p.1 Chapter 1: an introduction to organizing

p.3-4 Organizing is like a grammar in the sense that it is a systematic account of some rules and conventions by which sets of interlocked behaviors are assembled to form social processes that are intelligible to actors. It is also a grammar in the sense that it consists of rules for forming variables and causal linkages into meaningful structures (later called cause maps) that summarize the recent experience of the people who are organized. The grammar consists of recipes for getting things done when one person alone can't do them and recipes for interpreting what has been done.
 Organizing is directed initially at any input that is not self-evident... Once these inputs have become less equivocal, there is a decrease in the amount of collective activity directed at them.

p.4 Organizing is directed initially at any input that is not self-evident. Happenings that represent a change, a difference, or a discontinuity from what has been going on, happenings that seem to have more than one meaning (they are equivocal) are the occasion for sizable collective activity. Once these inputs have become less equivocal, there is a decrease in the amount of collective activity directed at them

p.4 [Allport] When individuals respond to one another in a direct, face-to-face manner, a social stimulus, given, for example, by the behavior of individual A, is likely to evoke from individual B a response which serves in turn as a stimulus to A causing him to react further. The direction of the stimuli and of their effects is thus circular, the response of each person being reevoked or increased by the reactions which his own responses called forth from others (1924, pp. 148-149).
 The sequence Allport describes is called a double-interact throughout this book

p.5 Organizations, despite their apparent preoccupation with facts, numbers, objectivity, concreteness, and accountability, are in fact saturated with subjectivity, abstraction, guesses, making do, invention, and arbitrariness... just like the rest of us.

p.6 The basic raw materials on which organizations operate are informational inputs that are ambiguous, uncertain, equivocal. Whether the information is embedded in tangible raw materials, recalcitrant customers, assigned tasks, or union demands, there are many possibilities or sets of outcomes that might occur. Organizing serves to narrow the range of possibilities, to reduce the number of "might occurs." The activities of organizing are directed toward the establishment of a workable level of certainty. An organization attempts to transform equivocal information into a degree of unequivocality with which it can work and to which it is accustomed. This means that absolute certainty is seldom required. It also means that there can be enormous differences among organizations and industries with respect to the level of clarity that they regard as sufficient for action.

p.7 an ambivalent stance toward past wisdom makes adaptive sense.

p.11-12 many of the ways of thinking about organizing that will be introduced in this book will portray organizations as superimposed structures. This imagery implies that there is not an underlying "reality" waiting to be discovered. Rather, organizations are viewed as the inventions of people, inventions superimposed on flows of experience and momentarily imposing some order on these streams. Notice, however, that many portions of the streams of experience will remain unorganized, and those portions being temporarily organized by imposed ideologies will remain equivocal... Such are the dilemmas that face those who choose as their topic of interest phenomena that are complex, fluid, collective.

p.13 1. Equivocal information triggers organizing... 3. Most efforts at sensemaking involve interpretation of previous happenings and of writing plausible histories that link these previous happenings with current outcomes.

p.25 Chapter 2: tactics for thinking about organizing

p.25 In many cases in science, one cannot know beforehand what will be found out, or even will be interesting at a better-informed tomorrow (Crovitz, 1970).

p.26 the intent of this book is to develop ways to talk about organizations. This book is about organizational theorizing

p.29 quantitative investigators forget that counting is only a means to understanding... Whether one chooses to count [JLJ - one thing rather than another thing] it's still good to know what you're doing. And this holds true for inquiry in general as well as for specific inquiries

p.30 If areas of ignorance remain constant in size and continually shift, then it seems clear that ambivalent conceptual orientations toward the world will be more adaptive and accurate than unambivalent ones. Problem-solving seems to be favored by opposed sets of propositions, both of which are correct on some occasions (e.g., Bruyn 1966, pp. 23-83). The investigator who retains opposed conceptual orientations will be open to comprehending a larger portion of the referent event. It is not that scientists must become more tolerant of ambiguity: information that is received may lend clear support to a specific position and may therefore reduce uncertainty... the scientist needs to search for information that supports opposing explanations of an observed event.

