vii 'It is what it is, it is in front of me, and I have to deal with it.' That credo is stirring and action oriented.

vii John Dewey describes the flux this way: 'In every waking moment, the complete balance of the organism and its environment is constantly interfered with and as constantly restored... Life is interruptions and recoveries... At these moments of a shifting of activity, conscious feeling and thought arise and are accentuated' (1922,pp. 178-179).

[JLJ - This is what I refer to as the 'predicament.' It is the predicament that we find ourselves in, every waking hour of our lives, which causes us to motivate ourselves to action, to scheme, and to live. The consciousness is a 'useful hallucination' which presents to us in one grand view our predicament, and suggestions deemed useful for managing it.]

vii The focus of the following essays is on the fugitive quality of organizing and sensemaking. The organizing is fugitive because people try to fold order into streaming, changing experience.

vii The streaming, the organizing, the sensemaking all are situated in what Taylor and Van Every (2000) call 'the crucible of the quotidian'... The quotidian is the commonplace, the everyday, the recurring, which is the crucible where efforts to make sense and hold events together are tested. This crucible is 'the ultimately determining factor in what the organization will be like'

ix Kathleen Sutcliffe... summarized the 394 pages we wrote in our two editions of Managing the Unexpected (2001) in one sentence: 'Managing the unexpected is curbing the temptation to normalize and dealing with the consequences when you do.'

[Organized Impermanence: An Overview p.3-8]

p.5 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 serve as a springboard for action.

p.7 Situations that are easy to convert from improvisation into repetition may well become the first and most basic organizational routines... Organizations look most alike in those sequences that are easiest to routinize.

p.7 High reliability organizations... 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... 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.

p.8 [Chia, 2005] 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.

[Mundane Poetics: Searching for Wisdom in Organizing Theory p.11-25]

p.14 the 'attitude of wisdom', which is acting as if one both knows and doesn't what is happening and what to do about it.

p.14 '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 the 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)

p.15 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.

p.17 The context of evolution draws attention to such things as... imagination as simulated trial and error... Organizing emerges as an ongoing stream of failed experiments and relentless mortality, updating, surprise, adaptations that threaten to reduce adaptability, winnowing, and occasional convergence.

p.18 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. [James 1980, vol. 2: 392]

p.20 The idea that people need to complicate themselves and that it takes a complex organization to cope with a complex environment flies in the face of the counsel that people need to focus, simplify, and keep it simple. Why all the clamor in favor of complication? Why is it dangerous to dwell on simplicity?

p.21 the environment is unknowable and unpredictable. In the face of all of this complexity, everyone simplifies the data they receive. But there are better and worse simplifications. Better simplifications arise from deeper knowledge of the environment and deeper understanding of what the organization is and what it can do.

p.21 Complexity is important because it fosters adaptability. Complex organizations have extensive response repertoires, which means they are in a better position to cope with environments that failed to show up in their forecasts. People are not very good at forecasting, as Bill Starbuck keeps showing. If that's the case, then it makes more sense to invest in generalized resources that can fit a variety of new environments than in better models of forecasting... In a dynamic environment, future problems materialize swiftly and unexpectedly. Generalized, adaptive resources are more likely to be retained in complex structures. Thus, complex structures preserve both adaptation and adaptability

p.22 '...Given that interdependence is the crucial element from which a theory of organizations is built, interacts rather than acts are the crucial observables that must be specified. The unit of analysis is contingent response patterns, patterns in which an action by actor A evokes a specific response in actor B which is then responded to by actor A. This is the pattern designated a "double interact." ...Since organizing involves control, influence, and authority, a description of organizing must use the double interact as the unit of analysis for specifying observable behavior.' (Weick 1969:33)

p.22 Thompson's (1967) pattern of task interdependence that he labels 'reciprocal interdependence managed by mutual adjustment' is basically a double interact constrained by the nature of the task.

