According to W. Edwards Deming, American companies require nothing less than a transformation of management style and of governmental relations with industry. In Out of the Crisis, originally published in 1982, Deming offers a theory of management based on his famous 14 Points for Management. Management's failure to plan for the future, he claims, brings about loss of market, which brings about loss of jobs. Management must be judged not only by the quarterly dividend, but by innovative plans to stay in business, protect investment, ensure future dividends, and provide more jobs through improved product and service. In simple, direct language, he explains the principles of management transformation and how to apply them.

Out of the Crisis

Sensemaking involves turning circumstances into a situation that is comprehended explicitly in words and that serves as a springboard into action. In this paper we take the position that the concept of sensemaking fills important gaps in organizational theory. The seemingly transient nature of sensemaking belies its central role in the determination of human behavior, whether people are acting in formal organizations or elsewhere. Sensemaking is central because it is the primary site where meanings materialize that inform and constrain identity and action. The purpose of this paper is to take stock of the concept of sensemaking. We do so by pinpointing central features of sensemaking, some of which have been explicated but neglected, some of which have been assumed but not made explicit, some of which have changed in significance over time, and some of which have been missing all along or have gone awry. We sense joint enthusiasm to restate sensemaking in ways that make it more future oriented, more action oriented, more macro, more closely tied to organizing, meshed more boldly with identity, more visible, more behaviorally defined, less sedentary and backward looking, more infused with emotion and with issues of sensegiving and persuasion. These key enhancements provide a foundation upon which to build future studies that can strengthen the sensemaking perspective.

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Organizing and the Process of Sensemaking

The longstanding and widespread tradition of the person approach focuses on the unsafe acts—errors and procedural violations—of people at the sharp end: nurses, physicians, surgeons, anaesthetists, pharmacists, and the like. It views these unsafe acts as arising primarily from aberrant mental processes such as forgetfulness, inattention, poor motivation, carelessness, negligence, and recklessness. Naturally enough, the associated countermeasures are directed mainly at reducing unwanted variability in human behaviour. These methods include poster campaigns that appeal to people’s sense of fear, writing another procedure (or adding to existing ones), disciplinary measures, threat of litigation, retraining, naming, blaming, and shaming. Followers of this approach tend to treat errors as moral issues, assuming that bad things happen to bad people—what psychologists have called the just world hypothesis.

Human error: models and management

We develop a contingency view of process management's influence on both technological innovation and organizational adaptation. We argue that while process management activities are beneficial for organizations in stable contexts, they are fundamentally inconsistent with all but incremental innovation and change. But dynamic capabilities are rooted in both exploitative and exploratory activities. We argue that process management activities must be buffered from exploratory activities and that ambidextrous organizational forms provide the complex contexts for these inconsistent activities to coexist.

Exploitation, Exploration, and Process Management: The Productivity Dilemma Revisited

The perfect complement to Nursing Research: Generating and Assessing Evidence for Nursing Practice, Ninth Edition, this knowledge builder helps you develop and reinforce basic skills essential to nursing research.

Resource Manual for Nursing Research: Generating and Assessing Evidence for Nursing Practice

Organizing for high reliability: Processes of collective mindfulness.

High reliability organizations (HROs) such as ER units in hospitals or firefighting units are designed to perform efficiently under extreme stress and pressure. Using HROs as the model for the 21st century organization, Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe show readers how to respond to unexpected challenges with flexibility rather than rigidity and to reduce the disruptive effects of change by using tools such as sensemaking, stress reduction, migrating decisions, and labeling. Introducing the powerful new concept of "mindfulness," the authors outline five qualities of the mindful organization and the organizational skills needed to achieve them. Each concept is clearly expressed in vivid case studies of organizations that demonstrate mindful practices in action. A Book in the University of Michigan Business School Series Voted Best HR Book of 2001 by HR.com

Managing the unexpected: Assuring high performance in an age of complexity.

Preface. 1. Managing the Unexpected: What Business Can Learn from High-Reliability Organizations. 2. Expectations and Mindfulness. 3. The Three Principles of Anticipation. 4. Principles of Containment. 5. Assessing Your Capabilities for Resilient Performance. 6. Organizational Culture: Institutionalizing Mindfulness. 7. How to Manage Mindfully. Notes. The Authors. Index.

Managing the unexpected : resilient performance in an age of uncertainty

Functional diversity in teams has been conceptualized in a variety of ways without careful attention to how different conceptualizations might lead to different results. We examined the process and...

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Kathleen M. Sutcliffe

Papers

Organizing and the Process of Sensemaking

Organizing for high reliability: Processes of collective mindfulness.

Managing the unexpected: Assuring high performance in an age of complexity.

Managing the unexpected : resilient performance in an age of uncertainty

Comparing Alternative Conceptualizations of Functional Diversity in Management Teams: Process and Performance Effects