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THE IMPERMANENT ORGANIZATION



There are regularities in the experience of organizing, as the six headers in Chapter 3

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

falling apart. To organize is to reaccomplish a sequence of acts and get them to recur.

Recurrence is the source of order and redoing is the means to preserve that order.

Labeling imposes order, but often at a cost. When organizations generalize and compound their abstractions, they put increasing distance between direct perceptions of

continuous flow and indirect recasting of those perceptions into discrete conceptions.

The benefits of compounded abstractions are that they facilitate shared images and

allow collective coping. The cost of compounded abstractions is that people lose sight

of differences that make a difference. Discarding is about the practice of dropping one’s

tools in order to adapt to changed circumstances. Discarding reverses the compounding of abstractions and moves closer to mindful perception of change. 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. Believing

recapitulates many of the dynamics already suggested by our quick gloss of the word

‘faith.’ However, believing is more than faith (e.g. Weick, 1995, pp. 133–154). In the

face of ceaseless change, people who organize strive for simultaneous belief and doubt

since change is not total. Today’s truth may be partially false tomorrow. Finally, substantiating points to organizing as ongoing efforts to hold collective action together despite a

relentless flurry of interruption and recovery (p. 39).

These five themes and six regularities are all in play in the story of how child abuse

was discovered, itself ‘a story of impermanence’ (p. 32). Ron Westrum’s (1993) published

account of the surprisingly recent articulation of the ‘battered child syndrome’ was the

lead incident (p. 1) in my book about sensemaking (Weick, 1995). I later met Westrum,

a remarkably insightful man, and he asked, ‘Would you like to hear the rest of the abuse

story?’ I then learned about how an expansion of treatment team capability through

the addition of social workers helped pediatricians ‘see’ the child abuse they had previously explained away as brittle bones, spontaneous brain bleeding, and poor memory for details of injuries. Today’s truth, crystallized by social workers who knew how to

deal with abusing parents, turned yesterday’s evasive rationalizations into falsehoods.

Previously pediatricians and radiologists had organized a recurring diagnostic sequence

that shielded them from darker possibilities. When they redid their recurring pattern of

medical care, and changed the personnel and interactions, they made better guesses

about the source of problems because the evidence became more meaningful. The

takeaway that Westrum crafted from these data is a cornerstone of the perspective that

is articulated throughout this book: ‘A system’s willingness to become aware of problems is associated with its ability to act on them’ (Westrum, 1993, p. 340). How can

I know what I face until I see what my limited actions uncover. Limited actions lead to

limited seeing leads to limited awareness. Limited awareness is a big liability in times of

impermanence. Mindful practices and mindful structures remove some of these limits

(see Chapter 6).

Diagnosis followed by treatment is a generic sequence that is inherent in most organizing (e.g. Patriotta, 2003, on ‘breakdowns’). However, the crucial twist, implied by the

idea that people act their way into cognition, is that diagnosis follows treatment; it lies in



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the path of the action (Starbuck, 2006; see Chapter 7). I know what I have been treating late in the game when I see differential responses to treatment. A child who supposedly bruises easily, develops no bruises at all when treated in a hospital. That outcome,

interpreted by a social worker who is knowledgeable about protective services, yields a

belated diagnosis of battered child syndrome. Physicians act their way into cognition,

just like everyone else. In the case of child abuse, they abandoned their old cognitions

when new personnel (social workers) offered new interpretations. Physicians began to

talk differently. Just like everyone else, when people talk differently, what they see is

different, what they think and do are different, and the consequences are different. This

compounding of differences involves change and impermanent structures made sensible by continuous organizing.

The following article was published in Organization Studies, 2006, 27(11), 1–14.



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Faith, Evidence, and Action: Better

Guesses in an Unknowable World1

Karl E. Weick

The final, definitive version of this paper has been published in Organization Studies, Issue

27(11), Copyright © 2004 SAGE Publications Inc. Reprinted with permission.