p.30 To know what we're doing when we inquire into anything is to know the limits of that inquiry

p.32 An act is an impulse that maintains the life process by the selection of certain sorts of stimuli it needs. Thus, the organism creates its environment. The stimulus is the occasion for the expression of the impulse. Stimuli are means, tendency is the real thing. Intelligence is the selection of stimuli that will set free and maintain life and aid in rebuilding it (Mead 1956, p. 120).

p.32 people notice stimuli that permit them to do what they want and/or need to do. Thus behavior can be viewed as responses in search of pretexts for expression... these stimuli remain only potential stimuli until they are noticed...response repertoires control noticing. The person carries this repertoire and its implications for noticing everywhere. If an observer gains an understanding of response repertoires, and the conditions under which attention is controlled by the content of these repertoires, then a more substantial theory about organizations and behaviors can be built. The theory would concentrate on attention as well as on action.

p.33 Defining organizational behavior in terms of processes of attention directs the investigator toward specific processes and properties within an organization that might ordinarily be overlooked. The investigator is sensitized to a specific set of events and behaviors in a way that is impossible given a more general definition of organizational behavior.

p.34 Reification means to treat an abstract concept as if it referred to a thing.

p.34 Throughout this book we will refer to organizations acting. When we say that "an organization acts," we mean this as a shorthand statement which, when translated, results in a conjunction of statements, each one of which describes a double interact... between two or more humans beings, one of whom can even be imagined... organizational activities are social rather than solitary

[JLJ - Another way to look at the "an organization acts" concept is that an organization is effectively a scheme, a practical scheme, set up by a founder or "prime mover" of sorts, or stakeholder or shareholder, who so arranges it that large groups of people can be coordinated and managed to do work on the large scale, and that "decisions" can emerge from the coordinated behavior of individuals operating together and with like purpose. The scheme of a committee voting, or obtaining a consensus, or tabling the matter for later, or letting the leader decide the broad details without getting involved in the specifics, has the end result of direct "action" without there being an identifiable "person" who "acts." Consider the case of President Lincoln replacing General Hooker with Meade three days before the battle of Gettysburg. Certain plans were already underway, a great coordination of men and resources, and Meade simply performed the role of head of the army of the Potomac. The organization acted, and acted successfully, after a change of leadership in a most critical time, because military organizations are carefully crafted schemes to accomplish, in the words of Lincoln, "victories."] 

p.35 When we say that an organization acts we mean to emphasize that double interacts, not solitary acts, are the raw materials that are assembled into processes. We also mean to emphasize that it is the assemblage, the pattern of interacts, that determines the outcomes - not the personal qualities of single individuals.

p.35 in the final analysis, organizational theorizing comes down to predictions of behavior.

p.35 Thorngate's (1976) postulate of commensurate complexity... states that it is impossible for a theory of social behavior to be simultaneously general, accurate, and simple.

p.36-37 If one intentionally sets out to do two o'clock research [JLJ - Weick means research that is both general and accurate], then Occam's Razor (Luchins and Luchins 1965) is sacrificed in favor of overdetermination. The concept of overdetermination states that there are usually more factors that act to produce a single behavior than are really necessary to have it occur.

p.37 People who try to generate explanations that have generality and accuracy will probably enlarge questions rather than try to shrink them.

p.42 The familiar forms of language conceal from us the extent to which the objects of our attention are not "things" but relations extended in time. I stress this, because the most essential common characteristic of the administrator's job in any organization is that he has to regulate a process extended in time (Vickers, 1967, p. 68).

p.43 insensitivity to process promotes the destruction of deviation-countering causal relationships.

p.44 The idea of process implies impermanence... Process imagery also means concern with flows, with flux, and with momentary appearances.

p.45 Three processes will be described later as comprising the bulk of organizing activity. These are enactment (bracketing some portion of the stream of experience for further attention), selection (imposing some finite set of interpretations on the bracketed portion), and retention (storage of interpreted segments for future application).

p.46-47 Recipes provide the means to generate structures that have the characteristics you want... organizing resembles a grammar, code, or set of recipes... Organizing involves shared recipes for building

p.51 All interesting theories share the quality that they constitute an attack on assumptions taken for granted by an audience.

