Karl Weick: Embracing Curiosity in the Face of Uncertainty

Senior Caucasian man explaining scientific exhibit to two teenage boys, both wearing lab coats, standing in museum display room with glass cabinets — So many parts of the late Karl Weick’s work are applicable to today’s business environment, but his sensemaking perspective is probably more relevant than ever. Source: Shutterstock

Published on: June 9, 2026 at 3:17 pm

The late Academy of Management Scholar Karl Weick (1936-2026) of the University of Michigan is best known for his theories on “sensemaking.” His ideas about organizational behavior and psychology have helped scholars better understand everything from how people deal with uncertainty and crises to the wisdom of avoiding oversimplification and jumping to conclusions based on unexamined assumptions.

Academy of Management Scholar Sally Maitlis of the University of Oxford said that so many parts of Weick’s work are applicable to today’s business environment, but his sensemaking perspective is probably more relevant than ever.

“He showed that people are not simply passive interpreters of uncertain environments, but help create, amplify, stabilize, and sometimes trap themselves within the very environments they are trying to understand,” Maitlis said. “This insight is especially important today, when organizations face uncertainty that is fast-moving, distributed, and technologically mediated.

“Weick’s idea of enactment is crucial here: Action is not just what we do once we understand a situation; it is part of how we come to make sense of that situation,” she said.

The early weeks of the Covid-19 pandemic offered many powerful examples.

“Governments, scientists, and many others were working with fragmented and shifting cues, while their early categories and actions—whether to treat Covid as flu-like, airborne, containable, etc.—shaped what they saw next,” Maitlis said. “Decisions about lockdowns, working from home, masks, testing, and travel restrictions did not simply reflect understanding of the virus; they helped produce different environments in which the virus spread or was contained, and became visible or remained hidden.”

Knowing that you can’t know

Weick’s sensemaking work is also relevant because it challenges our tendency to equate good leadership with certainty, she noted.

“In ambiguous situations, people need plausible accounts that allow them to keep acting, but those accounts must remain open to revision,” Maitlis said. “This is because organizations often move too quickly from doubt to certainty, from weak signals to familiar categories. Weick’s work shows why that can be dangerous. The first plausible story can be comforting because it reduces anxiety, but it may also foreclose sensemaking, making leaders less receptive to anomalous information that could and should change their understanding of what’s going on.”

Weick captures this idea in this quote: “The overconfident shun curiosity because they think they know what they need to know. The overcautious shun curiosity for fear that it will only deepen their uncertainties. Both the cautious and the confident are closed-minded, which means that neither makes good judgments. In this sense, wisdom, understood as simultaneous belief and doubt, improves adaptability.”

Resisting oversimplification

For business leaders and managers, one key implication of Weick’s research is that action can be a way of knowing.

“In highly ambiguous situations, organizations’ leaders often cannot think their way into clarity before acting,” Maitlis said. “They need small probes, experiments, and rapid feedback. The point is to act in ways that generate better cues, not to act as if the situation is already known. This is a different model of leadership than heroic decisiveness; it is leadership as disciplined inquiry.”

Another implication of Weick’s work is that leaders should be wary of simplifying too much, too early. Weick’s work suggests that clarity can be an illusion.

“In the face of complexity, leaders can valuably ask: What are we treating as obvious? What cues are we ignoring because they do not fit our story? What would we see if we changed the frame we are bringing to the situation?” Maitlis said. “These questions help keep sensemaking alive long enough for better understanding to emerge.”

Further, leaders should design organizations to encourage personnel to notice small surprises, inconsistencies, or other subtle indicators that a situation is not quite (or no longer) as they thought.

“Weick observed that people notice what they have the concepts, roles, and capabilities to act upon,” Maitlis said. “If an organization lacks a way to respond to a weak signal, then its leaders may not really see it. As he put it, ‘Believing is seeing’—we tend to notice what our existing categories, commitments, and capacities prepare us to notice. So the challenge for leaders is to build organizations in which belief does not harden too quickly into blindness—by cultivating diverse expertise, cross-boundary teams, psychological safety, and mechanisms for escalating anomalies before they become normalized.”

Radical ideas that change conversations

“Karl Weick was one of the most original thinkers in our field, someone who showed us how to see the world differently,” Maitlis said. “Many of his provocations now feel so familiar that it is easy to forget how radical they were: to look at organizing rather than organizations; to understand environments as enacted rather than merely encountered; to ask how people make plausible sense rather than arrive at accurate representations; and to recognize, in his well-known question, ‘How can I know what I think until I see what I say?’

“These ideas have travelled far beyond organization theory, shaping conversations about leadership, crisis, strategy, reliability, learning, and everyday managerial practice,” she said. “More personally, Karl was humble, kind, generous, and playful.

“He was a brilliant scholar, but also an encouraging presence for those of us finding our way—someone who made intellectual life feel more open and alive.”

A sample of Weick’s AOM research findings:

Author

Daniel Butcher

Daniel Butcher is a writer and the Managing Editor of AOM Today at the Academy of Management (AOM). Previously, he was a writer and the Finance Editor for Strategic Finance magazine and Management Accounting Quarterly, a scholarly journal, at the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA). Prior to that, he worked as a writer/editor at The Financial Times, including daily FT sister publications Ignites and FundFire, as well as Crain Communications’s InvestmentNews and Crain’s Wealth, eFinancialCareers, and Arizent’s Financial Planning, Re:Invent|Wealth, On Wall Street, Bank Investment Consultant, and Money Management Executive. He earned his bachelor’s degree, Cum Laude, from the University of Colorado Boulder and his master’s degree from New York University. You can reach him at [email protected] or via LinkedIn.

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