Keywords: alertness, sensemaking, mindfulness, enactment, improvisation



‘What the Romantics expressed as the claim that imagination, rather than reason, is the central

human faculty was the realization that a talent for speaking differently, rather than arguing well,

is the chief instrument of cultural change.’ (Rorty 1989: 111)



That reminds me of a story.

Up until the mid 1950s pediatricians refused to believe that parents were beating

their children even though they kept seeing X-rays where long bones in arms and legs

had been broken and were in different stages of healing. This pattern suggested multiple traumas. But when pediatricians asked parents about these patterns, the parents usually said they didn’t remember and the physicians then diagnosed the child

as having ‘brittle bones’. Here’s how Ron Westrum describes this troublesome period.

Pediatricians,

‘were used to operating in a clinical context, with little control over what went on beyond

the clinic. Many physicians, including pediatricians, had difficulty seeing themselves

as the advocate of a child against the parents, even when the child had been savagely

beaten. Thus, there was no immediate way to help the children, and it is tempting to

hypothesize that the problem would not be recognized until somebody could see a solution. This is a particular application of a more general law: The system cannot think about

that over which it has no control.’ (Westrum 1993: 336)



The breakthrough in diagnosing and treating child abuse occurred in the late 1950s

when Henry Kempe formed interdisciplinary treatment teams in a Boulder, Colorado,

hospital. These teams brought together radiology, pediatrics, and social work. The big

change was the addition of social workers. Once social workers joined the team, there

was no need for the other members to feel helpless in the face of manifest signs of child

abuse because now there was a way to deal with it. Physicians didn’t know what to

do with abusing parents but social workers did. They were familiar with protective

services and how to separate abusing parents from the children that pediatricians kept

handing back to them. With the addition of social workers, ‘Physicians now became

more willing to see child abuse, to talk about it, and to prevent it. . . . Child abuse could

1



The main text of this article is reproduced without amendment.



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KARL E. WEICK



thus be better seen when there was an explicit social organization to deal with it’

(p. 338).

The important message about alertness in this example is that ‘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. More generally, when people expand their repertoire, they

improve their alertness. And when they see more, they are in a better position to spot

weak signals which suggest that an issue is turning into problem which might well

turn into a crisis if it is not contained.

This is a story of imagining and speaking differently. The social workers spoke differently of ‘protective services’. Physicians spoke differently when they stopped talking about cases of ‘multiple unsuspected trauma syndrome’ and started talking about

the much more vivid ‘battered child syndrome’. Henry Kempe spoke differently when

he partitioned his staff into ‘teams’ rather than individual stars. This is also a story of

redoing, labeling, discarding, enacting, believing, and substantiating. These six themes

reflect a handful of assumptions common to my work and they reflect some of what is

discussed in the preceding papers.



Redoing

The story of child abuse is a story of impermanence. In William James’s familiar imagery,

‘The world is a buzzing, pulsating, formless mass of signals, out of which people try to

make sense, into which they attempt to introduce order, and from which they construct

against a background that remains undifferentiated’ (cited in Patriotta 2003). People

make sense, try to introduce order, and then selectively single out manageable moments

from a vast undifferentiated background. When people ‘introduce’ ‘order’ there is no

guarantee that it will persist. Typically, order is transient and needs to be reaccomplished

repeatedly. Thus, an undifferentiated background is a constant threat (opportunity?)

to swallow up the order people keep trying to establish. But that undifferentiated background has been part of our theorizing for a long time in such forms as Katz and Kahn’s

(1978) discussion of entropy, chaos in complexity theory (Stacey 1992), smoke in Taylor

and Van Every’s (2000) adaptation of Atlan’s (1979) imagery of smoke and crystal

(see below), the notion of Cartesian anxiety (Varela et al. 1993), and Eric Eisenberg’s

‘groundlessness’.

Impermanence imposes odd constraints on truth. ‘(W)e have to live to-day by what

truth we can get to-day, and be ready to-morrow to call it falsehood . . . When new

experiences lead to retrospective judgments, using the past tense, what these judgments utter was true, even though no past thinker had been led there’ (James 1975:

107). Marianne Paget makes a similar point in the context of medical errors:

‘A mistake follows an act. It identifies the character of an act in its aftermath. It names it.