p.57 As an example of a phenomenon assumed to be singular that in fact turns out to be heterogeneous, stratification appears to be composed of a variety of independent phenomena including economic class, status, prestige, and political power. Inquirers who use the first pattern in this category use a reduction strategy in which they look for the simple in the apparently complex. Occam's Razor provides the cutting edge for people who favor this strategy, a strategy that is in the Platonic tradition. The opposite strategy, a strategy in the Aristotelian tradition, is one in which interesting propositions are generated by finding complexity in the simple. [JLJ - !]

p.59 People seem to find a proposition interesting not because it tells them some truth they did not already know, but because it tells them some truth they thought they already knew was wrong.

p.63 Diversity is enhanced by the adoption of ambivalent conceptual orientations, ambivalent inquiring practices, and varying positions on the issues of generality, accuracy, and simplicity.

p.63 Diversity also means trying to grasp the flows, rhythms, and streams of organizations, a tough undertaking

p.64 since there's already a little madness in the theorizing, mere foolishness is nothing... All you need to know while thinking about organizing is that there's a bit of absurdity in all of us, theorists and managers alike.

p.65 Chapter 3: interdependence and organizing

p.65 The purpose of this chapter is to introduce some tools and ideas that can be used to think through some of the issues of connection as they involve organizations.

p.72 a deviation amplifying loop... Once a variable begins to move in a particular direction, either up or down, the variable will continue to move in that direction until the system is destroyed or until some dramatic change occurs (Goldsmith 1971).

p.74, 76 When more than one causal loop exists and when some of these loops suggest the system will explode while others suggest the system will remain stable, there is the problem of knowing how to analyze such a situation... we could assume that the loops are of unequal importance... and we would predict that the fate of the system would be determined by the nature of its most important loop... If we make the assumption that the loops are of equal importance... by counting the number of negative loops... We would predict that any system will survive as a system only if it contains an odd number of negative loops. If the system contains an even number of negative loops, then their effects will cancel one another

[JLJ - There is no easy answer to analyzing something complex, you need competition-tested tricks that work - such as the scheme Weick suggests here. You also need a practical scheme you can execute, and a sensitivity to those premonitions that have practical meaning in directing the evolutionary diagnostic tests which assess potential and stability over time.]

p.86 Most managers get into trouble because they forget to think in circles... Examples are everywhere... In every one of these examples causation is circular, not linear.

p.88 Most "things" in organizations are actually relationships, variables tied together in systematic fashion. Events, therefore, depend on the strength of these ties, the direction of influence, the time it takes information in the form of differences to move around circuits.

p.89 Chapter 4: interlocked behaviors and organizing

p.89 Organizing is accomplished by processes... The behaviors of one person are contingent on the behaviors of another person(s), and these contingencies are called interacts. The unit of analysis in organizing is contingent response patterns, patterns in which an action by actor A evokes a specific response in actor B (so far this is an interact), which is then responded to by actor A (this complete sequence is a double interact).
   Hollander and Willis (1967) argue that double interacts are the basic unit for describing interpersonal influence.

p.89 Organizing is accomplished by processes... The purpose of this chapter is to describe a variety of ways to conceptualize interlocked behaviors

p.91 Partners in a collective structure share time, space, and energy, but they need not share visions, aspirations, or intentions.

p.92 a basic property of reciprocal actions is that a member emits some behavior, any behavior, which is valuable to the other person; in return the member receives a behavior that is valuable.

[JLJ - Such is a business, a collection of strategically created and refined interacting processes and structures which employ individuals to execute certain defined roles, and when the whole system works, efficiencies of scale operate and leverage the production of capital - a (significant) portion of which is used or re-invested to continue the process, the rest is consumed as profit, by the owners of the business.]

p.92 Once the members converge on interlocked behaviors as the means to pursue diverse ends, there occurs a subtle shift away from diverse to common ends. The diverse ends remain, but they become subordinated to an emerging set of shared ends.

p.98 Wallace starts with the assumption that individual actions are either consummatory or instrumental. Consummatory actions are concluding actions that typically involve consuming a reward. Instrumental actions are initial activities or means that allow consummatory activities to occur. The instrumental activities provide the conditions under which the pleasurable consummatory activities can then occur.
 A mutual equivalence structure comes into existence when my ability to perform my consummatory act depends on someone else performing an instrumental act.

