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Making sense in organizations: Gold Nuggets, Signal Events and Cautionary Tales
Dr. P. Michael McCullough
[a working manuscript: revised 2.19.00]
Introduction
Those who study organizations have witnessed a rolling forward of research paradigms (Kuhn, 1961) from decision making, to information processing, to organizational learning (Argyris and Schon, 1996). Each of these deals with some aspect of human cognition in the context of organizing. Some writers maintain the most fundamental of all cognitive activities is that of “making sense” of organizational events. Weick (1995) and a number of others (Dunbar, 1981; Gioia & Chittipeddi, 1991;Goleman, 1985; Huber & Daft, 1987; Starbuck & Milliken, 1988 and Westley, 1990) are among those who have written a good deal on the subject of how people make sense in organizations. Weick says people tend to not know what believe until they see what they say. Then after they establish a belief, they tend to only “see” what corroborates that belief. Organizations are often the locus of varying believes and therefore the scene of many efforts to make sense.
The sharing of narratives (for our purposes here, stories and narratives will be used interchangeably) is an essential element of organizational sensemaking. In fact, it is possible to view organizations as symbolic systems with as many narratives as it has individuals (Cooren, 1999). Most organizational stories are told from the perspective of the top manager, what Boje, Luhman and Baack (1999) prefer to call the macro-story, but they could just as easily be told (and indeed are) from any of the other points of view, the various micro-stories (Boje, 1995; Boje, Luhman and Baack, 1999). The birds-eye view – the view from the top – includes a narrative of time and space that becomes as real as any of the other facts about the organization, such as the physical plant, organizational charts or functional departments (Searle, 1995). Those who work within the organization, even at the top, are never able to see it as “objectively” as those observing it from the outside do. Each “organizationally-bound” person sees the organization from inside his or her own ongoing narrative. That is, each participant tells the organization’s story to him or herself and this narrative is one subplot of many in the story of each person’s life. However, no one story evolves independently of the others.
Taken together, the various narrative accounts within the organization can be evaluated for consensus or themes. You might say that collective sensemaking is a search for themes, whereas individual sensemaking is a search for a reduction in uncertainty (Kramer, 1999). Being an organizational sociologist, Weick (1995) dwells more on sensemaking at the collective level than on individual contributions to sensemaking. Clearly, there can be no social understanding without individual contributions. My interest is in exploring how individual narratives are composed and in turn both reduce individual uncertainty and contribute to (collective) sensemaking. Crossan, Lane and White (1999) developed a model to connect learning at the individual level to that of the institution. They end their article by suggesting that more needs to be done to explain individual learning in an organizational context. What I am proposing is an explanation as to how “individual meaning making” feeds collective learning through both the composition and exposition of narratives or stories.
My Hall of Fame Story
Now for my attempt to make sense of what I am talking about. I introduce my discussion with a little story. Two of my wife’s brothers, a mutual friend and I, borrowed an Oldsmobile Station Wagon in 1989, and drove from Northern Kentucky to Cooperstown, New York to see Johnny Bench inducted into the Hall of Fame. We had a flat tire on the way out, in Utica, NY, on Sunday afternoon when nothing was open. We laid over and the next morning one of the brothers-in-law and I went looking for a gas station open to get the flat tire repaired so we could put it back on the car and return home. It was about 6 AM and we pulled in to a gas station run by a guy named Mike Papaglia. The garage was immaculately clean and organized. You could have eaten a white bread sandwich off the floor. He was listening to some sort of classical music and he was very upbeat for a early Monday morning.
Just prior to the trip I had been reading Robert Pirsig’s (1974) Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. In the book he recounts the time he learned that if you take your motorcycle to someone who does not care, you get what you deserve. It is better to work on your own motorcycle. In other words, caring is fundamental to quality workmanship.
What I saw that morning in Mike Papaglia’s garage was a perfect example of someone who cared. He treated us kindly, not taking advantage of the fact that we were stranded tourists, and he projected an air of concern for our situation. The result was our tire was fixed quickly, expertly and cheerfully and all on an early Monday morning.
So what’s the point of the story? I believe it is a homespun example of how we proceed through life, making sense, reducing uncertainty, weaving narratives. In this story I came under the influence of the understanding of another person (Robert Pirsig through his book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance), absorbed it into my way of looking at one aspect of the world, and then lived through an episode that helped validate my perception of the “truth” about quality. I was left with a sense of having cleared something up, having reduced uncertainty. I can never really know whether or not what I experienced was a revelation of an absolute truth, but that type of certainty is not necessary. I have low standards when it comes to truth. All I require is increased faith in my own understanding.