An act, however, is not mistaken; it becomes mistaken. There is a paradox here, for seen

from the inside of action, that is from the point of view of an actor, an act becomes mistaken only after it has already gone wrong. As it is unfolding, it is not becoming mistaken

at all; it is becoming.’ (Paget 1988: 56)



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For both James and Paget, a fundamental property of everyday life is that people

believe ahead of the evidence. Pediatricians momentarily believe in brittle bones only

to find later that the damage was more intentional. Things that seemed truthful at the

time seem less hard and fast later. Anthropologists are well aware of this:

‘The after-the-fact, ex post, life-trailing nature of consciousness generally — occurrence

first, formulation later on — appears in anthropology as a continual effort to devise systems of discourse that can keep up, more or less, with what, perhaps, is going on.’ (Geertz

1995: 19)



One way to focus the ‘life-trailing’ nature of consciousness on issues of organizing

is to adopt the poetic imagery that Taylor and Van Every (2000) found so useful in

depicting the emergent organization, the contrast between crystal and smoke (pp. 31,

324–326). They introduce this distinction, borrowed from Atlan (1979), in the context of self-organizing systems where life occupies the space created by the boundary

conditions of crystal and smoke.

‘Crystal is a perfectly structured material, in its repeated symmetry of pattern, but

because its structure is perfect, it never evolves: It is fixed for eternity. It is not life. But it

is order. Smoke is just randomness, a chaos of interacting molecules that dissolves as

fast as it is produced. It is not life either. But it is dynamic. Life appears when some order

emerges in the dynamic of chaos and finds a way to perpetuate itself, so that the orderliness begins to grow, although never to the point of fixity (because that would mean the

loss of the essential elasticity that is the ultimate characteristic of life.’ (Taylor and Van

Every 2000: 31)



Applied to issues of organization, the boundaries formed by smoke and crystal

become the limiting conditions between which organizing unfolds. Taylor and Van

Every equate crystal with repetition, regularity, redundancy, and the preservation of

many distributed conversations in the form of texts that stabilize and reproduce states

of the world. They equate smoke with variety, unpredictability, complexity, and conversations whose outcomes are unpredictable and transient. Organization resides between

smoke and crystal just as it resides between conversation and text. Organization is

talked into existence when portions of smoke-like conversation are preserved in crystallike texts that are then articulated by agents speaking on behalf of an emerging collectivity. Repetitive cycles of texts, conversations, and agents define and modify one another

and jointly organize everyday life.



Labeling

The story of discovering child abuse is also a story of labels that make a difference

(multiple trauma, brittle bones, battered child, child abuse, protective services). What

becomes clear in the story is that vocabularies are tools for coping rather than tools

for representation (Rorty 1989: 119). The question then becomes: What is the object

that is at the focus of the coping? In the case of child abuse is it a child, parents, fellow

pediatricians, medical teams, a reputation, symptoms, diagnosis, or getting through



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KARL E. WEICK



the day? Some of these objects are more social, some less so. And therein lies part

of the issue for the vocabularies that are associated with organizing.

The issue is what Robert Irwin has called ‘compounded abstraction’. That phrase

summarizes the fate of initial perceptions as they are reworked in the interest of coordination and control. The essence of compounded abstraction is found in one of Irwin’s

favorite maxims: ‘seeing is forgetting the name of the thing seen’ (Weschler 1982: 180).

The naming that transforms originary seeing into consensual seeing is done to introduce order into social life. But the conceptions that accomplish this often come to ‘mean

something wholly independent of their origins’ (p. 25). It is this potential for meanings

to become divorced from their origins that predisposes to failures of inference. Baron

and Misovich (1999) argue that sensemaking ‘starts’ with knowledge by acquaintance

that is acquired through active exploration. Active exploration involves bottoms-up,

stimulus-driven, online cognitive processing in order to take action, and naming plays

a secondary role. But if people want to share their cognitive structures, those structures have to take on a particular form. As social complexity increases, people shift from

perceptually based knowing to categorically based knowing in the interest of coordination. Now they develop knowledge by description rather than knowledge by acquaintance, their cognitive processing becomes schema-driven rather than stimulus-driven,

and they go beyond the information given and elaborate their direct perceptions into

types, categories, stereotypes, and schemas. The result is that now people know less and

less about more and more.