p.100 Wallace's proposal: a mutual equivalence structure can be built and sustained without people knowing the motives of another person, without people having to share goals, and it is not even necessary that people see the entire structure or know who their partners are. What is crucial in a mutual equivalence structure is mutual prediction, not mutual sharing.

p.109 using simple social structures as building blocks... The coordination is built into simple structures, the assemblage of which creates units more complex than anyone can comprehend. This greater complexity allows these structures to be used to cope with, manage, and resolve issues that are more complex than any participant can visualize or articulate... cause maps can be sufficient to sustain complicated social entities.

p.110 Double interacts as stable subassemblies... The presumption throughout this book is that the stable component in organizational growth and decay is the double interact.

p.110 The bonds among most subsystems, in most organizations, should be relatively loose.

p.111 Most things are only weakly connected with most other things.

p.111 [Glassman] An important part of our capacity to cope with reality is our ability to form generalizations

p.112 The combination of stable subassemblies composed of double interacts and of loose coupling among double interacts is attractive when pondering organizations because it suggests conditions under which evolution can occur quite rapidly, adaptation can be preserved, and adaptability can also be maintained. Subassemblies and loose coupling provide the potential for flexibility as well as stability. Since double interacts are suitable candidates for loosely-coupled structures, the fit among the concepts appears fortunate.

p.114 The greater the perceived amount of equivocality present in the input, the fewer the number of rules used to compose the process. Conversely, the smaller the perceived amount of equivocality in the input, the greater the number of rules used to assemble a process. If an input is judged to be highly equivocal, there is uncertainty as to exactly what it is and how it should be handled: this makes it more difficult to judge what the appropriate cycles would be or how many should be applied. As a result, only a small number of rather general rules are used to assemble a process. However, if the input is judged to be less equivocal, there is more certainty as to what the item is and how it should be handled; hence a greater number of rules can be applied in assembling a process to deal with this input

p.114 equivocality may be temporarily reduced by assemblages of double interacts... cycles consist of double interacts and processes are sets of double interacts.

p.115 each cycle is directed toward reducing equivocality.

p.116 Any process consists of two or more interlocked cycles... The greater the number of rules used to select the cycles, the smaller the number of cycles that will be assembled into a process. Conversely, the fewer the number of rules that are used to select cycles, the greater the number of cycles that will be assembled... With these tools in hand, we can now describe the stages that occur whenever a process is assembled. First, a member judges how much equivocality is present in an input; this judgment conditions that person's further judgment as to the number of rules that will be used to build the process.. The greater the perceived amount of equivocality, the fewer the number of rules; the smaller the perceived amount of equivocality, the greater the number of rules.

p.118 These collective structures, variously referred to as interlocked behavior cycles and double interacts, are the elements of organizing. Organizations are built of and fall back on these stable subassemblies.

p.119 Chapter 5: natural selection and organizing

p.119 Organizing processes resemble closely the three processes commonly associated with theories of natural selection.

p.130 The four elements of organizing are ecological change, enactment, selection, and retention.

p.130 people normally are not aware of things that run smoothly. It is only the occasion of change when attention becomes active.

[JLJ - I would disagree - we do notice the regular sound of the car engine but we practically disengage from it, as we subconsciously ask ourselves, "how much should I care about that, considering the predicament I am in?" and since the sound is normal and only of marginal concern, we disengage and continue our scanning activity for strategic awareness in our current predicament.]

p.130 Enactment is to organizing as variation is to natural selection. The term enactment is preferred over variation because it captures the more active role that we presume organizational members play in creating the environments which then impose on them... The activity of enactment parallels variation because it produces strange displays that are often unlike anything the individual or the organization has seen before.
 Enactment is the only process where the organism directly engages an external "environment." All processes subsequent to enactment work on edited raw materials and whatever episodes have been extracted by enactment.

p.131 The enactment, as it becomes linked with ecological change, merely provides the equivocal raw materials which then may be seized or dismissed by the selection process.

p.134 how can I [The actor]
know what I think [Retention]
until I see [Selection]
what I say [Enactment]

p.135 Clifford Geertz describes man with a turn of phrase which is quite compatible with the analysis that pervades this book: "man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun" (1973. p. 5).

