Plausibility Over Accuracy

Under conditions of ambiguity, organizations do not wait for accurate interpretations before acting. They settle for plausibility — an account coherent enough to orient collective behavior, internally consistent enough to survive challenge, and actionable enough to get people moving. The map need not be correct. It need only be sufficiently coherent to start the movement that generates the information that will eventually improve the map. Weick's illustration was the Hungarian soldiers lost in the Alps who survived by marching with a map of the Pyrenees — the map got them moving, the marching produced real information about real terrain, and the terrain pushed back against the plausible interpretation with enough force to correct it. Plausibility matters more than accuracy in the initial moment; accuracy is recovered through the friction of enactment. AI disrupts this recovery by producing outputs so polished, so aesthetically plausible, that the seam where interpretation diverges from reality becomes invisible and the terrain's capacity to push back is eliminated along with the production friction it used to