[Sensemaking in Organizations: Small Structures with Large Consequences p.5-31]

p.5 When scholars evaluate their own work, they often apply unconsciously what I will call the "Schutz Test of Comprehension." In the book Profound Simplicity, William Schutz made the following observation about his own writing: "When I look over the books I have written, I know exactly which parts I understood and which parts I did no understand when I wrote them. The poorly understood parts sound scientific. When I barely understood something, I kept it in scientific jargon. When I really comprehend it, I was able to explain it to anyone in language they understood... Understanding evolves through three phases: simplistic, complex, and profoundly simple" (Schutz, 1979, pp. 68-69).

p.9 the job of the sensemaker... is not to look for the one true picture that corresponds to a pre-existing, preformed reality. The picture of sensemaking that emerges... is "that there is nobody here but us scratching around trying to make our experience and our world as comprehensible to ourselves in the best way we can, that the various kinds of order we come up with are a product of our imagination and need, not something dictated to us by Reality Itself. There isn't any One True Map of [JLJ - the environment to be sensed] ...there are only maps we construct to make sense of the welter of our experience, and only us to judge whether these maps are worthwhile for us or not" (Fay, 1990, p. 38).

p.10 To reduce equivocality, people do not need larger quantities of information. Instead, they need richer qualitative information. "Information richness is defined as the ability of information to change understanding within a time interval. Communication transactions that can overcome different frames of reference or clarify ambiguous issues to change understanding in a timely manner are considered rich. Communications that require a long time to enable understanding or that cannot overcome different perspectives are lower in richness. In a sense, richness pertains to the learning capacity of a communication" (Daft & Lengel, 1986, p. 560).

p.11 Maps are pragmatic images that provide temporary guides for action.

p.16 When an action by Person A evokes a specific action in Person B, an interact exists... If we then add in A's response to B's reaction, a double interact exists... Hollander and Willis (1967) argue that the double interact is the basic unit of analysis for social influence

p.18 When people justify interacts, those justifications routinely acknowledge the existence of interdependence (e.g., Zanna & Sande, 1987). The justifications lend substance to the interdependence and reify it into a social entity.

p.19 we need to take a closer look at Morgan et al.'s (1983) suggestion that sensemaking involves "symbolic processes through which reality is created and sustained" (p. 4)... The content of sensemaking comes from preexisting symbols, norms, and social structures (Isaac, 1990, p. 6) that people reproduce and transform rather than create from scratch (Bhaskar, 1978, p. 13). Sensemaking itself is often described as sculpting done by a clever bricoleur (Harper, 1987, p. 74; Levi-Strauss, 1966) who uses whatever materials and tools are at hand to fashion whatever sense is needed... sensemaking... the activity itself is shaped by presuppositions and precedents (Smircich & Stubbart, 1985, pp. 732-733) as well as discoveries.

p.20 [Morgan et al. (1983, pp.4-5)] "the word symbol derives from the Greek roots which combine the idea of sign... with that of a throwing and putting together... A sign achieves the status of a symbol when it is interpreted... Any object, action, event, utterance, concept, or image offers itself as raw material for symbol creation, at any place, and at any time."

p.20 Morgan et al. (1983)... "Symbols, when approached upon the basis of this perspective [sensemaking], assume principal significance as constructs through which individuals concretize and give meaningful form to their everyday lives" (pp.24-25)... The symbol simultaneously refers to the here and now and to the larger social scene

p.21 we assert that the appearance that gets attention is a committed interact, that the pattern invoked to justify it is a feature of social structure consistent with the interact, that each elaborates the other through enactment into the world, and that through enactment into the world the pattern gains validity and the interact gains meaning... The presupposed pattern creates a sense of stable social structure that is consistent across time and confers meaning on concrete acts that seem to occur under its aegis. The interacts literally become meaningful because they occur in a stable context, even though the stability is itself a construction... It is the joint effect of being bound to an interact and of being exposed to symbols that portray a presumably factual social world

p.22 sensemaking is an attempt to produce micro stability amidst continuing change... micro stability is produced when people "orient to a presupposed social-structural order, reifying and reproducing it in the course of their activity and imposing its reality on each other as they do" (Hilbert, 1990, p.796)... People presume that something concrete, often their own committed behavior, is a document of some larger pattern that, having been presumed, proceeds to flesh out both the particular and the general.

p.23 Justification is not a brief moment in sensemaking. Instead, it shapes and is shaped by action subsequent to the commitment.

p.28 When we say that people construct reality, what we mean is that they use commitments to guide their efforts at sensemaking.

