The social psychology of organizing - Karl Weick

Partial Excerpts (antilibrary)

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 (vs politician's syllogism)

retrospect assembly rules
deviation-amplification
deviation-counteraction
cause map

1979

foreword

acknowledgments

contents

an introduction

To understand organizing is to appreciate events to organizing such as these:

A professor, named Alex Bavelas, often plays golf with other professors. “Once, he took the foursome down to the golf course, and they were going to draw straws for partners. He said, ‘Let's do this after the game’ ” (Brand 1975, p. 47).

*The story goes that three umpires disagreed about the task of calling balls and strikes. The first one said, ‘I calls them as they is.’ The second one said, ‘| calls them as | sees them.’ The third and cleverest umpire said, ‘They ain't nothin till | calls them’ ” (Simons 1976, p. 29).

*The greatest breakthrough achieved by this branch was the finding of politician-night watchman commonalities, such as random walking, peering into darkness, and lack of a requirement for intelligent conversation suggesting that either could serve as the other” (Anderson 1974, p. 727).

*ten of those episodes illustrate organizing, which is defined as a consensually validated grammar for reducing equivocality by means of sensible interlocked behaviors. To organize is to assemble ongoing interdependent actions into sensible sequences that generate sensible outcomes.

If some faction of the organization wants to act on the basis of past wisdom and some other faction wants to act in ways that oppose the past, both factions are partially correct. More importantly, both factions should act on behalf of their beliefs. What is being observed here is simply another instance of the split decision pattern that allows the organization to retain both flexibility and stability.

typically the leader announces a tune, imagines how it sounds and at what tempo it sounds best, snaps his fingers to capture that correct tempo, communicates this tempo to the orchestra, gives the downbeat, and everyone starts. If the leader has guessed wrong, it’s possible to speed up or slow down the tempo slightly while it’s being played, but the changes you can make during execution are not very big

people remember only those practices that are currently useful. Memory undercuts innovation. It is conceivable that if groups made greater use of randomizing devices, which let them forget current adaptive practices, they might be in a better position to cope resourcefully with change

These newer images, much like the diverse material that filters through the perforated spoon onto jelly (see Chapter 8), create several new gullies along which incoming material may be reorganized. Shuffling past images by means of an interlude of dis- crediting is helpful because it increases the number of beliefs that are available for seeing the world. This proliferation of relatively independent images means that more of the happenings in that world will be sensed.

COMPLICATE YOURSELF!

It’s okay not to know where you're going as long as you're going somewhere. Sooner or later, you'll find out where that somewhere is.

Is the supply of variety sufficient in the organization? Is there enough variance in the number of rules available to construct processes containing a highly variable number of cycles?

THE MOST IMPORTANT DECISIONS ARE OFTEN THE LEAST APPARENT

YOU NEVER DO ONE THING ALL AT ONCE

This point is a restatement of the idea that decisions made in the selection process have less to do with the fate of a system than do the decisions made concerning retention

a person can never do one thing

any action ramifies and has far-reaching consequences

Other pieces of practical advice can be distilled from the arguments of previous chapters, and ten of those pieces of advice are listed below.

interesting solution to tempo-setting that has been adopted by Buddy Rich on occasion. He starts playing a tempo either by snapping his fingers or by playing his drums; he then quietly asks the members of his orchestra, “What tune would sound good at that tempo?” They give him some suggestions, he chooses one, the musicians pull out the music while the tempo continues, and when everybody has their music in place Rich signals the start of the tune

We've also suggested that you think of your organization as an orchestra, spirit table, set of weakly held assumptions, garbage can, seesaw, organized anarchy, breeding farm, baseball game, display of statues, and so forth

*The consequences are small if you make a mistake. A decision can be made when there are insufficient facts. * ies) A decision can be made when there are insufficient differences among the alternatives. Bottlenecks can be broken. These practices confuse competitors. They create an infinite number of alternatives. The procedure is fun. A decision can be reached swiftly. o0 nna n No skill is required of the user. 10 The technique is inexpensive. 11 There is agreement on the process. 12 No files or storage are required. 13. There are no favorites, all alternatives are weighted equally. 14 The solution is arrived at nonargumentatively.

all of these consequences don’t happen at the same time

Don't panic in the face of disorder.

You never do one thing all at once.

Chaotic action is preferable to orderly inaction.

The most important decisions are often the least apparent. There is no solution. Stamp out utility.

The map is the territory.

Rechart the organizational chart.

