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p.278 Karl Weick... regards organizing as a lively process.
p.280 When words or events are equivocal, people don't need more information. They need a context or framework to help them sort through the data they already have - a filter to help them screen out interpretations that would turn out to be counterproductive.
p.280 [Huber, Daft] When confronted with an equivocal... event, managers use language to share perceptions among themselves and gradually define or create meaning through discussion, groping, trial and error, and sounding out.
p.280 Weick believes that the degree of complexity and diversity within the organization needs to match the equivocality of the data it processes. He calls this requisite variety.
p.281 [Weick] encourages members who are working in an equivocal information environment to "complicate themselves." They need to embrace a complexity that's commensurate with the multiple meanings they confront.
p.281 Weick describes the basic unit of interconnectedness as the double interact. A double interact consists of three elements-act, response, and adjustment... Double interact loops are the building blocks of every organization. These communication cycles are the reason Weick focuses more on relationships within an organization than he does on an individual's talent or performance. He believes that many outside consultants gloss over the importance of the double interact because they depart the scene before the effects of their recommended action bounce back to affect the actor.
p.283 The term ivory tower is often used to suggest that universities are separate and aloof from the world that surrounds them. [JLJ - ! So why does the term persist?]
p.283 Action is the root idea of enactment. Weick is convinced that the failure to act is the cause of most organizational ineffectiveness... He believes that action is a precondition for sensemaking. "Action is a means to gain some sense of what one is up against, as when one asks questions, tries a negotiating gambit, builds a prototype to evoke reactions, makes a declaration to see what response it pulls, or probes something to see how it reacts."
p.284 Assembly rules are stock responses that have served well in the past and have become standard operating procedure.
p.285 The second tool for selection is the act-response-adjustment cycle of the double interact
p.285 Although much of Weick's overall model remains to be tested, two innovative studies confirm that organizational members employ rules to process unambiguous data but use communication cycles to process highly equivocal information.
p.286 Weick urges leaders to continually unlearn much of what they think they know - to doubt, argue, contradict, disbelieve, counter, challenge, question, and even act inconsistently. Company manuals are collections of recipes that suggest that each course will turn out right if you follow the rules. Weick prefers the crazed chef approach that encourages the cook to make up the recipe as he or she goes along. Organizations fail because they lose flexibility by relying too much on the past.
p.287 [Weick] "all interesting theories share the quality that they constitute an attack on the assumptions taken for granted by an audience."
p.287 When you're lost, says Weick, any old map will do. When you are confused, any strategic plan is better than inaction because it animates and orients people. Act first; then figure out what those actions might mean.
Weick has offered a provocative theory of sensemaking that has stimulated a great deal of discussion in the business and academic communities.
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