[Sources of Order in Underorganized Systems: Themes in Recent Organizational Theory p.32-56]

p.44 A loosely coupled system is a problem in causal inference. For actors... the prediction and activation of cause-effect relations is made more difficult because relations are intermittent, lagged, dampened, slow, abrupt, and mediated... A loosely coupled system is not a flawed system. It is a social and cognitive solution to constant environmental change, to the impossibility of knowing another mind, and to limited information-processing capabilities. Loose coupling is... a means to achieve cognitive economy and a little peace (adapted from Weick, 1982, pp.404-405).

p.46 Because ambiguity is never fully removed, it is part of the normal context of organizational action. Ambiguity gives form to much of what occurs. [JLJ - Amazingly, ambiguity itself will guide action, and we will not worry that the initial guided action itself is not "correct". Much as we respond to the sound of gunfire in our immediate area with initial interest, our goal is to improvise an action on the fly, based on what we sense in the environment. We might run, offer assistance to an injured person, or conclude that a car was backfiring. Schutz would say that we act because of "hypothetical relevance"]

p.46-47 ambiguity... increases the extent to which action is guided by values and ideology.

p.47 ambiguity determines structure

p.47 actions can be understood as attempts to accept ambiguity, live with it, and take advantage of some of the unique opportunities for change that occur when ambiguity increases.

p.48-49 It is crucial to see that the issue here is not one of accuracy. Cause maps could be wrong and still be an important part of managerial action. The important feature of a cause map is that it leads people to anticipate some order "out there." It matters less what particular order is portrayed than that an order of some kind is portrayed. The crucial dynamic is that the prospect of order lures the manager into ill-formed situations that then accommodate to forceful actions and come to resemble the orderly relations contained in the cause map. The map animates managers, and the fact of animation, not the map itself, is what imposes order on the situation.

p.50 The principle of requisite variety states that no sensing device can control input that is more complicated than the sensing device.

p.50 The relationship between requisite variety and action rationality is that organizations can use two quite different strategies to reduce ambiguity in complicated environments. First, they can try to register the fine grain of the environment and then choose an action that is sensitive to subtle but potentially important regularities in that complicated environment. This path is the path of decision rationality... there is another way... This alternative strategy is to wade in, take vigorous action, and simplify the environment so that relatively crude analyses are sufficient to keep track of the main things that are happening. In an environment made simple by action, decision rationality is unnecessary. You don't have to worry about registering subtle nuances if your action simplifies that environment and removes the nuances.

p.52 Don't treat rationality as a universal prescription. If you live by rationality alone, you lose options (use of intuition, quick response, trial and error) and you lose nondeliberated sources of variety (hunches).

p.52 Intention is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for action.

p.52 Don't dismiss universities as mere ivory towers, at least until you understand more about how they actually function. [JLJ - don't dismiss independent scholars, at least until you understand more about how they actually function]

p.52 Don't expect long chains of events to make sense. Sense occurs only in small bursts in organizations.

p.53 Accuracy is less important than animation. Any old map or plan will do, if it gets you moving so that you learn more about what is actually in the environment.

p.53 Be willing to leap before you look... Action generates outcomes that ultimately provide the raw material for seeing something... The situation takes on distinct form and meaning only when action is inserted into it... By acting... people learn something meaningful, even though what they learn may not be what they expected.

p.53-54 In the final analysis managing may be more like surfing on waves of events and decisions (Westerlund & Sjöstrand, 1979, p. 121)... People who surf do not command the waves to appear, or to have a particular spacing, or to be of a specific height. Instead, surfers do the best with what they get.