[Faith, Evidence, and Action: Better Guesses in an Unknowable World p.31-44]

p.27 'Evidence' in organizations typically consists of traces, clues, and fragments that are made sensible by actions that combine cues and 'guesses' into meaningful patterns. These are the basic tools we have to construct transient meaning in an unknowable world.

p.28 The routines, agreements, and goals in impermanent organizations, by definition, are subject to unraveling. Impermanence forces people to redo patterns that keep falling apart.

p.28 Enacting reiterates the basic notion that people organize and create the environments that provide many of their constraints and opportunities. Enacting resembles improvisation, albeit 'wary improvisation' lest the order already achieved be entirely abandoned.

p.32 'A system's willingness to become aware of problems is associated with its ability to act on them' (Westrum 1993: 340). When people develop the capacity to act on something, then they can afford to see it.

p.36-37 [Ruben McDaniel] 'Because the nature of the world is unknowable... we are left with only sensemaking. Even if we had the capacity to do more, doing more would not help... the next state of the world is unknowable. And so we must pay attention to the world as it unfolds. Therefore, it is a good thing that we can't do more than sensemaking... because then we would only be frustrated by our inability to know...'

p.37 Enacting involves shaping the world... as well as stirring the world so that it yields what we then treat as 'answers'. Typically all it takes to trigger and guide enactment is a small structure such as... a map... These minimal structures often are sufficient to produce order since they animate activity, calm fears, get people in motion, and focus attention, all of which serve to update the initiating structures. These sequences are moments of enactment.

p.37 improvisation does not materialize out of thin air. Instead, it materializes around a simple structure that provides the pretext for real-time enacting. Some of that composing is built from precomposed phrases that become meaningful retrospectively as embellishments of that structure. And some comes from elaboration of the embellishments themselves. The use of precomposed fragments in the emerging action is an example of Ryle's 'wary improvisation' anchored in past experience... Considered as a noun, an improvisation is a transformation of some original model, Considered as a verb, improvisation is composing in real time that begins with embellishments of a simple model, but increasingly feeds on these embellishments themselves to move farther from the original structure and closer to the flexibility that Martha Feldman (2000) observes in routines and that John Dewey (1922/2002) sees in habits.

p.37 Enactment and improvising both represent bets that an unfolding action will have made sense.

p.38 Simultaneous believing and doubting (Weick 1979), the signature of a wise act (Meacham 1990)... in an unknowable, unpredictable world, the energy of the act may temporarily displace wisdom, since we need to act in order to see what we think. Cognition lies in the path of the action but the forcefulness of that action makes a difference.

p.39 Abductive reasoning is reasoning that forms and evaluates hypotheses in order to make sense of puzzling facts (Magnani, 2001)... the conjectural paradigm, grounded in abductive reasoning, is the foundation of inquiry... The essence of conjecture and divination lies in the faith that a fragment is a meaningful symptom which, if pursued vigorously, will enact a world where the meaning of the fragment becomes clearer. Conjecture essentially utilizes 'obscure or remote clues in a speculative manner to build an epistemological model' (Harrowitz 1988: 183). Clues enable people to 'leap from apparently significant facts, which could be observed, to a complex reality which - directly at least - could not' (Harrowitz 1988: 184). [JLJ - Nancy Harrowitz: The Body of the Detective Model: Charles S. Pierce and Edgar Allan Poe]

p.39 When an observed fact is read through an imagined rule, this action can generate a world not previously thought of.

p.39 'In every waking moment, the complete balance of the organism [system] and its environment is constantly interfered with and as constantly restored. Hence the "stream of consciousness" in general, and in particular that phase of it celebrated by William James as alternation of flights and perchings. Life is interruptions and recoveries.' (Dewey 1922/2002: 178-179)

[Managing the Unexpected: Complexity as Distributed Sensemaking p.51-64]

p.54 the organization of the workflow can affect the way people think... mere assembly does not guarantee meaning. Each part is meaningless until it is related to some other part whose meaning, in turn, is dependent on the meaning of the initial part. Making meaning is an iterative process.

p.54-55 if you want to prepare for the unexpected... You have to question... and argue... You have to think in a more mindful, less automatic manner. You have to engage in controlled thinking that is more commonly associated with doubt, inquiry, argumentation, and deliberation.

p.55-56 Sensemaking is a diagnostic process directed at constructing plausible interpretations of ambiguous cues that are sufficient to sustain action.

p.56 Notice that in a reactive world, a highly refined planning system is less critical than the capability to make sense out of an emerging pattern.

p.56 Sensemaking is a direction for the next period... When Gleason perceives himself as making a decision, he reports that he postpones action so he can get the decision "right"... If, instead, Gleason perceives himself as making sense of an unfolding fire, then he gives his crew a direction for some indefinite period, a direction which by definition is dynamic, open to revision at any time, self-correcting, responsive, and with more of its rationale being transparent.

