What Does Weick Believe About Flux – Free Workshops

This comes from Weick’s paper: Arrested Sensemaking: Typified Suppositions Sink the El Faro (p.16) (2022)

1. Sensemaking is an imbalance between continuity and discontinuity.

2. Being-in-the-world is an interruptible structure of anticipations.

3. Incisions are pragmatic efforts to stabilize change and structure ongoing experience.

4. Abstractions gather cues in a manner similar to astrological constellations.

5. Discursive suppositions are biased toward typicality.

6. Positions of arrest are prospective as well as retrospective.

7. Plausible explanations may resist updating, are grounded in perceived equivalence, and are individually armed which can make social construction more difficult.

8. Recovery from interruptions is approximate.

9. Materiality matters (e.g., stacks of containers act as sails).

Suggestions such as these nine are consistent with the nature of process thinking, namely that ‘reality is assumed to be perpetually fluxing, changing, and undifferentiated’.

Pattern, order, identity, and coherence are exceptional stabilizations and deemed to emerge as a consequence of human action, interactions, and interventions into the ‘flux of reality’ (Chia, 2017, p. 594).

Flux mixes the novel and familiar and it remains for sensemaking to reassemble that mix into emphases, sufficiency, narratives, and common sense that are made substantive by actions intended to validate them (Weick, 2021). But these intentions do not rule out the possibility of an amplification of flux, further detached abstraction, and greater vulnerability.

Comment

The use of language and metaphor in this paper by Weick is fascinating, for example: ‘Abstractions gather cues in a manner similar to astrological constellations’. This also resonates with other Weick discourse on ‘cosmological episodes’, ‘puzzles’ and ‘cutting edge mysticism’.

Without going further into this language used by Weick, we can see there are dimensions to his thinking that at omitted by many in safety who wish to use Weick to endorse ideas convenient to the safety worldview (https://safetyrisk.net/the-safety-world-view-and-the-worldview-of-safety). We especially see this where Safety wishes to endorse the idea of a static HRO.

When we approach books like Managing the Unexpected we need to read this within the corpus of Weick’s work and philosophy.

When Weick discusses the unexpected, uncertainty and flux, he is not talking about some casual interruption to order and systems. His thinking is much broader and deeper than Safety considers. For example, in is paper Theory Construction as Disciplined Imagination and (1989) he speaks about a stage in theory construction he calls ‘metaphysical elaboration’, where one takes advantage of ‘serendipity’. Much of his discussion about theory construction emerges later in his work on Loose Coupling.

In this paper Theory Construction as Disciplined Imagination (https://journals.aom.org/doi/10.5465/amr.1989.4308376), he draws into his discussion, the critical nature of: representation (semiotics), the nature of imagination and representative metaphors.

Draw all this work of Weick together and you develop a holistic understanding of what Weick means by: Enactment, Organisational Sensemaking and Collective Mindfulness. BTW, Mindfulness has very little to do with the brain, cognition or rationalism that is projected by the Safety worldview onto the work of Weick. When Weick talks about ‘Mindful Organising’ (p.147) he’s not talking about brain-work. Similarly, when he discusses performance and ‘what goes right’, he greatly emphasises: ‘what could go wrong’, ‘how could things go wrong’ and ‘what things have gone wrong’. Sorry HOP, the myth of performance, five slogans and ‘pre-accident investigations’ is nonsense.

If you are keen to learn more about Weick and his thinking and, its implications to tackling risk, you can register for the free workshops to be held in June here: admin@spor.com.au

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Prof. Robert Long

Expert in Social Psychology, Principal & Trainer at Human Dymensions

Latest posts by Prof. Robert Long (see all)

• Weick’s Expectations of the Unexpected - May 13, 2026
• The Non-Revolution in Safety - May 12, 2026
• Suspending Your Agenda to Begin Learning in Risk - May 11, 2026
• The De-Ethicization of the Object in Safety - May 9, 2026
• Weick’s Organising as ‘Consensually Validated Grammar’ - May 9, 2026

PhD., MEd., MOH., BEd., BTh., Dip T., Dip Min., Cert IV TAA, MRMIA Rob is the founder of Human Dymensions and has extensive experience, qualifications and expertise across a range of sectors including government, education, corporate, industry and community sectors over 30 years. Rob has worked at all levels of the education and training sector including serving on various post graduate executive, post graduate supervision, post graduate course design and implementation programs.