[Organizational Redesign as Improvisation p. 57-91]

p.58,60 design as improvisational theater... A design is a recipe... Designing is continuously reconstructed... Designs produce order through attention... Design codifies unplanned change after the fact.

p.60 Improvisation is about process and about designs that are continuously reconstructed. Starbuck and Nystrom (1981: 14) captured this idea perfectly when they said, "a well-designed organization is not a stable solution to achieve, but a developmental process to keep active." ...One way to shift attention from the static to the dynamic in organizational design is to move from the assumption that a design is a blueprint to the assumption that a design is a recipe... Blueprints... capture the way we sense the work... what blueprints can't do is capture how that sensed world came into being. It takes a recipe to do that. Recipes... describe actions that generate the objects specified in blueprints.

p.61 Architects may treat blueprints as givens, but people who improvise treat them as emergents. The givens for people who improvise are the recipes and routines by which they generate actions that could become any one of several different blueprints... Design, viewed from the perspective of improvisation, is more emergent, more continuous, more filled with surprise, more difficult to control, more tied to the content of action, and more affected by what people pay attention to than are the designs implied by architecture... Emergent, continuous designing is sensitive to small changes in local conditions, which means the design is continuously updated as people and conditions change... The notation of improvisation implies that attention rather than intention drives the process of designing.

p.61-62 designing often consists of a shifting pattern of attention and meaning imposed on an ongoing stream of social activity, rather than a stable pattern of intention imposed a priori on events initiated to achieve an outcome.

p.62 Design is clearly a process of sensemaking that makes do with whatever materials are at hand.

p.66 It is the ability to combine old resources in new ways to reduce new uncertainties that determines organizational effectiveness.

p.68 People who have skills at bricolage often are able to transform a large number of miscellaneous resources into a small number of critical resources through imaginative recombination.

p.69 If the content of design is affected by what people notice, and if people notice those things about which they can do something, then generalists... should notice more options and enact a greater variety of designs than specialists see and do. Improvements in design expertise should come not so much from direct schooling in blueprints for design as from development of a larger response repertoire.

p.72 Improvisation is largely an act of interpretation rather than an act of decision making. People who improvise have to make sense of unexpected events that emerge, which means they are more concerned with interpreting what has happened than with deciding what will happen... revised interpretations... guide action and constitute the actual design in use... design in use is shaped more by action than by plans, and more by interpretations than by decisions... To interpret means to encode external events into internal categories... The act of interpreting involves creating maps or representations that simplify some territory in order to facilitate action. [JLJ - note to self, put in current paper]

p.73-74 interpretation is a key to effectiveness, and the purpose of design is to facilitate interpretation... The design issue is not how to apply judgement to decision making. The design issue is how to construct a capability for judgment in the first place.

p.78 The importance of justification as a tool for design is suggested by Lucas's (1987: 147) statement that "organizations define and think themselves out through repertoires of patterned actions, a capacity to develop, implement, and maintain justifications for structures of existing repertoires, and through negotiating rules for changing these repertoires."

p.79 If we assume that paradigms contain organizational designs and guide action, then we have a vehicle by which ideas, interpretations, and justifications exert control.
 Pfeffer (1982: 227-228) describes a paradigm as a "technology, including beliefs about cause-effect relations and standards of practice and behavior, as well as specific examples of these, that constitute how an organization goes about doing things." ...Paradigms tend to be closed systems, closed in the sense that they are not just a view of the world, but also contain procedures for inquiring about the world and categories to collect the observations that are stimulated by these inquiries. Paradigms are powerful tools of interpretation.

p.85 Designs that facilitate the construction of environments encourage bricolage, deutero-learning (Bateson, 1979), rich assessment of situations (Daft and Lengel, 1986), ...careful attention to the interpersonal linkages that comprise the environment (Eccles and Crane, 1988), ...development of a culture that promotes enacting rather than reacting

p.85-86 If designs originate in ideas, interaction, shifting competencies, and retrospect, then organizations should be characterized by a succession of short-lived designs that evaporate rather than erode.