p.57 Now we ask whether social resources at CDC were organized to create a plausible story that was actively updated through ongoing attention to shifting patterns of cues.

p.57-58 Physicians don't count errors that occur in diagnosis and therapy as errors. Instead, "they count them as progressive approximations of their understanding of the character of illness." ..."The work process unfolds as a series of approximations and attempts to discover an appropriate response. And because it unfolds this way, as an error-ridden activity, it requires continuous attention to the patient's condition and to reparation"

p.59 I have argued that how you are organized... determines the depth of your resources for sensemaking.

[Information Overload Revisited p.67-84]

p.66 'significance' is crucial for managing load... As Dewey notes later, once we accomplish something:

...new struggles and failures are inevitable. The total scene of action remains as before, only for us more complex, and more subtly unstable. But this very situation is a consequence of expansion, not of failures of power, and when grasped and admitted it is a challenge to intelligence. Instruction in what to do next can never come from an infinite goal, which for us is bound to be empty. It can be derived only from study of the deficiencies, irregularities and possibilities of the actual situation (Dewey, 1922, pp.288-289).

p.66 Action can shape a pile of cues into a coherent cluster that is then easier to name and label and update.

p.71 Recall James Thompson's (1967) claim that the key "problem for complex organizations is one of coping with uncertainty," which is reduced through information.

p.72 Progress is present reconstruction adding fullness and distinctness of meaning (Dewey 1922:281)

p.72 [Dewey] "So act as to increase the meaning of present experience" (p.283). Thus, complexity and perplexity increase hand in hand with an increase in significance and meaning... apparent setbacks are actually complications, extensions, and growth in complexity resulting from new interpretations.

p.73 [Dewey] Every important satisfaction of an old want creates a new one; and this new want has to enter upon an experimental adventure if it is to find its satisfaction. (p.285)

p.73 [Dewey] Instruction in what to do next can never come from an infinite goal, which for us is bound to be empty. It can be derived only from study of the deficiencies, irregularities and possibilities of the actual situation. (Dewey 1922:288-9)

p.73 Complication and instability are hallmarks of human activity, sensemaking and meaning... Information overload "is a transitory sensation that is experienced by individuals developing schemas that will allow them to upgrade their performance in job-related tasks" (Kock 2000:261)

p.78 [Brenner] "The expert not only knows what needs to be achieved, based on mature and practiced situational discrimination, but also knows how to achieve the goal. A more subtle and refined discrimination ability is what distinguishes the expert from the proficient performer. This ability allows the expert to discriminate among situations all seen as similar with respect to the plan or perspective, distinguishing those situations requiring one action from those demanding another... [T]he expert not only sees what needs to be achieved, but also how to achieve it. When things are proceeding normally, experts don't solve problems and don't make decisions, they simply do what experience has shown normally work, and it normally works"

[Organizing for Mindfulness: Eastern Wisdom and Western Knowledge p.89-105]

p.85 Ten years ago... We defined mindfulness as a 'rich awareness of discriminatory detail coupled with wise action, both being generated by organizational processes.'

p.94 Impermanence 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.96 "Stable attention induces a rich awareness of discriminatory detail and wise action." ..Attempts to increase mindfulness in an organization are complicated, because organizations are established, held together, and made effective largely by means of concepts.

p.102 Commitment to resilience refers to processes that recover from setbacks, especially through improvisation.

[Making Sense of Blurred Images: Mindful Organizing in Mission STS-107 p.111-128]

p.110 organizing for high reliability increases rich awareness of discriminatory details by shifting priorities away from efficiency and decision making toward effectiveness and sensemaking. Important resources for sensemaking (e.g. identity [JLJ - p.7 frames of reference], cues, actions, plausible narratives) tend to be mobilized more readily when people ask 'What's the story?' rather than 'What's the answer?'

p.117 Systems with higher reliability worry chronically that analytic errors are embedded in ongoing activities and that unexpected failure modes and limitations of foresight may amplify those analytic errors. The people who operate and manage high-reliability organizations are well aware of the diagnostic value of small failures.

p.119 The question... is a perfect example of a diagnostic small failure that is a clue to larger issues.

p.124 Most systems try to anticipate trouble spots, but the higher-reliability systems also pay close attention to their capability to improvise, to act without knowing in advance what will happen, to contain unfolding trouble, and to bounce back after dangers materialize.

