PERSON
Karl Weick
The organizational theorist who replaced the fiction of rational decision-making with the messier truth of sensemaking—and whose insight that action precedes understanding is the most precise explanation of what AI does to the organizations it enters.
Karl Weick did not set out to explain artificial intelligence. He set out to explain Tenerife. On March 27, 1977, the most experienced pilot in the KLM fleet began his takeoff roll without clearance, killing 583 people—not because he lacked information but because he had committed to an interpretation of his situation so coherent and so consistent with his identity as a senior commander that the cues contradicting it could not penetrate. Weick spent four decades mapping the organizational pathology this disaster exemplified: the tendency to mistake plausibility for accuracy, to commit too early to a single interpretation, to allow a good-enough account of a situation to foreclose the stranger, slower, harder accounts that might have been truer. His key concept was
sensemaking—the ongoing, social, retrospective process through which organizations construct workable interpretations of ambiguous situations—and his deepest finding was that
plausibility matters more than accuracy in organizational life, because a plausible interpretation that enables coordinated action is more