In Making Sense of the Organisation, The Impermanent Organisation (2009) (book 5) Weick explores six styles of organisational theory and owns his own style as ‘poetic’ (p.11).

I have written about Weick’s Poetics earlier (https://safetyrisk.net/weicks-poetics/).

What does it mean when one identifies an organisational style as ‘Poetic’?

Poetics is about all that is not measurable (https://www.humandymensions.com/product/poetics-and-risk-feeling-into-being/).

Poetics is NOT about poetry although, poems fit into the meaning but so too does any kind of human activity that can’t be measured eg. theatre, drama, dance, acting, gardening, climbing, walking, cooking etc.

Weick ends his chapter with this (p. 23):

In SPoR, we conducted a video series on the nature of Poetics and Risk earlier this year in line with the publication of our book. There are fourteen episodes you can access here: https://safetyrisk.net/podcast-audio-series-on-poetics-and-risk-14-episodes/

You can see the first of the fourteen-part video series here: https://safetyrisk.net/poetics-and-risk/ and access the whole series here: https://safetyrisk.net/?s=Poetics

Following Weick’s Chapter on Poetics, he starts his next chapter on Faith.

I wonder if it occurs to people in safety who talk about Weick that this is his language: faith, wisdom, cosmology, believing, mysticism, ‘thrownness’ and Poetics. Is this the language you hear in safety when it talks about organising and risk?

For Weick, faith stands in dialectic with impermanence. Weick comments (p.37):

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 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.

Who in safety talks like this about organising? You never hear it used in safety. Safety is afraid to even say the word ‘faith’. That’s principally because Safety doesn’t know what faith is. Weick does.

You will never find the word ‘faith’ or the language of ‘Poetics’ mentioned in any text on safety culture. This simply demonstrates that Safety knows so little about culture. This is summed up nicely by Weick in his discussion on the ‘Five Stages of Expertise’ (p.77). In Safety, you apparently need no expertise in culture to talk about culture.

By Chapter six, Weick has jumped from Poetics, to Faith then to Eastern Wisdom (pp. 85ff). Is this how Safety understands risk? Yet, this is the genius of Weick.

Then by Chapter Eight he explores the nature of emotions and power, a wonderful discourse into the ethical nature of organising and risk.

But if everything is impermanent, how can there be a HRO? Weick never intended for his concept to be made a static thing, this is what safety does, but it is not in the work of Weick. This is why in SPoR, we only speak of HROing. We make the activity into a participle.

The final Chapter of this book is called ‘Leadership as the Legitimation of Doubt’. Wow! Does safety ever actually read this stuff.

For Weick the remedy to the seduction of certainty is Doubt.

So, whilst Safety runs around shouting, ‘we have all the answers’, Weick is shouting, ‘I don’t know’, ‘let’s see what is enacted into being’.

If you want to read the blog series on Weick you can start here: https://safetyrisk.net/?s=Weick