p.88 good designs are those designs that incorporate the intuiting, experimenting, and arguing that are prominent in improvisation... To design is to notice sequences of action that are improvements, call attention to them, label them, repeat them, disseminate them, and legitimize them... the way out of turbulence may lie in continuous improvisation in response to continuous change in local details. Designing replaces design.

p.96 Most of the time sensemaking is all we have, especially considering that the world is both unknowable and unpredictable (McDaniel, 1997). Sensemaking starts out as a momentary, expedient understanding

[The Collapse of Sensemaking in Organizations: The Mann Gulch Disaster p.100-124]

p.110 Bruner (1983: 183) described creativity as "figuring out how to use what you already know in order to go beyond what you currently think."

p.110-111 Dodge was an experienced woodsman, with lots of hands-on experience. He was what we would call a bricoleur, someone able to create order out of whatever materials were at hand (e.g., Levi-Strauss, 1966; Harper, 1987).

p.112 what Maclean calls the first principle of reality: "little things suddenly and literally can become big as hell, the ordinary can suddenly become monstrous..."

p.116 The Mann Gulch disaster is a case in which people were unable to negotiate strangeness.

[Enactment Processes in Organizations p.179-206]

p.183 Generally, organizations that face complex, unpredictable environments tend to have complex structures... to control something is to take actions with respect to it. These actions become the raw materials from which a sense of the situation is eventually built. The controlling actions are what the organization examines retrospectively to see what it is up to.

p.185 Piaget (1962, pp.191-3):
... the initial universe [of a person] is not a network of causal sequences, but a simple collection of events surging in extension of his own activities. (pp. 191-92, emphasis added)
 Virtually all of the elements that we associate with enacted sensemaking are found in that sentence.

p.186 The final product of enactment, therefore, will be a causal map (Weick, 1975) depicting how the events in the simple collection are causally related.

p.187 It is important to note that even though enactment looks like a relatively insignificant portion of the process of doing interpretations, in fact it is of major importance. The only possible raw materials that are available for subsequent parsing and retention, are those materials initially generated and/or bracketed by enactment processes. Enactment drives everything else in an organization. How enactment is done is what an organization will know.

p.188 Literally, to enact an environment can mean to "create the appearance of an environment" or to "simulate an environment for the sake of representation." Those two meanings are compatible with the position taken in this chapter. Members act as if they have environments, create the appearance of environments, or simulate environments for the sake of getting on with their business. These organizing acts are acts of invention rather than acts of discovery... they are based on the assumption that cognition follows the trail of action.

p.189 "An explorer can never know what he is exploring until it has been explored" (Bateson, 1972, p.xvi). The organizational equivalent of that assertion is "an organization can never know what it thinks or wants until it sees what is does." In the case of organizations, what they say and what they do provide the displays which can be examined reflectively after their occurrence in order to understand what is occurring. The sequence in that prototypical soliloquy is crucial. Talk or some kind of action occurs first and provides the occasion for an eventual articulation of cognitions and desires.

p.192 "The enactment process creates the [raw data] that the system adapts to, and in doing so removes a small amount of equivocality"... the creation of information occurs later in the process of organizational sensemaking than I realized.

p.193 I want to agrue that enactment involves generating the raw data which is eventually transformed by other processes into information and action.

p.193 Enactment is the organizational equivalent of unjustified variation (Campbell, 1974), and is often only weakly constrained by retention and causal maps.

p.194 If one assumes that sensemaking involves invention rather than discovery, then validation takes on a different appearance. One cannot say that a superimposed order is right or wrong. Such a judgement would presume an underlying order that is waiting to be discovered. Validation of superimposed patterns involves judgments of reasonableness, and if one superimposed order is reasonable and is no less plausible than some other imposed order, then the imposition is valid.

p.195 It will be recalled that parsing is an act of invention, not an act of discovery... A crucial property of an inverted network or causal map is that its validity cannot be proven in a logical sense. Instead, the only assertion that can be made about conclusions contained in the map are that they are as likely as possible, and as reasonable as some other conclusion... Reasonableness, not accuracy, is the topic of interest in enacted sensemaking.

p.202 Causal maps are approximations and deal with likelihoods, not certainties... Members activate sets of interlocked behavior cycles to deal with this residual equivocality.