[Organizing and the Process of Sensemaking p.131-151]

p.132 Sensemaking is about the interplay of action and interpretation rather than the influence of evaluation on choice.

p.132 To focus on sensemaking is to portray organizing as the experience of being thrown into an ongoing, unknowable, unpredictable streaming of experience in search of answers to the question, "what's the story?" Plausible stories animate and gain their validity from subsequent activity. The language of sensemaking captures the realities of agency, flow, equivocality, transience, reaccomplishment, unfolding, and emergence, realities that are often obscured by the language of variables, nouns, quantities, and structures.

p.132 To work with the idea of sensemaking is to appreciate that smallness does not equate with insignificance. Small structures and short moments can have large consequences.
 We take the position that the concept of sensemaking fills important gaps in organizational theory.

p.133 "Organization is an attempt to order the intrinsic flux of human action, to channel it toward certain ends, to give it a particular shape, through generalizing and institutionalizing particular meanings and rules" (Tsoukas and Chia 2002, p. 570).

p.133 The operative image of organization is one in which organization emerges through sensemaking, not one in which organization precedes sensemaking or one in which sensemaking is produced by organization.

p.134 During her routine activities, the [sensemaker] becomes aware of vital signs that are at variance with the "normal" demeanor... In response to the interruption, the [sensemaker] orients... and notices and brackets possible signs of trouble for closer attention. This noticing and bracketing is an incipient state of sensemaking.

p.134 The [sensemaker's] noticing and bracketing is guided by mental models she has acquired during her work, training, and life experience. Those mental models may help her recognize and guide a response

p.134 Sensemaking is about labeling and categorizing to stabilize the streaming of experience.

p.135 In medicine, functional deployment means imposing diagnostic labels that suggest a plausible treatment.

p.136 To make sense is to connect the abstract with the concrete... Sensemaking starts with immediate actions, local context, and concrete cues

p.136 "The [medical] work process unfolds as a series of approximations and attempts to discover an appropriate response. And because it unfolds this way, as an error-ridden activity, it requires continuous attention to the patient's condition and to reparation" (Paget 1988,p.143).

p.136 If the first question of sensemaking is "what's going on here?," the second, equally important question is "what do I do next?" This second question is directly about action

p.138 To summarize, this sequence highlights several distinguishing features of sensemaking, including its genesis in disruptive ambiguity, its beginnings in acts of noticing and bracketing, its mixture of retrospect and prospect, its reliance on presumptions to guide action, its embedding in interdependence, and its culmination in articulation that shades into acting thinkingly. Answers to the question "what's the story?" emerge from retrospect, connections with past experience, and dialog among people who act on behalf of larger social units. Answers to the question "now what?" emerge from presumptions about the future, articulation concurrent with action, and projects that become increasingly clear as they unfold.

p.139 "a system can respond adaptively to its environment by mimicking inside itself the basic dynamics of evolutionary processes" (Warglien 2002, p.110). The basic evolutionary process assumed by sensemaking is one in which retrospective interpretations are built during interdependent interaction.

p.140 Though plausible, the story that is selected is also tentative and provisional.

p.141 Sensemaking is not about truth and getting it right. Instead, it is about continued redrafting of an emerging story so that it becomes more comprehensive, incorporates more of the observed data, and is more resilient in the face of criticism... People may get better stories, but they will never get the story... The idea that sensemaking is driven by plausibility rather than accuracy (Weick 1995, p. 55) conflicts with academic theories and managerial practices that assume that the accuracy of managers' perceptions determine the effectiveness of outcomes.

p.142 People do not need to perceive the current situation or problems accurately to solve them; they can act effectively simply by making sense of circumstances in ways that appear to move toward general long-term goals.

p.147 To deal with ambiguity, interdependent people search for meaning, settle for plausibility, and move on. These are moments of sensemaking, and scholars... scrutinize them... in the belief that they will affect how action gets routinized

