Weick Collection

Karl E. Weick is one of the most influential thinkers in the psychology of risk and organizational safety, best known for introducing the concepts of sensemaking, collective mindfulness, and High Reliability Organising (HROing). Weick challenges traditional safety approaches based on engineering, behaviourism, and simplistic cause-and-effect thinking, arguing that safety emerges from how people collectively interpret, communicate, and respond to uncertainty in real work environments. His work emphasizes a preoccupation with failure, reluctance to simplify, sensitivity to operations, commitment to resilience, and deference to expertise as key principles for managing the unexpected. Through books such as The Social Psychology of Organizing, Sensemaking in Organizations, and Managing the Unexpected, Weick helped shift safety thinking from a focus on rules, compliance, and zero harm toward understanding culture, learning, adaptability, and the social processes by which people make sense of risk. His ideas are foundational to the Social Psychology of Risk (SPoR) and essential for developing more human-centred and resilient approaches to safety and risk.