[Enactment and the Boundaryless Career: Organizing as We Work p.207-223]

p.215 I have repeatedly described the process of organizing (to learn) as a stable, bounded process in a boundaryless world. Organizing consists of self-designing cycles of enactment-selection-retention, in which retained outcomes partially shape subsequent action.

p.220 Karl Deutsch defined power as "the ability not to have to learn"

p.221 There is basically no substitute for trial and error in dealing with surprise.

[Improvisation as a Mindset for Organizational Analysis p.284-304]

p.296 Starbuck reminds us that, when faced with incomprehensible events, there is often no substitute for acting your way into an eventual understanding of them.

p.296 To organize for diagnosis is to design a setting that generates rich records of symptoms, a plausible initial treatment, alertness to effects of treatments, and the capability to improvise from there on. Theories, diagnoses, strategies, and plans serve mostly as plausible interim stories that mix ignorance and knowledge in different patterns.

p.296 a combat soldier... his role is one of constant improvisation... The impact of battle destroys men, equipment, and organization, which need constantly and continually to be brought back into some form of unity through on-the-spot improvisation

p.297 To watch jazz improvisation unfold is to have palpable contact with the human condition. Awe, at such moments, is understandable. [JLJ - I watched a jazz trio perform - guitar (also singer), bass, solo saxophone. The saxophone player appeared to pull amazing solos out of nowhere. I asked him after the performance how he did it. He confided to me that he spent time practicing "diminished scales", and based his solo performance on impressions of the song, and the diminished scale of the key that the song was played in.]

p.299 if time is a competitive advantage then people gain speed if they do more things spontaneously without lengthy prior planning exercises (Crossan and Sorrenti 1996, p. 4).

p.301 My bet is that improvising is close to the root process in organizing and that organizing itself consists largely of the embellishment of small structures... control... planning... standard operating procedures. The process that animates these artifacts may well consist of ongoing efforts to rework and reenact them in relation to unanticipated ideas and conditions encountered in the moment... improvised storylines impose modest order... improvisation may be part of the infrastructure present in all organizing.

[Organizations as Cognitive Maps: Charting Ways to Success and Failure p.308-329]

p.308 Organizations exist largely in the mind, and their existence takes the form of cognitive maps.

p.312 A cause map develops as the mind reflects on experience, constructs concepts in the form of variables, and imposes connections among the variables. When variables are connected, they become meaningful since meaning flows from relationships. Thus, the more equivocality the individual can remove from experience by means of concept-structures, the more the world will make sense to that person, and the more productive that person can be.

p.312 The concepts contained in cause maps are variables. "A concept variable is something like 'the amount of security in Persia'; something that can take on different values such as 'a great amount of security' or 'a small amount of security.' A cognitive map allows great flexibility in the variables. They may be continuous variables, such as more or less of something; or they may be dichotomous variables, such as the existence or nonexistence of something. But whatever type of concept is represented, it is always regarded as a variable that can take on more than one value" (Axelrod, 1976, p. 59).

p.313 Equivocal does not mean unclear or uncertain; rather, it means that there are two or more clear, distinct meanings for several related variables because the relationships among them differ.

p.314 The core of a double interact is the cause map, since concepts and relationships are what are being negotiated.

p.322 A cause map starts where people actually are in their understanding of issues and preserves the natural language of their understanding.... Cause maps also represent a blend of the rational and the nonrational (Shweder, 1984). Maps contain inconsistencies, equivocal relations, tacit values, and concepts originating in metaphors, yet they also contain the more rational components of means-ends relations - that is, observed regularities, consensually validated relationships, changes in response to experience, and sensible inconsistencies.

p.323 "The picture of a decision maker that emerges from the analysis of cognitive maps is of one who has more beliefs than he can handle, who employs a simplified image of the policy environment that is structurally easy to operate with, and who then acts rationally within the context of his simplified image" (Axelrod, 1976, p. 244).

p.327 Because maps relate an uncertain event to existing concepts, they generate meaning for the event... Since cause maps determine what a person will perceive and do in situations, they have a substantial effect on what people call "real."

p.327-328 The important thing to remember about a cause map is that it is the organization (Weick, 1979, p. 141). The cause map contains the structure, the process, and the raw materials from which agreements and conflicts are built when people coordinate action.