[Impermanent Systems and Medical Errors: Variety Mitigates Adversity p.157-172]

p.153 Requisite variety is a relationship between the variety in one system relative to the variety in another. The shorthand version of this relationship is that 'only variety can destroy variety' (Ashby, 1956, p.207). Haberstroh (1965) describes the main idea in this way: 'if the environment can disturb a system in a wide variety of ways, then effective control requires a regulator that can sense these disturbances and intervene with a commensurately large repertory of responses' (p. 1176). The amount of variety that can be controlled in any situation is determined by the system with the least variety. Variety that goes unnoticed remains free to be expressed in unintended outcomes.

p.159 Ross Ashby's 'Law of Requisite Variety' (1956)... 'the larger the variety of action available to a control system, the larger the variety of perturbation it is able to compensate.' Systems with higher requisite variety should catch the development of adverse events more quickly and should recover from those events with less damage than is true for systems with lower requisite variety.

p.159 Environmental disturbances affect both a regulator and some system that generates output... Regulators sense some portion of the disturbance, attempt to counteract what is sensed, and try to render the treatment system more resilient in the face of disturbances. The treatment (output) system transforms inputs from disturbances and regulators into outputs, but is at the mercy of disturbances unless the regulator destroys them. Thus, only variety in the regulator can destroy variety in the disturbed system and insure reliability in system outputs.

p.160 When the team's repertoire of actions got larger, its capability to sense and regulate variety also got larger. As a result, previously unchecked disturbances to the functioning... were interrupted earlier in their development and resulted in less trauma.

p.161 'power makes people stupid' (Flyvbjerg, 1998, pp. 37, 229).

[JLJ - no, power makes people intoxicated, which can make them act stupid.]

p.163 Disturbances are not counteracted simply by random bursts of variety. There must be 'orchestration' (Benner, Hooper-Kyriakidis, and Stannard, 1999, pp.204-211) of the variety that is directed at a crisis.

p.164 Crucial variety may be sacrificed when people reach for protocols in the belief that their activities are interrelated in a simple manner when in fact their situations are more complex and require rich reciprocal interaction (Daft and Lengel, 1986).

p.164 To reduce adversity, practitioners need to focus on ways in which variety is imbalanced and strive for greater balance. Some unexpected and relatively minor changes can rebalance variety.

p.165 To rebalance variety... in an environment that is often unknowable and unpredictable... The dominant issue under such conditions is not decision making with its distracting rational system overlay. The dominant issue, instead, is one of sensemaking, interpretation, and the resumption of treatment after an unexpected interruption. The variety necessary for meaningful interpretation... does not lie in an all-purpose algorithm for decision making... Sutcliffe (2001) notes... 'better information processing may not so much be characterized by an ability to choose between accurate images and misperceptions, but rather the ability to enhance plausibility and choose between different potential misperceptions' (p. 211).

p.165 Something that is an error now often wasn't an error back then.

p.166 The emerging picture is one in which a system with high requisite variety has the capability for nested hindsight... If systems are designed to be more respectful, heedful and mindful, then fewer acts, whether they are near term or long term, should become adversely wrong.

[Hospitals as Cultures of Entrapment: A Re-analysis of the Bristol Royal Infirmary p.177-188]

p.175 One reason why organizational life is punctured by a steady stream of interruptions and recoveries is that mistakes are common.

p.180 Clues that things were not going as well as they seemed were abundant.

[Enacting an Environment: The Infrastructure of Organizing p.193-205]

p.190 people are shaped by their own shaping of circumstances... 'People act their way into clearer identities by learning from retrospective interpretations of the improvisations necessary to handle discontinuous work assignments' (Weick, 2001, p. 177). [JLJ - we improvise, then we learn, retrospectively, from these improvisations]

p.190 [Follett, 1924, pp. 118-119] the activity of the individual is only in a certain sense caused by the stimulus of the situation because that activity is itself helping to produce the situation which causes the activity of the individual

p.190 We do something and the situation is forever changed, and those changes affect us. [JLJ - and our ability to do something. We ought to have the resources to handle the environment which is subtlety changed by what we do. And recursively so on. If not, we should change what we do.]

p.198 Enactment is about operants, acts that operate on the world... Enactment helps people see the environment as something other than resources, institutional precedents, promises, uninterrupted information, niches, models to mimic, markets, liabilities, and costs.

p.201 Enactment is about knowing and learning, which means it is about issues of epistemology [JLJ - the study of knowledge and justified belief]. But the form of knowing that is involved in enactment, active probing that both shapes and meets resistance, means that it is also about issues of ontology [JLJ - a description of the concepts and relationships that can exist for an agent or a community of agents]... Enactment is about probing that determines the nature and reality of what is probed.

