Making Sense of the Organization: Volume 2: The Impermanent Organization
The seeming permanence of organizations conceals an endless cycle of interruptions, recoveries, and re-organizing. This fundamental cycle is explored in a series of essays that focus on ways in which people organize their attention, interpretations, actions, and learning in order to cope with impermanence. Coping is explored in settings such as the spread of a puzzling virus, a foam strike on the space shuttle, excess deaths following pediatric surgery, wildland fires that suddenly explode, and the misidentification of fingerprints in a crime lab. Recovery from events such as these tends to be rough. The fixes made in the name of recovery tend to be transient and eventually give way to new interruptions, new challenges for sensemaking, and renewed efforts to reorganize. The purpose of these essays is to render the challenges less mysterious.