Karl E. Weick Quotes

Karl Edward Weick is an American organizational theorist who introduced the concepts of "loose coupling", "mindfulness", and "sensemaking" into organizational studies. He is the Rensis Likert Distinguished University Professor at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. Wikipedia  

✵ 31. October 1936
Karl E. Weick: 30   quotes 2   likes

Famous Karl E. Weick Quotes

“How can I know what I think until I see what I say,”

Source: 1980s-1990s, Sensemaking in Organizations, 1995, p. 25
Context: In the recipe, How can I know what I think until I see what I say, saying equates to variation, seeing equates to selection of meaning in what was said, and thinking equates to retention of an interpretation. The retained interpretation may then be imposed subsequently to interpret similar saying (retention is credited) in order to construct cumulative understanding, test past labels for their validity, or generalize older labels to newer events.

“The typical coupling mechanisms of authority of office and logic of the task do not operate in educational organizations.”

Source: 1970s, "Educational organizations as loosely coupled systems," 1976, p. 17

“An ordered set of assertions about a generic behavior or structure assumed to hold throughout a significantly broad range of specific instances.”

Source: 1980s-1990s, "Theory construction as disciplined imagination," 1989, p. 517

Karl E. Weick Quotes about people

“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.”

Source: 1970s, Social Psychology of Organizing, (1979), p. 243 ; As cited in: Dr. Adrian McLean (2013), Leaderhip and Cultural Webs in Organisations: Weavers' Tales. p. 213

Karl E. Weick Quotes about reason

“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.”

Weick (1993, p. 635), as cited in: Bruce K. Berger, ‎Juan Meng (2014), Public Relations Leaders as Sensemakers, p. 7
1980s-1990s

“Roethlisberger argues that people who are preoccupied with success ask the wrong question. They ask, “what is the secret of success” when they should be asking, “what prevents me from learning here and now?” To be overly preoccupied with the future is to be inattentive toward the present where learning and growth take place. To walk around asking, “am I a success or a failure” is a silly question in the sense that the closest you can come to answer is to say, everyone is both a success and a failure.”

Weick, Karl E. "How Projects Lose Meaning: The Dynamics of Renewal." in Renewing Research Practice by R. Stablein and P. Frost (Eds.). Stanford, CA: Stanford. 2004; cited in: Bob Sutton " Karl Weick On Why "Am I a Success or a Failure?" Is The Wrong Question http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/04/karl-weick-on-w.html," at bobsutton.typepad.com, April 12, 2008.
2000s

Karl E. Weick Quotes

“Enactment is first and foremost about action in the world, and not about conceptual pictures of the world.”

Source: 1980s-1990s, Sensemaking in Organizations, 1995, p. 36; as cited in: Haridimos Tsoukas, ‎Jill Shepherd (2009), Managing the Future: Foresight in the Knowledge Economy, p. 99

“They [laboratory groups] bypass such questions as how one comes to know that a problem exists, what it does to solution adequacy to be working on several different things concurrently with problem solving, what it's like to go about solving a felt, intuited problem rather than an explicitly stated consensually validated problem which was made visible to all members at a specific point in time.”

Karl E. Weick (1971, p. 9), as cited in: Harry L. Davis. " Decision Making within the Household http://www.unternehmenssteuertag.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Redaktion/Seco@home/nachhaltiger_Energiekonsum/Literatur/entscheidungen_haushalte/Decision_Making_within_the_Household.pdf," The Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 2, No. 4. (Mar., 1976), pp. 241-260.
1970s

“If an organization is to learn anything, then the distribution of its memory, the accuracy of that memory, and the conditions under which that memory is treated as a constraint become crucial characteristics of organizing.”

Karl E. Weick (1979; 206), cited in: James P. Walsh and Gerardo Rivera Ungson. "Organizational memory." Academy of management review 16.1 (1991): 57-91.
1970s

“Simply pushing harder within the old boundaries will not do.”

Attributed to Karl E. Weick in: Iyar, Subrah S. Why Buy the Cow,. 2007. p. 21
2000s

“By their very nature the problems imposed on organizational theorists involve so many assumptions and such a mixture of accuracy and inaccuracy that virtually all conjectures and all selection criteria remain plausible and nothing gets rejected or highlighted.”

Source: 1980s-1990s, "Theory construction as disciplined imagination," 1989, p. 521; as cited in: Richard A. Swanson, ‎Thomas J. Chermack (2013), Theory Building in Applied Disciplines, p. 49

“Sensemaking tends to be swift, which means we are more likely to see products than processes.”

Source: 1980s-1990s, Sensemaking in Organizations, 1995, p. 49

“Organizations are presumed to talk to themselves over and over to find out what they are thinking.”

Source: 1980s-1990s, Sensemaking in Organizations, 1995, p. 133-134, as cited in: Magala (1997, p. 321)

“The environment is located in the mind of the actor and is imposed by him on experience in order to make that experience more meaningful. It is seldom dawns on organizational theorists to look for environments inside of heads rather than outside of them.”

Karl. E. Weick (1977, p. 273), as cited in: James R. Taylor, Elizabeth J. Van Ever. The Emergent Organization: Communication As Its Site and Surface. (1999), p. 285
1970s

“In any potential collectivity, members have different interests, capabilities, preferences, and so forth. They want to accomplish different things. However, to achieve some of these diverse ends, concerted, interdependent actions are required.”

Karl E. Weick. "Group Processes, Family Processes, and Problem Solving," in J. Aldous, T. Condon, R. Hill, M. Straus, and I. Tallman, eds., Farnily Problem Solving: A Synzposizim on Theoretical, Methodological, and Substantive Concerns. Hinsdale, Ill.: Dryden Press, 1971, p. 26
1970s

“Any approach to the study of organizations is built on specific assumptions about the nature of organizations and how they are designed and function.”

R.L. Daft, Karl E. Weick. "Toward a model of organizations as interpretation systems," Academy of management review, 1984.
1980s-1990s

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