The work of Prof. Karl E. Weick is known to many safety people but often not in the deepest sense of his philosophy or complexity of his ideas.

Some may have downloaded his research on the Mann Gulch tragedy  or his work on Sensemaking in Organisations.

Some may have downloaded and read Sensemaking in Organisations or Managing the Unexpected but I have found not many in Safety have explored his foundational philosophy in his first text: The Social Psychology of Organising.

When reading philosophy or researchers like Weick, it really depends on the worldview you bring to the table to how you cope with Weick’s deconstruction and reconstruction of risk.  The filters you bring to Weick affect the value of your perception. If all you bring to Weick is the worldview of safety, you won’t see much. If however, you bring the dialectic of Ellul, Kierkegaard, Ricoeur (https://safetyrisk.net/what-can-ricoeur-offer-safety/ ), Buber, Brueggemann, Lotman, Derrida, Damasio, Fuchs, Johnson etc to Weick, you see much more.

In the same way it is instructive to see who were the mentors and influencers of Weick, particularly in the area of Social Psychology. As we explore these influencers we see the importance of dialectic, provocation and contestation of ideas.

The idea of Loosely Couple Systems comes from Glassman (Glassman, R. B. (1973) ‘Persistence and loose coupling in living systems’ Behavioral Science, 18:

83–98.). His ideas in organising come from some like Goffman, Katz and Luhmann. Interestingly, some refer to Weick’s style as ‘allegoric breaching’. As Van Maanen (Van Maanen, J. (1995) ‘Style as theory’ Organization Science, 6(1): 133–143) states, this style favours: ambiguity of reasoning, dialectic reconstruction, and a rhetorical strategy of presence.

If you have a a background in Social Psychology, you get much more out of Weick that one gets from a background in Scientism or Behaviourism. Indeed, this is how the ideas of Weick are often warped and distorted by safety that wants to make Weick suits its own worldview.

From a SPoR perspective , we know this more as the poetical, lyrical and metaphorical style of Ricoeur, Kierkegaard, Jung and Ellul. And, if you read Weick as if it is like Science or Behaviourist thinking, you can use Weick as if he’s a behaviourist. He is not. Weick floats a great deal between metaphors of ambiguity, bricolage and reflexivity.

For those who want to learn more about Weick and HROing, one can register for the free workshops being held in June.

We already have 20 registrations from 9 countries and the group will be limited to 50.

Register here: admin@spor.com.au