Weick had no interest in individualism. He states (p 6. Sensemaking in Organisations):

Sensemaking is grounded in both individual and social activity’ and whether

the two are even separable will be a recurrent issue in this book, because it has been a durable tension in the human condition. Witness this description from Emily Dickinson:

Much Madness is divinest Sense –

To a discerning Eye –

Much Sense – the starkest Madness –

‘Tis the Majority

In this, as All, prevail –

Assent-and You are sane –

Demur-you’re straightaway dangerous

And handled with a Chain –

As is often the case, Weick turns to Poetics (https://www.humandymensions.com/product/poetics-and-risk-feeling-into-being/ ) to explain the inexplicable. And this verse by Dickinson comments profoundly on what people believe makes sense and is mad, and what seems mad, but makes great sense.

The key for Dickenson (and Weick) is ‘the discerning eye’. That is, that special insight that is learned through critical thinking, deconstruction, critical discourse analysis and Poetics. All manifestly absent from the safety industry.

I discussed the necessity for discernment in my free book Real Risk, Human Discerning and Risk (https://www.humandymensions.com/product/real-risk/).

For Weick, the lens of organisational sensemaking is founded in seven essential properties (https://safetyrisk.net/weick-and-organisational-sensemaking/) that arev all social.

In Chapter two of Sensemaking in Organisations Weick again starts with Poetics. This time a lengthy poem by Pablo Neruda entitled We Are Many (pp 18-20). Weick comments (p. 18):

Sensemaking begins with a sensemaker. “How can I know what I think until

I see what I say?” has four Pronouns, all four of which point to the Person

doing the sensemaking. Obvious as that assertion may seem, it contains a trap. The trap is that sensemaker is singular and no individual ever acts like a single sensemaker. Instead, any one sensemaker is, in Mead’s words, “a parliament of selves.

Weick further states (p.19):

Thus the sensemaker is himself or herself an ongoing puzile undergoing continual redefinition, coincident with presenting some self to others and trying to decide which self is appropriate.

I love this metaphor of the puzzle, as applied to the many faces we show to others depending on context. Do you consider yourself as a puzzle?

I am the one person but have different ‘faces’ – to my wife, my children, my grandchildren, my brother, my sister, to strangers and friends. Neruda captures this well.

In SPoR, we would say that our Socialitie is both internal and external.

Indeed, our body is made up of interworking, interconnected and interaffected systems, that all need and interact with each other (nervous system, respiratory system, circulation system, skin system, immune system and endocrine system). All of our bodily systems are interconnected and interaffected and, independently inform the brain of what they are doing. As Claxton so rightly states: ‘the brain doesn’t make decisions, it hosts conversations’. This is the foundation of embodiment. There is no separation of body, mind, brain, heart and gut.

In many ways, our bodies are NOT individual but rather the cooperation of social ecological systems. If any one of these systems is injured, diseased or damaged, the whole body is affected.

Then when we are placed in the world of organising with others, we operate socially in families, groups, organisations, societies and cultures. This too is Socialitie. See further: Meyer, Streeck and Jordan (2017) Intercorporeality, Emerging Socialities in Interaction. Oxford, London. (https://www.academia.edu/87261696/Intercorporeality_and_Interaffectivity).

Any work in risk and safety that proposes decision making as ‘brain work’ or as ‘brain-centric (eg. HOP) has little comprehension of how human decisions are made. If you need a filter on what to avoid in safety discourse, anything that uses the image/semiotics of the brain for understanding safety ought to be rejected. Yet, the semiotics of the brain dominates most of safety discourse.

What we believe and how we shape belief is neither constructed by brain work or rationality. Most belief is generated emotionally in an embodied way. Some would say: ‘I believe where my feet go’.

As a good social psychologist, Weick knew that organisational sensemaking was profoundly collective.

Weick understood that systems take on a collective life of their own. In many ways they act archetypically from the collection of individuals in them. BTW, any criticism of the system has very little to do with criticism of the individuals in it. The work of Bethel (How Systems Speak: Understanding the Hidden Language of Organizations) is worth a read – https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-systems-speak-understanding-hidden-language-yvette-bethel-zd4ge/

A good indicator of Weick’s Collectivism is captured in who he recommends you read (pp. 65-60). What an amazing list of 55 resources he suggests you read to understand Organisational Sensemaking.

Then on page 44 Weick directs us to Heidegger’s sense of ‘thrownness’. These are critical in understanding Weick’s collectivism:

1. You cannot avoid acting: Your actions affect the situation and yourself, often against your will.
2. You cannot step back and reflect on your actions: You are thrown on your intuitions and have to deal with whatever comes up as it comes up.
3. The effects of action cannot be predicted: The dynamic nature of social conduct precludes accurate prediction.
4. You do not have a stable representation of the situation: Patterns maybe evident after the fact, but at the time the flow unfolds there is nothing but arbitrary fragments capable of being organized into a host of different patterns or possibly no pattern whatsoever.
5. Every representation is an interpretation: There is no way to settle that any interpretation is right or wrong, which means an “objective analysis” of that into which one was thrown, is impossible.
6. Language is action: Whenever people say something, they create rather than describe a situation, which means it is impossible to stay detached from whatever emerges unless you say nothing, which is such a strange way to react that the situation is deflected anyway.

What a list. If only Safety knew these, most of its silly myths, beliefs and slogans would disappear. s

This idea of being ‘thrown’ into the world captures the essential social nature of human ‘being’. The foundation of accepting where you have been ‘thrown’ is critical to accepting fallibility, vulnerability, mortality, limited being, uncertainty and imperfection. Therefore, Zero is nonsense! Everyday Social Resilience is the key (https://www.humandymensions.com/product/everyday-social-resilience-being-in-risk/).

For Weick, our organising declares collective dependence and inter-dependence. There is no I in Weick’s personhood only i-thou. We see this exemplified in Weick’s fist book and his ‘causal loops’.