takeoff,’ ‘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 fingerprints 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 fix its structure through the generation of texts, written and spoken, that reflexively map the organization and its preoccupations back into its discourse, and so, for the moment, produce regularity. . . . 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 affinity 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 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 flows of experience punctuated by moments of relative order. The notion of ‘impermanence’ is prominent in Eastern psychology 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 passive. They enact as well as search for anchors. They anchor by means of sensemaking, 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 flux (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 recurrent 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 vulnerable to error (Chapter 9); temporary organizing under extreme conditions of danger and uncertainty in wildland fire (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 liabilities 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 reification 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 fictions of permanence by means of practices such as long-term planning, strategy, reification of temporary structures, justification, investments in buildings and technology, and acting as if formal reporting relationships are stable. When people drop some of these fictions, the firm 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 permanence through processes that resemble self-fulfilling prophecies. Aside from working with fictions, there is the option of mindful organizing.

When we talk about organizing rather than organization, we acknowledge impermanence (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 permanent. 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 flow, 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 first 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 interest of predictability and uncertainty reduction. Now they begin to look and act alike as they find 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, simplification, operations, resilience, and expertise make perfectly good sense. Those five 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 (ongoing), plausible stories of what could be happening (plausibility), and actions that clarify thinking (enactment). When these sensemaking resources are mobilized, people are better able to spot the significance 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.

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 unexpected get activated, organized, strengthened, and institutionalized more or less effectively depending on how people handle failure, simplification, operations, resilience, and expertise. In compact form, the guidance implicit in these five is:

1. Scrutinize small failures.

2. Refine 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 five increase, transient organizing becomes more mindful and more responsive 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 firstly and fundamentally the task of becoming aware, attending to, sorting out, and prioritizing an inherently messy, fluxing, 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 passengers 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 people like William James, Robert Chia, James Taylor, and Elizabeth Van Every are valuable 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 influence pervades the chapters. Chapter 3 provides a conceptual overview of key ideas and illustrates these ideas by applying them to the gradual discovery of the battered child syndrome.

Chapter 2

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 defines this book. Fragments of biography are used to illustrate the way in which assumptions influence 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 fine, gossamer wool with structure and coherence, yet with no rigidity, its mathematics 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 fits the scene, is the only way (Littlefield, 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), firefighter 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.

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, interruption = unready-to-hand disruption in activity, and recovery = either present-at-hand atomistic 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 fleeting 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, evolution, 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 daydreaming) 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 flux. The assumption of ambivalence highlights a criterion for editing flux, namely preserve adaptability. 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 five assumptions are developed in Chapter 2, and their influence is visible in subsequent chapters.

The final key word in the title, ‘wisdom,’ points to a growing emphasis in organizational theory (e.g. Kessler and Bailey, 2007) on ‘the acquired ability to create viable realities 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 reflects an awareness of incomplete information, action that blends knowledge 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 final, definitive 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 principle the theme that ideas generate their own contexts for development. Ideas generate their own contexts by means of conceptual affinities, as is illustrated by the author’s movement from ideas about unintended consequences to ideas about cognitive dissonance, 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 scientistic (e.g. Thompson), revolutionary (e.g. Burrell), philosophical (e.g. March), educational (e.g. Silverman), ethnographic (e.g. Van Maanen), and the one she identifies 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 reflected 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 writing, continue to reveal themselves in additional poems contained in The Social Psychology of Organizing (Weick 1979). Here we find 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 notwithstanding, 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 Valéry.

‘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 influence of a mind on itself and of a work on its author).’ (Paul Valéry, cited in Bloom 2002: 494)

As a first anchor, let me mention some predecessors who have undergone ‘transformations’ in my mind. The identity of those ‘others’ is not hidden, nor is my dependence on them hard to spot. Harold Garfinkel 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, evolution, cognition, interpretation, organizations, experience, expertise, mistakes, the human condition, and Mann Gulch — suggests that Valéry is probably right. My dependence on the works of others is complex, irregular, intricate, and filled with ‘hidden transformations’. The problem then is that any effort on my part to talk about the development 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 topics 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 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 summarized 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 first 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 considerable time doing what we came to call ‘façade maintenance’. The teams were more concerned with metrics that demonstrated their productivity to project monitors than with the problem itself. More façade maintenance was practiced by the less productive team, which meant that the better they looked, the worse they were doing. Looking productive didn’t serve to create latitude and autonomy to do the real work, as many thought it would. Instead, façade 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 façade maintenance and backstage research, a separation that began to break down as people spent more time and effort maintaining the façade. A potential vicious circle was set in motion in which more maintenance meant less productivity which necessitated more maintenance which led to even less productivity, all triggered by the mundane requirement to file 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 manageable way to think about unanticipated consequences. Dissonance research produced findings such as decreased incentives for doing an activity led to increased attraction to the activity; disconfirmed expectations led to intensified 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 insufficient justification. 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 concept attainment task that modeled research team activity, and saw how productivity could be pressed into the service of dissonance reduction. In this microcosm were the precursors of an enacted environment, sensemaking under pressure, confirmation bias, mutual reinforcement of thought and action, and commitment. In other words, cognitive dissonance was and continues to be² 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 Infirmary, wildland fire entrapments such as occurred at South Canyon, and withheld 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 overload, stress, interruption, breakdowns, and cosmology episodes. The bulk of the unanticipated consequences tended to be negative and included outcomes such as regression, flight, tunnel vision, self-justification, 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 find 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 find themselves 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 recapitulates what pragmatists, especially John Dewey, view as the natural logic by which people evaluate and reconstruct their experience. To see this, consider Thayer’s summary 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 settlement 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, scientific, 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 where doubt is paramount, to conditions where it is assimilated, accepted, and converted 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 contexts. 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 thinking (Kahnemann 2003), and trust in the plausibility of initially puzzling connections.

Assumptions as Context

Assumptions provide a reality that is taken as given, a reality that exerts influence over what one notices and ignores and labels as significant. My work on topics such as sensemaking, 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 reified 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 continuity from setting to setting is more likely than discontinuity . . . 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 statement 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 influence 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 flight, 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.’

To put this assumption of continuity into practice is to treat all lived experience as relevant data for organizing and to presume that reflection on those data is relevant to organizational life. To assume continuity is to pay more attention to situations, contexts, 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