Knowledge by description is largely the language of organizations, as Tsoukas makes

clear when he argues that generalizing is the prototypic act of organizing:

‘A distinguishing feature of organization is the generation of recurring behaviours by

means of institutionalized roles that are explicitly defined. For an activity to be said to be

organized implies that types of behaviour in types of situations are connected to types of

actors . . . An organized activity provides actors with a given set of cognitive categories

and a typology of action options . . . On this view, therefore, organizing implies generalizing; the subsumption of heterogeneous particulars under generic categories. In that

sense, formal organization necessarily involves abstraction.’ (Tsoukas 2005: 124)



By this reading, both the organization and its people are concepts, mentally formed

collections of direct experience with a name. Although ultimately neither people,

selves, nor organizations exist, conventionally these concepts convert James’s ‘formless

signals’ into activities and people and then hold them together long enough for people

to couple actions with reasons. Nevertheless, these conceptual moves toward shared

meaning and permanence generate a durable tension. In order to see something

we need concepts. Perception without conception is blind. But concepts, abstractions,

and schemas without perception are empty. The tension? Believing is seeing except

that seeing is forgetting the name of the thing seen. To manage this tension we need

observing that is more mindful, concepts that are more refined, and constraints on

sharing that are less tight. Organizational designs that move in these directions should

be associated with more reliable performance, less turnover, and greater innovation

(Weick 2004).



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Organizational designs that accomplish these ends are often simultaneously loose and

tight in their structures. They are tight around a handful of key values but loose around

everything else. These softer constraints on coordination serve to increase the number

of independent sensing elements that can register changes in the pattern of events

(Campbell 1979). This increased capability for differentiated sensing allows for perceptually based knowledge to be better preserved in an otherwise schema-driven coordinated world.

Differentiated sensing is the cornerstone of Western ideas about mindfulness. The progression from undifferentiated perception to shared public perceptions that are named,

dimensionalized, reified, and treated as facts (Irwin 1977), can be done more mindfully

if there is (1) active differentiation and refinement of existing distinctions, (2) creation

of new discrete categories out of the continuous streams of events that flow through

activities, and (3) a more nuanced appreciation of the context of events and of alternative ways to deal with that context (Langer 1989). This combination of differentiation,

creation, and appreciation captures more details, evokes more varied roles. And converts

those details into richer conjectures.

What is new in all of this is the possibility that mindful acts as defined by Western philosophy incorporate more of the properties of Eastern mindfulness than has previously been

recognized (Weick and Putnam, this book, chapter 6; Weick and Sutcliffe, 2006). When

people engage in enriched distinction-making, their efforts often resemble acts with meditative properties. For example, when people make distinctions they may see some of the

limits of a category and sometimes even of categorizing; they experience focused attention

and see the costs of distraction; they pay more attention to what is happening here and

now; they experience ‘entities’ as less substantial and more transient than they appear;

they see the liabilities of swift thinking when they slow down to register finer distinctions

and see how much is missed and distorted in the interest of speed; and there is gradual

recognition that changes in events as well in oneself as perceiver are often not of one’s

own making. When people engage in distinction-making, they begin to realize just ‘how

quickly we put our experiences into tidy and unexamined conceptual boxes’ (Kabat-Zinn

2002: 69), how reluctant we are to examine those conceptual boxes, and how much is discovered when we do examine those boxes. Langer’s interventions to disrupt mindlessness

tend to promote discrimination of subtle cues that had gone unnoticed before. When these

cues are noticed, routines that had been unfolding mindlessly are interrupted. And when

routines are disrupted, the resulting void is similar to the void induced by quiet meditation.

