CONCEPT
Enactment
Weick's claim that organizations do not merely interpret pre-existing environments — they produce the environments they then interpret through their own actions.
Enactment is Weick's most philosophically radical concept. Organizations do not encounter a pre-formed environment waiting to be correctly perceived; they act, and the acting produces the environment they then interpret. The manager who believes employees are untrustworthy installs surveillance, which produces disengaged behavior, which confirms the initial belief. The sales team that believes the market wants lower prices cuts prices, which trains customers to wait for discounts, which confirms the interpretation. In each case, the action based on the interpretation creates the evidence that validates the interpretation. Enactment is not a cognitive bias but the fundamental mechanism by which organizations create the relatively stable environments that make coordinated action possible. AI transforms enactment by compressing the cycle from interpretation to action to near-zero, producing self-confirming environments faster than the interpretive process that would challenge them can form.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The concept grew out of Weick's dissatisfaction with the dominant models of organizational perception, which treated environments as independent variables to be sensed accurately. His fieldwork repeatedly showed the opposite