16 June 2006

Karl E Weick - Collected Quotes

"If all of the elements in a large system are loosely coupled to one another, then any one element can adjust to and modify a local a local unique contingency without affecting the whole system. These local adaptations can be swift, relatively economical, and substantial." (Karl E Weick, "Educational organizations as loosely coupled systems", 1976)

"In a loosely coupled system there is more room available for self-determination by the actors. If it is argued that a sense of efficacy is crucial for human beings. when a sense of efficacy might be greater in a loosely coupled system with autonomous units than it would be in a tightly coupled system where discretion is limited." (Karl E Weick, "Educational organizations as loosely coupled systems", 1976)

"Managers construct, rearrange, single out, and demolish many objective features of their surroundings. When people act they unrandomize variables, insert vestiges of orderliness, and literally create their own constraints." (Karl E Weick, "Social Psychology of Organizing", 1979)

"The typical coupling mechanisms of authority of office and logic of the task do not operate in educational organizations." (Karl E Weick, "Educational organizations as loosely coupled systems", 1976)

"Any approach to the study of organizations is built on specific assumptions about the nature of organizations and how they are designed and function." (Richard L Daft & Karl E Weick, "Toward a model of organizations as interpretation systems", Academy of Management Review Vol 9 (2), 1984)

"Action often creates the orderly relations that originally were mere presumptions summarized in a cause map. Thus language trappings of organizations such as strategic plans are important components in the process of creating order. They hold events together long enough and tightly enough in people's heads so that they act in the belief that their actions will be influential and make sense." (Karl E. Weick, "Organizational culture as a source of high reliability", 1987)

"An ordered set of assertions about a generic behavior or structure assumed to hold throughout a significantly broad range of specific instances." (Karl E Weick, "Theory construction as disciplined imagination", 1989)

"Experience is the consequence of activity. The manager literally wades into the swarm of 'events' that surround him and actively tries to unrandomize them and impose some order: The manager acts physically in the environment, attends to some of it, ignores most of it, talks to other people about what they see and are doing."  (Karl E Weick, "Sensemaking in Organizations", 1995)

"Organizations are presumed to talk to themselves over and over to find out what they are thinking." (Karl E Weick, "Sensemaking in Organizations", 1995)

"Sensemaking is about the enlargement of small cues. It is a search for contexts within which small details fit together and make sense. It is people interacting to flesh out hunches. It is a continuous alternation between particulars and explanations with each cycle giving added form and substance to the other." (Karl E Weick, "Sensemaking in Organizations", 1995)

"Sensemaking tends to be swift, which means we are more likely to see products than processes." (Karl E Weick, Sensemaking in Organizations, 1995)

"The organism or group enacts equivocal raw talk, the talk is viewed retrospectively, sense is made of it, and then this sense is stored as knowledge in the retention process. The aim of each process has been to reduce equivocality and to get some idea of what has occurred." (Karl E Weick, "Sensemaking in Organizations", 1995)

"The point we want to make here is that sensemaking is about plausibility, coherence, and reasonableness. Sensemaking is about accounts that are socially acceptable and credible... It would be nice if these accounts were also accurate. But in an equivocal, postmodern world, infused with the politics of interpretation and conflicting interests and inhabited by people with multiple shifting identities, an obsession with accuracy seems fruitless, and not of much practical help, either." (Karl E Weick, "Sensemaking in Organizations", 1995)

"To talk about sensemaking is to talk about reality as an ongoing accomplishment that takes form when people make retrospective sense of the situations in which they find themselves and their creations. There is a strong reflexive quality to this process. People make sense of things by seeing a world on which they already imposed what they believe. In other words, people discover their own inventions. This is why sensemaking can be understood as invention and interpretations understood as discovery. These are complementary ideas. If sensemaking is viewed as an act of invention, then it is also possible to argue that the artifacts it produces include language games and texts." (Karl E Weick, "Sensemaking in Organizations", 1995)

"When people perform an organized action sequence and are interrupted, they try to make sense of it. The longer they search, the higher the arousal, and the stronger the emotion. If the interruption slows the accomplishment of an organized sequence, people are likely to experience anger. If the interruption has accelerated accomplishment, then they are likely to experience pleasure. If people find that the interruption can be circumvented, they experience relief. If they find that the interruption has thwarted a higher level plan, then anger is likely to turn into rage, and if they find that the interruption has thwarted a minor behavioural sequence, they are likely to feel irritated." (Karl E Weick, "Sensemaking in Organizations", 1995)

"The basic idea of sensemaking is that reality is an ongoing accomplishment that emerges from efforts to create order and make retrospective sense of what occurs." (Karl E Weick, "The collapse of sensemaking in organizations: The Mann Gulch disaster", Administrative Science Quarterly 3, 1993)

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