When either void is created, past experience no longer serves as a firm guide and the disruption ‘stirs the cognitive pot’. Since the void is momentarily tough to categorize and label,

it serves as a moment of overlap between Western conceptual mindfulness and Eastern

non-conceptual mindfulness. During this moment more is seen and more is seen about

seeing itself.



Discarding

The story of child abuse is a story that is filled out by the irony that people enlarge their

repertoire for acting by dropping some of their tools. Pediatricians dropped their belief



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KARL E. WEICK



that child abuse was unthinkable. They dropped the bizarre diagnoses that had dominated pre-social-worker days, diagnoses such as spontaneous subdural hematoma

(child suddenly develop serious brain bleeds), non-specific bleeding disorders, family

history of being easily bruised, born with brittle bones. They dropped the tepid label

under which they grouped these cases, ‘multiple unsuspected trauma syndrome’, and

replaced it with the much more vivid label, ‘battered child syndrome’. They stopped

arguing that child abuse was rare and was confined to insane parents (Westrum 1993:

333). And toughest of all, they stopped trusting parents who remained silent about

relevant history when x-rays of their children revealed signs of trauma that parents

didn’t remember.

It’s also instructive to ask why the pediatricians didn’t drop their tools sooner, since

those reasons closely resemble the reasons other groups such as wildland firefighters refused to drop their tools and perished (Weick 1996). Physicians refused to drop

their face-saving diagnoses because, if they did, they would have to admit a terrible

reality. In the words of one pediatrician, ‘if I believed the parent could abuse the child

I would leave pediatrics immediately’ (Westrum 1993: 335). That’s no different than

a firefighter keeping his chain saw while trying to outrun a fire because, to drop it,

means that he has to admit the terrible reality that he’s trapped and the end is near.

Pediatricians maintained the belief that they were central players in medical practice, which lured them into what Westrum calls the ‘fallacy of centrality’. They reasoned, ‘If abuse were going on, I in my central position would know about it. Since

I don’t know about it, it’s not going on.’ That belief pretty much put an end to curiosity. Pediatricians also refused to drop their diagnoses because those diagnoses were

questioned by radiologists who were lower status medical personnel. Pediatricians also

didn’t know how to drop their face-saving diagnoses (e.g. what do I do if I suspect that

abuse is the problem?). But most of all, pediatricians kept their tools because none of

the other pediatricians were dropping theirs.

The larger point for learning may be this: ‘In pursuit of knowledge, every day something is acquired. In pursuit of wisdom, every day something is dropped’ (Lao Tzu,

cited in Muller 1999: 134).



Enacting

The abuse story is a story of enacting. Pediatricians create the environment which then

constrains them. Having publicly chosen to make the irrevocable diagnosis of brittle

bones, they then have no choice but to hand the abused child back to the abusing parents with the chilling counsel to pay closer attention to the child.

Reuben McDaniel captures the essence of enacting in a way that meshes with

James’s portrayal of a buzzing world:

‘Because the nature of the world is unknowable (chaos theory and quantum theory) we

are left with only sensemaking. Even if we had the capacity to do more, doing more would

not help. Quantum theory helps us to understand that the present state of the world is, at

best, a probability distribution. As we learn from chaos theory, 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



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be frustrated by our inability to know. But believing enables actions which leads to more

sense (sometimes) and taking action leads to more sense (sometimes) and sensemaking

connects actions to beliefs (sometimes).’ (Reuben McDaniel, personal communication)



Enacting involves shaping the world (e.g. a self-fulfilling prophecy verifies itself) 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 melody, a map

(even any old map under the right circumstances), a crack in a caribou shoulder bone,

a simple if-then plotline, or a nudge at a tipping point. 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. They inhabit and structure the territory between

smoke and crystal, which means that enactment, faith, and improvisation are foundational in enactment.

The close ties among faith and enactment are visible in Gilbert Ryle’s (1979)

description of the improvisational quality of everyday life:

‘To be thinking what he is here and now up against, he must both be trying to adjust himself to just this present once-only situation and in doing this to be applying lessons already

learned. There must be in his response a union of some Ad Hockery with some know-how.