[JLJ - A machine executing code is suspended in webs of significance spun by the programmer.]

p.143 Cause maps are approximations and deal with likelihoods, not certainties.

p.147 Chapter 6: enactment and organizing

p.148 Experience is the consequence of activity.

[JLJ - Experience is the consequence of activity and a wise reflection on that activity, which categorizes events and makes notes to change future behavior.]

p.151 A presumption throughout this book is that managers often know much less about their environments and organizations than they think.

p.154-155 A schema is an abridged, generalized, corrigible organization of experience that serves as an initial frame of reference for action and perception... Neisser describes schemata as active, information-seeking structures that accept information and direct action... A schema directs the exploration of objects, this exploration samples portions of an object, and these samples may modify the schema, which then directs further exploration and sampling, which then further modifies the schema; this kind of process goes on continuously.

[JLJ - This concept is also useful for game theory.]

p.156 When an object is sampled, only portions of it are pulled out for closer inspection, but these are sufficient to give some indication as to what is going on.

p.157 Neisser would argue that schema are not that vulnerable to distortion and that by and large they pick up real objects.

p.157 organizations enact their environments

p.171 Chapter 7: selection and organizing

p.174 Things that are equivocal do not lend themselves to definite classifications. They can always be classified as indications of two or more different objects and meanings... equivocal inputs have multiple significations... The image we want to capture is not that of an environment that is disordered, indeterminant, and chaotic. Instead, we want to capture the image of an environment that is rich in the possible connections that could be imposed on an equally rich assortment of possible punctuated variables. We feel that equivocality is the term that most accurately preserves these nuances. It is the richness and multiplicity of meanings that can be superimposed on a situation that organizations must manage.

p.177 When people in organizations select actions and interpretations, they try to be reasonable in making these selections, even if they have only modest success doing so. What people impose in their attempts to be reasonable are previous interpretations of causal sequences that have worked - that is, cause maps of previously enacted environments. When current equivocalities are filtered through these prior enactments, some things go unnoticed while others are labeled as familiar, strange, relevant, and so on. In all cases the enacted environment is acting as a surrogate for the natural environment. And it is enacted versions of reality that supply the [JLJ - interacting elements of an ecosystem] amongst which people with equivocal power and equivocal positions fit with varying degrees of success.
  The enacted environment substitutes for the natural environment only when it is unequivocal and credited, only when people who are trying to understand a current equivocal input compose a selection process using many rules and few cycles and treat the incoming input as a known rather than unknown commodity... Credited enactment... will bear a close resemblance to a standard operating procedure.

p.177 People try to fit novel interpretations and actions into what they've known all along. And when something doesn't fit with the past, it's often discarded or misread. That suggests why newcomers... outsiders... are crucial sources of innovations. 

p.183 [Heider] In examining a machine, I may move some parts to see with what other parts they are connected... Then the causal possibilities are mediated to me through events. As we have seen, however, a look at the static object often tells us much about the way it would perform.

p.185 Enactments often consist of trial-and-error behavior... Whatever people do during enactment... if those "strange" actions promote rapid adaptation to shifting conditions, they're likely to persist, be enacted repeatedly, and to be frequent inputs to the selection process.

p.188 The law of requisite variety "states that the variety within a system must be as least as great as the environmental variety against which it is attempting to regulate itself. Put more succinctly, only variety can regulate variety" (Buckley 1968, p.495). It's because of requisite variety that organizations have to be preoccupied with keeping sufficient diversity inside the organization to sense accurately the variety present in ecological changes outside it.

p.189 When applied to organizations the implication of requisite variety is that organizational processes that are applied to equivocal inputs must themselves be equivocal.

p.192-193 When faced with the need for requisite variety, there really are only three things an organization can do. First, it can establish a one-to-one correspondence between variety in the controller and variety in the controlled... The second way to deal with variety is to reduce it... The third alternative, and the one toward which we are most sympathetic, is to complicate the controller. This intentional complication increases the controller's variety relative to the variety in the inputs that the controller processes. A complicated individual embodies in one place the several sensors implied when there is one sensor assigned to each variable. This embodiment means that the complicated individual can sense variation in a larger environment, select what need not be attended to, what will not change imminently, what won't happen, and by this selection the individual is able to amplify his control variety. He safely (that is, insightfully) ignores that which will not change, concentrates on that which will, and... is able to anticipate significant environmental variation when and where it occurs... Complicated observers take in more. They see patterns that less complicated people miss, and they exploit these subtle patterns by concentrating on them and ignoring everything else.

p.193 No one is ever free to do something he can't think of. That's why requisite variety produces adaptation.

p.194 Action precedes thought (Bem 1974; Zimbardo 1969).