p.201 There are numerous relationships in which two elements are linked and, by successive approximations, specify one another more clearly, reduce uncertainty, and heighten understanding. [JLJ - structure influences action, which changes structure. By chicken-and-egging, we can uncover the nature of our reality.]

p.201 Territory is not territory without a map. And there is no map apart from some territory. It is a chicken-and-egg nightmare all the way down.

p.202 Action unattached to a narrative is senseless... the solution is to adopt the embedded act as a foundational structure. An embedded act is one whose very character is defined by and defining of context.

p.204 people are seldom in the state of not acting. This means that enactment may be more about redirection of a unit that is already acting than about getting the unit in motion in the first place... Enactment, in this view, occurs concurrent with breaches, surprises, the unexpected, and events that interrupt routine responding... Acts spread across time and space... were the rule in the examples of enactment.

p.204 Enactment argues that people act in order to replace uncertainty with meaning. These actions in search of meaning spin off unanticipated consequences... detecting and managing these latent conditions, and the consequences that are flowing from them, is a recurrent task. Because the task recurs, the organization that performs the task must itself be reaccomplished... Hence the centrality of organizing as a focus for organizational theory. Hence the centrality of sensemaking as the activity that smoothes over or singles out unexpected events.

[Positive Organizing and Organizational Tragedy p.209-221]

p.211 When people organize, they often create a context where people are thrown into equivalent streams of events that can be interrupted by unexpected events. Actions of recovery, bricolage, repair, updating, making do, and improvisation tend to dominate in such settings. Positive organizing, therefore, occurs concurrent with wading into uncertain circumstances and dealing with whatever unexpected events occur using tools that themselves were unexpected recombinations of existing repertoires.

p.212 As Paget (1993) said in her work on medical error, "Physicians are 'expert' in a work that proceeds by trial and error" (p. 15).

p.212 A plausible common assumption is that people act their way into meaning. This means that in their early stages, and for some stretch of time, actions are becoming meaningful rather than unfolding with clear-cut meaning right from the start.

p.212 David Hume... said, "tis impossible to separate the chance of good from the risk of ill" (Sharpe & Faden, 1998:1)... As an action unfolds it may turn out to be either positive or negative since either outcome emerges from a common pathway.

p.218 Those organizations that spend more time examining failure as a window on the health of the system, more time resisting the urge to simply assumptions about the world, more time observing operations and their effects, more time developing resilience to manage unexpected events, and more time locating local expertise and creating a climate of deference to those experts, tend to be more reliable (Weick & Sutcliffe, 2001). Collectively these five processes enact a rich awareness of discriminatory detail, wisdom, and continuing adjustments in the service of reliability.

[Emergent Change as a Universal in Organizations p.229-241]

p.226 The continuing adaption that is associated with emergent change seems to occur when people stay in motion, have a direction, look closely, update often, and converse candidly... Any old change program will do as long as that program (1) animates people and gets them moving and experimenting; (2) provides a direction; (3) encourages updating through closer attention to what is happening; and (4) facilitates respectful interaction that enables people to build a stable rendition of what they face.

p.235 Sensemaking involves "the meaningful linkaging of symbols and activity, that enables people to come to terms with the ongoing struggle for existence" (Prus 1996, p. 232)... People need to act to discover what they face, and they need to talk to discover what is on their mind... Sensemaking appears to be the root activity when people deal with an unknowable, unpredictable world.

p.236 effectiveness will improve or decline depending on whether the program engages or blocks the four components of sensemaking.These components by themselves are sufficient to produce change. But they require a pretext for activation: there needs to be some kind of surprise and some kind of content to set them in motion... When interventions inhibit animation, direction, attention, and dialogue, ambiguity increases... In a change process that works, people tackle new tasks and discover new capabilities. They continue to move in the direction of greater alignment of personal and organizational values. They continue to notice, now in greater detail, just how much top management neglected and has left as their legacy for the units to clean up. And they become increasingly willing to speak up about what really needs to be remedied. All four of these activities - animation, direction, attention, respectful interaction - are crucial for adaptation, learning, and change in a turbulent world. But they are also the four activities most likely to be curbed severely in a hierarchical command-and-control system.

p.237 One reason it is tough to alter a pattern of emergent change is that this requires a demanding set of diagnostic and intervention skills.

