Most of the things we deal with in organizational occurring are of the nature of relationships and processes, or aspects thereof. E.g. capital, revenue, P&L, stock, throughput, turnover, cost, waste, capacity, etc. The problem is that processes are elusive and hard to describe. It is this very difficulty of processes that prompts managers, out of frustration, to metrics “and other static pastimes” (Weick, 1979:43). By mistaking these snapshots for the realities, they often end up tinkering with the wrong things. In the process, delicate and subtle balances that may be in place are upset which may in turn cause problems for which measures or metrics don’t yet exist. Consequently, things can appear to be going swimmingly well, when in fact they’re not.

Use of lots of nouns in our descriptions of organizations (see, there’s another noun) imputes a spurious character of stability to organizations. Weick writes: “In the interest of better organizational understanding we should urge people to stamp out nouns” (Weick, 1979:44).

Weick, K. E. (1979). The Social Psychology or Organizing (2nd ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.

Posted in: Organization by admin on Thursday, December 20th, 2007

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