Registrations for the Weick and HROing workshops for June have now closed.

Weick’s definition of organising evolved over the years. In 1969 is was:

 ‘the resolving of equivocality in an enacted environment by means of interlocked behaviors embedded in conditionally related processes’

Ten years later organizing was now defined as:

‘a consensually validated grammar for reducing equivocality by means of sensible interlocked behaviors’

By 2005 it was:

‘the ongoing retrospective development of plausible images that rationalize what people are doing’

You can read more about Weick’s evolving thinking about organising here:

In this piece as usual, Weick starts anchored to Poetics in a prophecy and a dream about magic. Hmmm, not quite the rationalist language one would expect about organising and risk.

But, then again, few in safety read Weick, they read into Weick.

So why so much focus on grammar? Grammar is all about the very structure and composition of meaning through language.

Understanding language, linguistics and meaning in language ought to be the starting point in understanding safety.

When Safety spruiks nonsense language like ‘pre-accident investigations’, ‘blame fixes nothing’ and slogans like it that hide an ethic and philosophy, alarm bells should ring. What we learn most from the language and discourse in safety is that it is made meaningless though nonsense grammar like ‘1% safer’ and ‘zero harm’. All of this silly language is premised on an ideology of perfection and the denial of fallibility (https://safetyrisk.net/fallibility-denial-as-a-safety-psychosis/).

When we understand grammar we know it has three parts: its form, its meaning and its parts. This is why we study linguistics in SPoR (https://cllr.com.au/product/linguistics-flyer-unit-21/) so that language can make sense.

(source: Larsen-Freeman, Celce-Murcia (2015) The Grammar Book)

And so, we use language in organising to try and reduce ambiguities, paradox and equivocality. But it is an endeavour fraught with many challenges.

In risk and safety, we know the more we seek to hyper-organise to reduce risk, the more fragile we make our organisation (Taleb and Amaberti). The very process of seeking more certainty and fool-proofing systems, the more foolish we become.

This is why so much of Weick’s work focuses on the dialectic between loosely coupled and tightly-coupled systems.

This is why in SPoR we focus so much on the grammar of the hyphen between the i-thou, following-leading and either-or.

Unfortunately, in safety, it sems speaking nonsense to people (https://safetyrisk.net/safety-experts-in-speaking-nonsense-to-people/) has become an art form. No wonder there are all these insider groups in safety with their gurus with their special language that only they understand. Meanwhile, back in the world of reality where the law and regulation is present and the courts juggle legal liability, all of this nonsense language unravels. Spin and propaganda doesn’t last very long in a courtroom (https://safetyrisk.net/spin-nonsense-language-and-propaganda-in-safety/). If lawyers do anything well it is Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). Most lawyers can smell a con from a long way away (https://safetyrisk.net/the-pcbu-the-law-blame-reality-and-the-con/).

So, in your Risky Conversations (https://www.humandymensions.com/product/risky-conversations/) does your grammar make sense?