Sometimes the event we live through may appear to be all that happens. That is, it may seem that there was no prior insight, but that the event itself teaches us. However, I would maintain that for us to learn from events we first must be “opened up”. The sense we are making of things as we live helps guarantee that we will be able to make sense of what transpires in the future. My visit to Mike Papaglia’s garage could never have meant as much had it not come while my thoughts were on Robert Pirsig’s statements about the relationship between caring and quality. This, I would maintain, is not an isolated incident. It happens to us all and it happens a lot. What appears to be fortuity or serendipity is actually common, ordinary occurrence. Exposing oneself to new ideas is like making choices. Both open up future universes.
For each of us looking ahead, this process looks like chaos; looking back it looks like fortune, but from the outside looking in (from the perspective of another person) when we understand something now because of what we have been through before, we just look smart. Cast one more vote for a liberal arts education, since exploration outside a narrow view increases the odds of future sensemaking connections.
Gold Nuggets, Signal Events and Cautionary Tales
Weick (1995) says that sensemaking is a social activity. However, some of the elements of it he implies, include private thought on the part of individuals involved. There is, of course, no other way for social activity to occur than through individual contributions, however intertwined they may be with those of others. The nature of these individual contributions is the basic subject of this paper. To be even more specific, I am interested in the notion of what Shotter (1983) calls a seed. Weick goes on to call it an extracted cue. My understanding of Shotter’s seed notion, is that in the flow of events we make sense in part because we already have the seeds for doing so. Weick seems to be saying that the current situation causes us to extract certain cues and that this is accomplished through retrospective thought.
The point I am making is that the way some people register their experience leaves them with potential meanings or what I will call Gold Nuggets. Not all experience is registered the same way. Some people see more of what might be called the enfolded, implicate or potential meaning (Bohm, 1980) than do others. As we will see later, whether I process phenomena with both implicate and explicate order, can depend on me and the situation in which I find myself. I would further maintain that some mental states are more conducive to seeing enfolded order in our experience. The primary purpose of this paper is to discuss the nature of “seeing” enfolded order, what that leads to, and to some extent, why we sometimes “see” it and we sometimes do not. I am following Bohm’s definition of enfolded order, which is what is implied by a phenomenon rather than what it is explicitly.
I will use three separate metaphors to describe the process of making meaning through insight into enfolded order. The first metaphor assumes we sometimes bring away an understanding of the enfolded order from our experience. These bits of implications we take away from our living, I will call Gold Nuggets (GNs), because, like little bits of found gold, their value lies mainly in the future. Before they can become valuable they must be polished and refined. This refining process will not occur for many of the GNs we uncover. Many of them we will lose all together, they fade from our minds. Perhaps a few examples will help explain what I mean by GN.
Everywhere we go GNs are scattered about us. Sometimes we bend over, pick them up and put them in our pocket, and other times we grind them with our boot heel and keep right on walking. They may be bus fumes on the corner of Fifth and Vine Street, the motion of a friend’s hand as she waves goodbye, or an aerial view of a glacier pointing up through white clouds. If I am mindful (Trungpa, 1993) the bus fumes will be noted and subsequently available in my memory, attached to emotions I felt as I stood on the street corner. To certain observers a friend’s goodbye contains all the meaning of a well-written short story. Whereas another person may be so preoccupied as to not even store the wave in memory. The aerial view of a glacier pointing up through white clouds is such an exceptional site, most people cannot help but notice it. Even the most oblivious airline passenger might well stop in mid-sentence to comment on the breathtaking view of Mount Baker off the right wing.
Sometimes the nuggets come in clusters, as might the smell of assorted flowers, the panoramic view of Vancouver as we top a hill permitting us our first view of the bridges, Stanley park and the exo-skeletal blue and green steel buildings. That whole, fresh moment may stay with us as one large GN. No one would disagree that it matters greatly to our experience, whether we see Vancouver on the horizon for the first time as a prisoner in the back seat of a police car, as opposed to seeing it as a free person from the front seat of our own automobile. Who is more likely to “see” the GN in the panorama that is Vancouver, all other things being equal, the prisoner or the free person?
How shall we define GN then? GNs are what we pick up on our life’s journey, and here I use journey literally and figuratively. The first time I drive by a section of woods at dusk, I might see the cypress trees draped with Spanish moss as having a ghost-like shape. Our wonderful minds see images not only for what our senses say they are, but also for what they imply to our higher cognitions. Fiction writers often train themselves to see things both ways, explicitly and implicitly. Something about processing stimuli both digitally (literally) and with analogue content (figuratively), causes them to be more retrievable afterwards (Griffith, 1999). GNs are the associations we make during literal or vicarious experience. They are the trappings of what things imply.