0 ON Dn Ff WN PR Visualize organizations as evolutionary systems. o Complicate yourself!

The person who makes decisions about what the goal of the company should be next year is less important to continued functioning than are the persons who decide what is known by the company, what should be done next in terms of selection and enactment, and whether opposing decisions are made for selection and enactment

Members of the New York Police Department who are familiar with crisis management in ghettos are significantly more complicated with regard to those situations than are people associated with enforcement in other areas

DON'T PANIC IN THE FACE OF DISORDER

The importance of complication is difficult to overemphasize. Take cause maps, for example. Any cause map is an oversimplification of situations. In the real world signs on relationships can change, the swiftness with which an effect follows activation of a cause is variable, the magnitude of the change that will occur is variable, insertion of a new variable into a cause map can change the entire set of conclusions that are drawn from it

He reverses things. He starts executing something before he knows what it is he’s executing

It is possible that a well-functioning control system could be destroyed in the interest of handling a momentary disruption, a disruption that eventually would be dissolved anyway because of the pattern of relationships within the system. The danger of inappropriate intervention is especially likely if members mistakenly assume that people, rather than relationships, are the critical control points in an organization. The thrust of the organizing model is that it’s easy to overmanage an organization and that it is an excess rather than a deficiency of intervention that lies at the heart of many organizational problems

Organizations are viewed by members and observers as presum- ably rational, accountable, orderly, predictible units that know what they’re doing. Given those presumptions, when disorder occurs it’s easy for those same observers to assume that the organization is dissolving

Who judges the equivocality of information and how are these judgments made?

15 Genuine novelty is introduced. 16 One's luck can be changed by initiating a different pattern of responding

Organizations keep peoply busy, occasionally entertain them, give them a variety of experiences, keep them off the streets, provide pretexts for story- telling, and allow socializing. They haven't anything else to give.

Finally, to be complicated is to take pleasure in the process rather than pleasure in the outcome. That holds true for the process of theorizing as well as

for the process of managing

THERE IS NO SOLUTION

One thing that’s apparent in the preceding analyses is that there are no simple answers and there is no simple finite set of causes for anything that happens in an organization (see Steinbeck 1941, chap. 14, on nonteleology). Furthermore, origins are often impossible to discover, because they usually lie at some distance from the symptom and they have usually grown all out of proportion to their beginnings through deviation-amplifying loops

If we transform the organizing formulation into a series of diagnostic questions, those questions would include such items as the following:

1 What and where is the retention process?

2 Who ties the retention process to enactment and selection, with what frequency, and with respect to what content?

How active is the organization when it inspects its environment? An organization that is simply registering what goes on outside of it can either stand in a stationary position or can move about in that environment. A mobile existence generates more data than does a sedentary one (G. W. Bateson

CHAOTIC ACTION IS PREFERABLE TO ORDERLY INACTION

meaning is retrospective and only elapsed experience is available for meaningful interpre- tation. The practical implication of this is that an organization would be in a better position to improve its efficiency if the elapsed experience were filled with action rather than inaction. Action, when viewed retrospectively, clarifies what the organization is doing, what business it is in, and what its projects may be. Inaction, viewed retrospectively, is more puzzling and more senseless

Implications for Practice

a cause map itself is a simplification, even though it does help to complicate how an individual examines his organization. If you ask an individual to descvibe his organization you'll get a fairly simple answer. If you then press that same individual to develop a cause map of it, new conclusions will be seen, and a more complicated perspective on that organiza- tion will emerge. Nevertheless, the cause map omits a large number of characteristics

If it’s true that sense-making involves seeing what one has said, then it’s also true that if we can reword the sentences that people utter about themselves, we can alter the conclusions they arrive at concerning who they are and what they’re up to.

One of the misleading metaphors that is often used to describe managers is to argue that they are akin to conductors of orchestras

Examination of what conductors actually do (e.g., Rubin 1974; Faulkner 1971, 1973; Arian 1971) suggests that contrary to popular folklore, conducting is most effective when it is tacit, unobtrusive, noninterfering, and takes into consideration control processes already woven into the orchestra

in Moore’s own words, “It seems safe to assume that human beings require a functional equivalent to a table of random numbers if they are to avoid unwitting regularities in their behavior, which can be utilized by adversaries”

We're trying to make it possible for people to have better conversations so that they can see their circumstances more richly

Toward this end we have introduced a number of tools to be made part of these converstions. The tools are implied in words such as these:

As a perfect example of this reformulated way of thinking about orchestra conducting, consider the problem of the leader of a jazz orchestra trying to decide on the tempo at which a number should be played. If the leader sets the tempo too slow, the tune sounds dead and lacks brilliance