What is organizational effectiveness? Do you have it in your organization?

Is your organization achieving the outcomes it intends to produce? Or, is it ineffective?

Companies capture efficiencies and create measures to get the job done right, but why not just think of organizational effectiveness as "sensemaking."

In the detailed analysis, The collapse of Sensemaking in Organizations: The Mann Gulch Disaster, theorist Karl Weick's analysis of the death of 13 Forest Service smokejumpers, made famous by Norman McClean's, Young Men and Fire, Weick states that the actions of the smokejumpers in their last critical moments of survival, can be used to illustrate a gap in our current understanding of organizations. Weick theorizes that participants to an event can actually question their own capacity to act if they loose a sense of their own reality.

"Sensemaking" as defined by Weick, is the basic idea that reality is an ongoing accomplishment that emerges from efforts to create order and make retrospective sense of what occurs.  The idea of sensemaking emphasizes that people try to make things rationally accountable to themselves and others. So in effect, Weick reasons that, "individuals are not seen living in, and acting out their lives in relation to, a wider reality, so much as creating and sustaining images of a wider reality, in part to rationalize what they are doing." They realize their reality by reading into their situation patterns of significant meaning.

Weick's analysis of Mann Gulch theorizes that the smokejumpers were an organization, because their work was usually done in "small temporary outfits in which the stakes are high and where foul-ups can have serious consequences." So, theoretically, if we understand the Mann Gulch incident, we may be able to conceptualize and cope with contemporary organizations.

For these young men, the "root cause" of the Mann Gulch tragedy according to Weick was their inability to act and gain a sense of reality when overcome by looming disaster.   By "creating temporary systems, intergroup dynamics, and team building" when they became overcome by the threat of death by fire, they could have integrated and quite possibly survived. In Weick's opinion, their lack of organization at a crucial moment cost them their lives.

How unfortunate it would be to let organization loose it's sense of reality, or a let a senseless action cause you to lose your ability to make sense of things. When disaster is looming at work, be a leader, and ask yourself, how can I make my organization more effective?    

Webster's defines the word "sense" as, a "conscious awareness or rationality."


Does Weick's lack of Sensemaking remind you of any organization's that have collapsed in the face of a looming disaster? I'm sure you could name a few...






Read Weick's article, Leadership When Event Don't Play By the Rules:
http://www.bus.umich.edu/FacultyResearch/Research/TryingTimes/Rules.htm


Photocredit.