Person
Karl E Weick
Organizational theorist of sensemaking—how people enact and retrospectively rationalize meaning under ambiguity.
Why this matters
Weick is central to how meaning moves, organizes, and rewrites itself under pressure.
Works4 sources
book
Managing the Unexpected: Resilient Performance in an Age of Uncertainty
Weick, Karl E., and Kathleen M. Sutcliffe. Managing the Unexpected: Resilient Performance in an Age of Uncertainty. 3rd ed. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2015.
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article
Organizing
Weick, Karl E., Kathleen M. Sutcliffe, and David Obstfeld. "Organizing and the Process of Sensemaking." Organization Science 16, no. 4 (2005): 409–421.
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book
Sensemaking in Organizations
Weick, Karl E. Sensemaking in Organizations. Foundations for Organizational Science. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995.
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book
The Social Psychology of Organizing
Weick, Karl E. The Social Psychology of Organizing. 2nd ed. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979.
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Related books9 books
Book
How Meaning Moves
Signal, Compression, Restraint, and the Pace of Understanding
Before people disagree, they interpret. How meaning forms through signal, compression, and restraint—long before anyone is obviously wrong, and often while the sentence is still forming.
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How Serious Systems Learn
Disciplines for Acting Without Certainty
A handbook for teams and institutions that need to learn in motion, improve under pressure, and make better decisions without waiting for perfect information.
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The Discipline of Uncertainty
Judgment, Restraint, and Decision Quality Under Incomplete Information
Field notes on judgment, restraint, and decision quality when information is incomplete.
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Trust Beyond Similarity
How Trust Remains Possible Across Difference
How people learn to trust perspectives they do not share—and why trust becomes more valuable when perspectives differ.
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When Accountability No Longer Expires
How Legitimate Authority Learns to Survive Harm
An institutional lens on why legitimate authority can persist after harm. Organizations learn to survive scandal without resolving it.
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When Others Look to You
Renewal and Erosion in Leadership
A leadership field guide to how influence forms, how trust is renewed, and how erosion begins when responsibility drifts from practice.
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When Others Look to You: Companion Edition
Forming, Renewing, Eroding, Repeating
How leadership influence forms, renews, erodes, and repeats across the full cycle of responsibility in practice.
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When Trust Stops Tracking Reality
Why Good Intentions Sometimes Become Harmful
How trust drifts from evidence when good intentions stop learning from feedback—through the fictional arc of Calder Family Health and real institutional patterns.
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Why Collaboration Is So Hard
And Why the Effort Still Matters
Why joint work fails when incentives, trust, and shared understanding do not line up—and why the effort to collaborate still matters.
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