Weick, "Sources of Order" and "Organizational Redesign as Improvisation," in _Making Sense of the Organization_, 2001

Summary: Wow! These chapters are chock-a-block with ideas--extremely productive ones. I can only gloss over them here, but the chapters are absolutely worth (probably several) careful reading(s). Weick writes that "order occurs in unexpected places and spans fewer people for shorter periods than we thought. [...Organizations] are organized anarchies [and] loosely coupled systems" (34). Weick's argument fits well with the "organized/directed chaos" theme I've been picking up on. Some key ideas in his piece are that an overemphasis on pre-planning and order can stifle the most productive processes in an organization: "When we design our next action, we don't build in enough chances to learn, experiment, improvise, and be surprised" (38). We should conceive of organizations as federations rather than monoliths and empower smaller groups to make decisions and generate ideas. Managers should "reduce ambiguity to tolerable levels" while still leaving room for improvisation (48). One should not over-privilege rationality, nor replicate past actions (we often have an imperfect understanding of what actions actually caused specific outcomes). We should be patient and "be willing to leap before you look. If you look before you leap, you may not see anything. Action generates outcomes that ultimately provide the raw material for seeing something" (53).

Weick also discusses organizational improvisation at length. Actors who improvise "have equivalent views of what is happening and what it means" (58), but they do not plan everything, instead leaving space for individual expression and the development of something new and, to a large extent, unanticipated by any individual. A section I found especially helpful was his discussion of bricolage (using "whatever resources and repertoire one has to perform whatever task one faces"), in which he writes that "what makes for skilled bricolage is intimate knowledge of resources, careful observation, trust in one's intuitions, listening, and confidence that any enacted structure can be self-correcting if one's ego is not invested too heavily in it" (63, my italics). Weick writes that, by necessity, we do not fully understand nor control organization's environments, outcomes, etc., and that by holding too tightly to intentional design, we "overlook the improvisational character of organizational design. [We] overlook the emergent designs that bubble up when capability changes. [We] overlook the ways in which interdependent actors become self-organizing in the face of underspecified designs" (88).

Response: These are pieces that absolutely must remain in the course. I found them exciting, empowering, and liberating. In terms of WPA-ing, I see Weick's ideas suggesting to administrate with a light hand, focusing on setting up an environment in which we agree on our goals and tasks, but then empowering smaller groups to investigate their own interests and generate their own solutions. I love the idea that these solutions are deeply contextual and unanticipated. I also think Weick's ideas suggest continual evolution of a writing program--we don't, for instance, develop a curriculum and then brush our hands off, problem solved. And I also like the lack of ego he advocates. These articles made me extremely excited to WPA.

Uses: They provide a broad understanding of a program. I played with the idea of advocating that these chapters come earlier in the course, but I don't think I would have understood them. They served to coalesce a lot of the ideas in earlier readings.