[Organizational Culture as a Source of High Reliability p.330-344]

p.330 When people have less variety than is requisite to cope with the system, they miss important information, their diagnoses are incomplete, and their remedies are short-sighted and can magnify rather than reduce a problem.

p.331 reliable performance depends on the development of substitutes for trial and error.

p.332 As noted, to regulate variety, sensors must be as complex as the system which they intend to regulate.

p.333 Effectiveness is postulated to vary as a function of the degree to which informational richness matches the complexity of organizational phenomenon. Rich media provide multiple cues and quick feedback which are essential for complex issues but less essential for routine problems. Too much richness introduces the inefficiencies of overcomplication, too little media richness introduces the inaccuracy of oversimplification.

[Substitutes for Strategy p.345-355]

p.346 Strategic plans are a lot like maps. They animate and orient people. Once people begin to act, they generate tangible outcomes in some context, and this helps them discover what is occurring, what needs to be explained, and what should be done next.

p.346 Followers are often lost... the leader... What he has to do, when faced with this situation, is... get them moving in some general direction, and be sure they look closely at what actually happens, so that they learn... and get some better idea of where they are and where they want to be.
 If you get people moving, thinking clearly, and watching closely, events often become more meaningful.

p.347 Any old plan will work in an organization because people usually learn by trial and error... any old plan is often sufficient to get this whole mechanism moving, which then makes it possible to learn what is going on and what needs to be done next... meaning is produced because the leader treats a vague map or plan as if it had some meaning, even though he knows full well that the real meaning will come only when people respond to the map and do something.

p.348 Optimism is one manifestation of the belief that situations will have made sense... Optimism is not necessarily a denial of reality. Instead it may be the belief that makes reality possible.

p.349 Presumptions should be especially prominent when beliefs about cause and effect linkages are unclear (Thompson 1964: 336)... It is precisely in the face of massive uncertainty that beliefs of some sort are necessary to evoke some action.

p.350-351 Environments often crystallize around prophecies, presumptions, and actions that unfold while planners deliberate. Guidance by strategy often is secondary to guidance by prophecies... Thus, presumptions can substitute for strategy... A presumption does not necessarily mean that whatever is presumed actually exists.

p.351 I assume that whatever direction strategy gives can be achieved just as easily by improvisation... To understand improvisation as strategy is to understand the order within it.

p.352 Strategies are... more accurately portrayed as small steps... that gradually foreclose alternative courses of action and limit what is possible. The strategy is made without anyone realizing it. The crucial activities for strategy making... are actions, the controlled execution of which consolidate fragments of policy that are lying around, give them direction, and close off other possible arrangements. The strategy making... is the editing of drafts. These actions are not precursors to strategy; they are the strategy.
 Strategies that are tied more closely to action are more likely to contain improvisations (Weiss 1980: 401)

p.353 Any old explanation, map, or plan is often sufficient because it stimulates focused, intense action that both creates meaning and stabilizes an environment so that conventional analysis now becomes more relevant.

p.354 It is the action that is responsible for meaning, even though planning and symbols mistakenly get the credit.

[The Attitude of Wisdom: Ambivalence as the Optimal Compromise p.361-379]

p.361 When people create maps of an unknowable, unpredictable world, they face strong temptations toward either overconfident knowing or overly cautious doubt. Wisdom consists of an attitude toward one's beliefs, values, knowledge, and information that resists these temptations through an ongoing balance between knowing and doubt (Meacham, 1983, 1990).

p.365 Meacham argued that "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 confidence 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 appreciation that knowledge is fallible, in the balance between knowing and doubting" (p.210).

p.370 Organizations are action generators (Starbuck, 1983), and anything that gets in the way of action, including wisdom, is discouraged.

p.370 To be aware that one is ignorant but to act anyway is made possible when people trust that a combination of attentiveness, resilience (Wildavsky, 1988), and improvisation can substitute for omniscience.