If he is not at once improvising and improvising warily, he is not engaging his somewhat

trained wits in a partly fresh situation. It is the pitting of an acquired competence or skill

against unprogrammed opportunity, obstacle or hazard. It is a bit like putting some new

wine into old bottles.’ (p. 129)



The important point is that improvisation does not materialize out of thin air.

Instead, it materializes around a simple structure that provides the pretext for realtime 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. The further elaboration of these emerging embellishments is an example

of Ryle’s opportunistic improvisation in which one’s wits engage a fresh, once-only

situation. 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.



Believing

Belief and faith are prerequisites of organizing and sensemaking. Enactment and

improvising both represent bets that an unfolding action will have made sense. Such

action often verifies itself. ‘

Again and again success depends on energy of the act; energy

depends on faith that we shall not fail; and that faith in turn on the faith that we are



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right — which faith thus verifies itself ’ (McDermott 1977: 339). Applied to this essay

and the work it describes, James’s deviation amplifying feedback loop looks like this. In

the beginning I bet that the vocabularies of sensemaking and organizing will help people cope [this is James’s step which he labels ‘faith that we are right’]. I’m also betting

that if I look for sensemaking and organizing, I’ll find them when I observe coping and

recovering [‘faith that we shall not fail’]. I look persistently and enthusiastically in varied settings, mostly in the work of others, to see what their story is [‘energy of the act’].

And I find what looks to me like sensemaking and organizing [‘success’]. And so I place

further bets on these concepts, which strengthens faith, which . . . This is not what you

would call a rhetoric of falsification.

Nor is it a particularly calming rhetoric. Think about the variable that James calls

‘faith that we are right’. Taken to the extreme that phrase raises the specter of the

true believer, unwilling and unable to listen, and self-righteous to the core. While

faith creates order, doubt (Ryle’s ‘wary improvisation’) fine tunes that faith by differentiating things known from things not known. Simultaneous believing and doubting

(Weick 1979), the signature of a wise act (Meacham 1990), do not sever the links in

James’s depiction. Instead, that simultaneity weakens the link that goes from success to

‘faith that we are right’. Enthusiasm is the friend of action but the enemy of wisdom.

Nevertheless, 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.

Thus, despite the seeming emphasis on thought, belief, faith, and other ‘neck up’

determinants, the ideas being discussed are also about hard work, the energy of the act,

intensity (Weick 1979: 54), effort expenditure (Weick 1964), enthusiasm, and forcefulness while ‘acting thinkingly’ (Weick 1983). Descriptions of the world are up for grabs,

so presumptive descriptions (e.g. this music has been composed by a novice composer1)

are sufficient to mobilize confirming actions (e.g. minimal attention to the music score

while rehearsing), selective attention (e.g. novel passages are treated as signs of incompetence rather than creativity), the result being error-filled music that sounds bad and

confirms the ineptness of the composer. There is order in the sound produced, order in

the rehearsing, and order in the sense made of it all, but musicians tend to underestimate their centrality in producing this outcome.

I’ve treated belief and faith as if they were synonymous, but dictionaries warn

against doing this. ‘Belief, faith, credence, credit are comparable when they mean the

act of one who assents intellectually to something proposed or offered for acceptance as

true or the state of mind of one who assents’ (Merriam-Webster 1984: 96). What sets

faith apart from belief is intensity, full assent rather than mere mental acceptance. It

is often that difference between ‘mere acceptance’ and ‘full assent’ that determines the

likelihood of verification. Sooner or later bets are made. And it is not clear that hedging

solves much of anything.

When vocabularies of the invisible (e.g. faith, belief) are focused on organizing, questions change. In what ways does an organizational culture based on belief differ from

one based on faith? What is the role of guesses in organizing? Is distributed abduction a

model for organizing in the face of unknowability?

When considering issues of belief and faith, it is crucial that we reach outside traditional notions of deduction and induction, and revisit Charles S. Peirce’s third form



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