[Drop Your Tools: An Allegory for Organizational Studies p.247-259]

p.248 Dropping one's tools is a proxy for unlearning, for adaptation, for flexibility, in short, for many of the dramas that engage organizational scholars.

p.248 [Kaplan 1964] It comes as no particular surprise to discover that a scientist formulates problems in a way which requires for their solution just those techniques in which he himself is especially skilled

p.256 Kant's rich assertion that "perception without conception is blind; conception without perception is empty" (Blumer, 1969: 168).

p.257 Thompson urged us to focus on relationships, use abstract concepts, bridge observations and abstractions, and articulate the values that matter

[Leadership as the Legitimation of Doubt (Weick, 2001) p.263-271]

p.262 To organize doubt is to engage in meaningful argumentation... Action is crucial because doubt, by itself, is dangerous.

p.264 In an unknowable, unpredictable world, sensemaking is all we have... It is the combination of thrown-ness [JLJ - Heidegger proclaimed that we are "thrown" into the world and that our Being-in-the-world is a "thrown-ness"], unknowability, and unpredictability that makes having some direction, any direction, the central issue for human beings, and by implication, the central issue for leaders. Sensemaking is about navigating by means of a compass rather than a map. "Maps, by definition, can help only in known worlds - worlds that have been charted before. Compasses are helpful when you are not sure where you are and can get only a general sense of direction" (Hurst, 1995, p.168). Maps may be the mainstay of performance, but the compass and the compass needle, which function much like human values, are the mainstays of learning and renewal. If people find themselves in a world that is only partially charted, and if leaders also admit that they too don't know, then both are more likely to mobilize resources for direction making rather than for performance.

p.265 A compass makes it clearer that we are looking for a direction rather than a location. And a compass is a more reliable instrument of navigation if locations on the map are changing... it is less crucial that people have a specific destination, and more crucial for purposes of sensemaking that they have the capability to act their way into an understanding of where they are, who they are, and what they are doing. While the effective leader may sometimes be able to point to a specific destination that people find compelling, it is more likely that the effectiveness lies in the ability to set in motion a process for direction making.

p.265 When bewildered people ask, "What's the story?" the crucial thing is to get them moving, observing, updating, and arguing about feasibility and plausibility. A powerful means to do this is for the leader to answer the question by saying, "I don't know what the story is, but let's find out." ...A plausible story is not something that one "finds." When the leader says, "let's find out," what the leader really means is, let's create the story. The good story is not simply lying out there waiting to be detected. Instead, the good story comes from experience that is reworked, enacted into the world, and rediscovered as though it were something external.

p.266 I want to suggest that, in the face of doubt, leaders are best served if they focus on animation, improvisation, lightness, authentication, and learning.

p.266 Successful sensemaking is more likely when people stay in motion, have a direction, look closely, update often, and converse candidly.

p.267 In a way, any old prescription, any old change program, any old mantra or guru or text will do, as long as that program animates people and gets them moving and generating experiments that uncover opportunities; provides a direction; encourages updating through improved situational awareness and closer attention to what is actually happening; and facilitates respectful interaction in which trust, trustworthiness, and self-respect (Campbell, 1990) develop equally and allow people to build a stable rendition of what they face.

p.267 What matters is the extent to which the program triggers sustained animation, direction, attention, and respectful interaction. It is these four activities that make it easier or harder for people to collectively make sense of what they are facing and to deal with it.

p.267 When people are thrown into an unknowable, unpredictable environment, there is also a premium on improvisation. Improvisation can be defined as reworking previously experienced material in relation to unanticipated ideas that are conceived, shaped, and transformed under the special conditions of a current performance... Improvisation involves the flexible treatment of preplanned material. It is not about "making something out of nothing." ...Improvisation materializes around a simple... formula, or theme that provides the pretext for real-time composing and embellishment.

[Epilogue]

p.274 The preceding essays are informed by an interpretive framework that is grounded in sensemaking. To focus on sensemaking is to 'portray organizing as the experience of being thrown into an ongoing, unknowable, unpredictable streaming of experience in search of answers to the question, "what's the story?" Plausible stories animate and gain their validity from subsequent activity... Small structures and short moments can have large consequences'