p.371 When physicians make a formal diagnosis under time pressure... Doubt, correction, and revision of the diagnosis do not occur, because they are deemed unnecessary. One way around this is to postpone making a diagnosis... A hunch held lightly... is a direction to be followed, not a decision to be defended.

p.375 [Gilbert Ryle, 1979] If he is not at once improvising and improvising warily, he is not engaging his somewhat trained wits in a partly fresh situation.

p.375 higher levels of confidence necessary for bold action can be achieved if the wise person also believes that what is already known can be combined in novel ways to deal with previously unmapped certainties... Belief in the power of improvisation animates the attitude of wisdom... Improvisation enables people to wade into situations with fallible knowledge, secure in the belief that they can recombine that knowledge by shifting their fallibilities around. Faith in their ability to "make do" infuses confidence into their balance of knowledge and doubt.

p.376-377 [William James, 1890] 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... Here, now, is Campbell's distillation (1965, p. 305) of the key points he draws from James: "The presence in... motivational systems of opposing values is often interpreted as discrediting the value system by showing its logical inconsistency... the joint presence of opposing tendencies has a functional survival value. Where each of two opposing tendencies has survival relevance, the biological solution seems to be an ambivalent alternation of expressions of each rather than the consistent expression of an intermediate motivational state. Ambivalence, rather than averaging, seems the optimal compromise."

p.378 Knowledge and ignorance balance on the pivot of improvisation. [JLJ - Weick gets it... I have to find a way to use this...]

[Management of Organizational Change Among Loosely Coupled Elements p.380-403 In: P. Goodman, Change in Organizations, 1982, pp.375-408, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass]

p.383 Miller's (1978, p. 16) description of systems... "A system is a set of interacting units with relationships among them. The word 'set' implies that the units have some common properties. These common properties are essential if the units are to interact or have relationships. The state of each unit is constrained by, conditioned by, or dependent on the state of the other units. The units are coupled."

p.383-384 Loose coupling exists if A affects B (1) suddenly (rather than continuously), (2) occasionally (rather than constantly), (3) negligibly (rather than significantly), (4) indirectly (rather than directly), and (5) eventually (rather than immediately)... they are episodes from which we induce a picture of normal functioning in the face of indeterminate relationships.

p.384 The concept of loose coupling indicates why people cannot predict much of what happens in organizations.

p.384 To affirm that systems in organizations also have delays, lags, unpredictability, erratic guidance by feedback, unstable equilibria, and untrustworthy feedback, one can highlight the fact that components within the system are loosely coupled.

p.385 The property of loose coupling is pervasive, and all organizational theorists and change agents are affected by it, even if they choose to ignore it.

p.386 Loosely coupled systems are often characterized as systems in which there is low agreement about preferences and cause-effect linkages (Thompson and Tuden, 1959).

p.386 When people examine environments, they often see the effects of their own actions emitted while positioning themselves for a better view.

p.388-389 A loosely coupled system reduces the costs of trial and error, preserves variety because it allows innovations to be retained and cumulate (Ashby, 1960), and can improve the accuracy with which situations are diagnosed.

p.389 When things are loosely coupled, sensing is improved, small deviations are sensed more quickly, and corrective actions are directed at those small deviations sooner. The result of this swifter response to smaller deviations is that potentially big problems are anticipated and solved before they become unmanageable... With loose coupling, diagnosis is more accurate, but interventions on the basis of this diagnosis have only minor, local effects. With tight couplings, diagnosis is less accurate, but interventions on the basis of the misdiagnosis have large effects.

p.390 In summary, change in loosely coupled systems is continuous rather than episodic, small scale rather than large, improvisational rather than planned, accommodative rather than constrained, and local rather than cosmopolitan. Furthermore, loosely coupled systems may store innovations that are not presently useful. Change diffuses slowly, if at all, through such systems

p.391 To construct a loosely coupled system is to design a system that updates itself and may never need the formal change interventions that sometimes are necessary to alter the hard-wired routines in tightly coupled systems.