[JLJ - Action might generate thought, but the action itself was preceded by thought. More specifically, and in my opinion, thought and action are locked in cycles which neither precede nor follow, they coexist with each other and feed on/off each other.]

p.205 Chapter 8: retention and organizing

p.221 The reader should be cautioned that the statement "Organizations must partially discredit what they know" does not mean just that an organization should doubt what it knows for certain... we also mean that an organization should treat as certain those things which it doubts... When things are clear, doubt; when there is doubt, treat things as if they are clear. That's the full and symmetrical meaning of discrediting.

[JLJ - I think I understand what Weick is saying here, so I will therefore doubt that I do. But, since I am now doubting Weick, I will therefore treat what he is saying as clear. This 'discrediting' should and ought to be discredited. I am now completely lost, so I will end this comment.]

p.228 Any person who has a view of the world and who also discredits part of that view winds up with two ways to examine a situation. Discrediting is a way to enhance requisite variety and a way to register more of the variety that's present in the world.

p.233 Chapter 9: implications of organizing

p.235 the organizing formulation takes the analyst's several thoughts about rules, ambiguity, perceptions, actions, memory, and choice, and weaves them together so that the analyst can see the consequences.

p.236 The picture of organizing that emerges from the formulation is one in which there are numerous enactment-selection-retention (ESR) sequences underway at any moment in time scattered throughout the organization.

p.239 goals... are more productively understood as summaries of previous actions.

[JLJ - Goals are simply intelligently or practically refined wants - by a (usually) mature process of understanding, deliberation and selection that concludes, "Yes, of all the things it makes sense to aim for, to do at this moment, and in order to 'go on' in this predicament, this item is one of the wants that I can and should elevate from a mere thought or dream or maybe-one-day-I-could, to the point that I ought to make and execute plans, and take initial or continuing concrete actions, in order to begin, continue, or continue to pursue, so that I might acquire or achieve it."]

p.240 Equivocality is arousing (Hunt 1963), and this free-floating arousal sets the stage for emotional labeling (Schachter 1964) and for a narrowing of perception (Easterbrook 1959) and frustration (Kahnemann 1973).

p.240 Understanding is not just a left-brain activity... understanding is shot through with right-brain activities of intuition and imagination.

p.240 One way to look at this book is as a Swiss Army knife for organizational design.

p.243 You never do one thing all at once.

p.244 In a highly interdependent system, any action ramifies and has far-reaching consequences... all of these consequences don't happen at the same time. Some of them happen right away, some of them have remote and delayed effects.

p.245 chaotic action is preferable to orderly inaction

p.245 Action, when viewed retrospectively, clarifies what the organization is doing, what business it is in, and what its projects may be.

p.245 When a group is without a project and is confused, the emission of actions that can be viewed reflectively increases the chances that the group may discover what it is doing.

p.246 there are no simple answers... for anything that happens in an organization... We've repeatedly suggested that improvisation, reaccomplishment, and invention are required as substitutes for open-ended analyses.

p.248 play [in Miller's view] is not viewed as a means to an end but rather as a crooked line to the end. It gets around obstacles, but the obstacles were put there by the player in order to complicate the player's life. Deliberate complication, if it gives the person experience in combining elements in novel ways, can be potentially adaptive for dealing with novel problems.

p.248 The heart of Miller's argument is that play is important not because it teaches some new skill, but because it takes activities that are already in one's repertoire and gives one practice in recombining those into novel sets.

p.250 Maps constrain enactments

p.252-253 Evolutionary systems are creative systems, and creativity usually means putting old things into new combinations and new things into old combinations. In either case, novel relations between pairs of things are the essence of creativity.

p.261 Any cause map is an oversimplification of situations.