People act first and interpret afterwards, so organisational reality is retrospectively constructed rather than discovered.
Weick's 1995 argument, and its sharpest form is that people act to find out what they think. The organisational consequence is that plans function as prompts to act rather than as descriptions of what will happen.
In practice
- A team that cannot agree what the product is builds a rough version, and discovers the disagreement was about two words in the brief.
- A strategy document's function is to prompt the arguments that reveal the strategy, which is why the second draft is always more informative than the first.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Organizations & Bureaucracy
- Essay
- Why organisations learn, harden and decline