{"id":8901,"date":"2026-06-09T15:17:01","date_gmt":"2026-06-09T15:17:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aom.org\/today\/?p=8901"},"modified":"2026-06-09T19:56:59","modified_gmt":"2026-06-09T19:56:59","slug":"karl-weick-embracing-curiosity-in-the-face-of-uncertainty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aom.org\/today\/karl-weick-embracing-curiosity-in-the-face-of-uncertainty\/","title":{"rendered":"Karl Weick: Embracing Curiosity in the Face of Uncertainty"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Daniel Butcher<\/a><\/p>\n

The late Academy of Management Scholar Karl Weick<\/a> (1936-2026) of the University of Michigan is best known for his theories on \u201csensemaking.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Academy of Management Scholar Sally Maitlis<\/a> of the University of Oxford said that so many parts of Weick\u2019s work are applicable to today\u2019s business environment, but his sensemaking perspective is probably more relevant than ever.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe 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,\u201d Maitlis said. \u201cThis insight is especially important today, when organizations face uncertainty that is fast-moving, distributed, and technologically mediated.<\/p>\n

\u201cWeick\u2019s 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,\u201d she said.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

The early weeks of the Covid-19 pandemic offered many powerful examples.<\/p>\n

\u201cGovernments, scientists, and many others were working with fragmented and shifting cues, while their early categories and actions\u2014whether to treat Covid as flu-like, airborne, containable, etc.\u2014shaped what they saw next,\u201d Maitlis said. \u201cDecisions 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Knowing that you can\u2019t know<\/strong><\/p>\n

Weick\u2019s sensemaking work is also relevant because it challenges our tendency to equate good leadership with certainty, she noted.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn ambiguous situations, people need plausible accounts that allow them to keep acting, but those accounts must remain open to revision,\u201d Maitlis said. \u201cThis is because organizations often move too quickly from doubt to certainty, from weak signals to familiar categories. Weick\u2019s 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\u2019s going on.\u201d<\/p>\n

Weick captures this idea in this quote: \u201cThe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Resisting oversimplification<\/strong><\/p>\n

For business leaders and managers, one key implication of Weick\u2019s research is that action can be a way of knowing.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn highly ambiguous situations, organizations\u2019 leaders often cannot think their way into clarity before acting,\u201d Maitlis said. \u201cThey 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another implication of Weick\u2019s work is that leaders should be wary of simplifying too much, too early. Weick\u2019s work suggests that clarity can be an illusion.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn 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?\u201d Maitlis said. \u201cThese questions help keep sensemaking alive long enough for better understanding to emerge.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cWeick observed that people notice what they have the concepts, roles, and capabilities to act upon,\u201d Maitlis said. \u201cIf an organization lacks a way to respond to a weak signal, then its leaders may not really see it. As he put it, \u2018Believing is seeing\u2019\u2014we 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\u2014by cultivating diverse expertise, cross-boundary teams, psychological safety, and mechanisms for escalating anomalies before they become normalized.\u201d<\/p>\n

Radical ideas that change conversations<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cKarl Weick was one of the most original thinkers in our field, someone who showed us how to see the world differently,\u201d Maitlis said. \u201cMany 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, \u2018How can I know what I think until I see what I say?\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cThese ideas have travelled far beyond organization theory, shaping conversations about leadership, crisis, strategy, reliability, learning, and everyday managerial practice,\u201d she said. \u201cMore personally, Karl was humble, kind, generous, and playful.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe was a brilliant scholar, but also an encouraging presence for those of us finding our way\u2014someone who made intellectual life feel more open and alive.\u201d<\/p>\n

A sample of Weick\u2019s AOM research findings<\/strong>:<\/p>\n