In some cases, based on the variety of our former experience, we may see immediately what a “thing” implies. In other cases, we only need live a while longer for the “thing’s” implication to register. Consider the contrast between the sage and the novice in a field of stimuli. The sage is “picking up” all sorts of implications (GNs) as she reads a novel, listens to a lecture or drives through a city she has never seen before. The novice, on the other hand, might just as well be walking slowly across a moonscape, since nothing refers to anything he has ever experienced before. Almost everything is explicit, nothing implied. If Bob, who has never read or heard anything from the Bible, sees one person slap another on the cheek, Bob will not be reminded of what Jesus said about turning the other cheek. There is no reflecting back for Bob, no rich metaphor to entertain. In other words, there is no GN. When we make rich connections between present experience and previous understanding, we fashion GNs. But it does not stop there. The GN connections we have made demonstrate value when a subsequent event transpires, an event for which our previous rich-connection is well suited. Without the rich GN connection, our processing of an event is too shallow for it to serve us well later on.
The subsequent phenomena, that which causes us to hark back to a GN, I will call Signal Events (SEs). SEs, by definition, are only possible if a person has in mind one or more GNs. So now we are operating at the third level of meaning. First there was the GN, which was a figurative connection we made between an experience (real or abstract) at time two and an earlier experience (real or abstract) at time one. SEs are further associations made after the original connection (GN). Successive SEs refine the original GN. After many SEs, our GN may have increased in value and richness to the point that we might call it wisdom. SE-refined GNs in many cases are fashioned into what I will call Cautionary Tales (CTs). These tales bear the wisdom we accumulate with respect to a given piece (or pieces) of SE-refined GN insight. With the telling of the CT to others, the sharing of the relatively unrefined GN, or just announcing the connection between a SE and our GN, our original understanding of the GN may undergo alteration. The process of articulating what we mean - and the adjustments suggested by those to whom we make our announcement- may cause us to come away with a GN that appears to have almost no value at all, or one that is now more valuable than ever. Expert knowledge has a lineage of GN-SE-CT connections.
Here are what I believe to be some conditions for GNs, SEs and CTs to occur. First, we will not get GN insight unless we have the cognitive tools and propensity necessary. While almost every adult has the capacity for GN insight, not everyone cultivates it. You might say poets cultivate it more than most. Or perhaps it would be more apt to say that those who cultivate GN thinking are often called poets. Second, we may or may not be conscious of GNs we are carrying around with us at any given time. They are GNs just looking for a home, for SEs. Third, GNs are closer to latent understanding than to manifest understanding. They are unrefined. Hence the term gold nugget.
We need to frame our meaning of Signal Events (SEs) as well. First, there is a window of opportunity within which an event must occur so it becomes the SE for a corresponding GN. The size of this window depends on the strength of the GN connection and singularity of the event. Second, whether events are connected to GNs - whether they are called SEs – almost certainly depends on the “state of the individual’s mind” when the event is experienced. Who knows what all the variables are? Stress, heightened awareness, ennui, depression, euphoria may all mediate the extent to which GN-SE associations are made. Third, SEs may be more likely to occur upon moving from one field to another, due to the increased attention that results from the transition from one field to another. “Freshness” might be a good term for the mental condition that elicits more SEs. Fourth, when the SE is outside the stimulus field of the GN, the significance of the connection may well be increased. SE connections to a GN in another field may seem more powerful or universal.
As for Cautionary Tales (CTs), I believe the following to be true. First, CTs are both “pulled” and “pushed” from the thoughts of the individual. Sometimes we find ourselves shoe-horning CTs into a situation, where they have only marginal relevance. At other times it may take “too long” for us to finally get around to telling a CT that clearly applies. Second, the richness of the CT will depend on both the significance of the GN-SE connection within the field, and the story-telling abilities of the individual involved. CTs on the tongues of the inarticulate or unpersuasive, never realize their potential for impacting collective sensemaking (Kelly and Zak, 1999). Third, CTs can affect the thinking of the individual involved, whether or not she or he relates the story to someone else, but each time the story is revisited or told the meaning of the GN-SE connection is further clarified. Life after GN-SE-CT connections is not always a straight line toward increasing clarity. The clarity of our understanding can be assumed to wax and wane, but revisiting it with a little focused attention, focus required more by telling than by quiet reflection, will tend to improve our clarity and even our conviction of understanding. Fourth, if we tell our CT to someone experienced in the field to which the connection applies, we are more likely to get feedback relevant to validity of the GN-SE connection. Communities of practice (Liedtka, 1999), manufacturing cells (Grznar, 1994), like-minded people wherever they may be found, can be valuable to one another as sources of feedback about GN-SE connections. The value of within-group exchanges is likely to be enhanced by the variety of extra-group experiences held by members of the group. Fifth, relating the story to someone experienced in a field other than the one to which the connection applies, will offer feedback relevant to the generalizability of the GN-SE connection contained in the story. Sixth, it stands to reason that some atmospheres are more likely to elicit CTs from individuals than others, and that these atmospheres (cultures?) and personality characteristics of those involved, will interact.