p.392 A cause map (Weick, 1979) can be thought of as a summary of the presumptions one makes about a structure that hold that structure together. People do not actually see causes and effects; they infer them. With that cause map in mind, people examine events and act as if those events are tied together in the ways displayed in the map... Presumptions fill in the gaps that are created when a loosely coupled system is built. People create loosely coupled systems so they can sense and adapt to changes in the environment.

p.399 Feedback becomes suspect in loosely coupled systems for a variety of reasons. For a tight coupling to form between actions and consequences, there must be swift, accurate feedback of those consequences to the action. As the speed and accuracy of feedback diminishes, there are looser couplings formed between actions and consequences and between actors. Loosely coupled systems show stability in the presence of environmental change.

p.400 Loosely coupled systems can perceive their environments and themselves accurately because of their mediumlike quality noted earlier. As a result, feedback can be redundant and of little consequence as a vehicle for change.

p.400 A loosely coupled system is a problem in causal inference. For actors and observers alike, the prediction and activation of cause-effect relations is made more difficult because relations are intermittent, lagged, dampened, slow, abrupt, and mediated. Microchanges predominate in loosely coupled systems.

p.401 A loosely coupled system is not a flawed system. It is a social and cognitive solution to constant environmental change, to the impossibility of knowing another mind, and to limited information processing capacities.

[Organizing Design: Organization as Self-Designing Systems p.404-419]

p.410-412 we can examine six general characteristics of self-design.
1. Self-design involves arranging and patterning, linking and decoupling sets of elements to change the consequences from those currently occurring. 2. Self-designing systems must contain provisions for and support of the continuous evaluation of ongoing designs. 3. Issues of self-design typically focus, not on the designs themselves, but on the processes responsible for the designs. Emphasis is on processes that reflect the need for and create alternative arrangements... 4. A self-designing system wrestles chronically with the stubborn reality that specific adaptations often restrict subsequent adaptability... 5. Designs must often be fabricated in the absence of specific performance criteria... 6. Self-design is often hard to separate from implementation.

p.416-417 Stephen Miller [JLJ - Ends, Means, Galumphing: Some Leitmotifs of Play, American Anthropologist, 1973] argues that play... preserves adaptability because it provides a way to develop novel designs. Play "makes us flexible and gives us exercise in the control of means that we are capable of using which are superfluous right now... [When people play] they are using their capability to combine pieces of behavior that would have no basis for juxtaposition in a utilitarian framework." ...What play basically does is "unhook behavior from the demands of real goals." The person gains experience in combining pieces of behavior that he would never have thought of combining given the practical problems confronting him.

[Small Wins: Redefining the Scale of Social Problems p.426-443]

p.431 A small win is a concrete, complete, implemented outcome of moderate importance... Small wins are controllable opportunities that produce visible results.

p.432 Small wins provide information that facilitates learning and adaptation. Small wins are like miniature experiments that test implicit theories about resistance and opportunity and uncover both resources and barriers that were invisible before the situation was stirred up... small wins are stable building blocks.

p.433 Parts of Saul Alinsky's (1972) model for building community organization parallel the notion of small wins. Alinsky's three criteria for working goals are that the goals be highly specific, realizable, and immediate (Peabody, 1971, p. 525).

p.437 Small wins build order into unpredictable environments, which should... improve performance.

p.440 it seems useful to consider the possibility that social problems seldom get solved, because people define these problems in ways that overwhelm their ability to do anything about them.

[Cosmos vs. Chaos: Sense and Nonsense in Electronic Contexts p.444-457]

p.446 Action is a major tool through which we perceive and develop intuitions.

p.450 trial and error is most effective with a greater number of heterogeneous trials.

p.452 Christopher Lehmann-Haupt described computing as "quantified narcissism disguised as productive activity." [JLJ - actual quote in NY Times October 3 1984 'Who says computing is a tool? I say it's an end in itself - quantified narcissism disguised as productive activity.']

[Sensemaking as an Organizational Dimension of Global Change p.458-472]

p.460 To make sense is to focus on a limited set of cues, and to elaborate those few cues into a plausible, pragmatic, momentarily useful guide for actions that themselves are partially defining the guide they follow.