CONCEPT
Attitude of Wisdom
Weick's term for the
simultaneous maintenance of confidence and doubt — the disposition that enabled
Wagner Dodge's improvisation and that distinguishes the bricoleur from both the dogmatist and the paralyzed.
The attitude of wisdom is the active maintenance of two orientations that ordinary cognition treats as opposed: the confidence to act on one's current understanding, and the humility to recognize that the understanding may be wrong. It is not a compromise — not a fifty-fifty mix of assertion and doubt. It is the refusal to collapse into either pole. The practitioner with the attitude of wisdom acts, because paralysis is not an option, but acts while remaining alert to the cues that would reveal the action was wrong. Weick argued that this disposition was what enabled Wagner Dodge to improvise the escape fire at
Mann Gulch: he had
enough confidence in his own reading of the situation to do something no one had taught him, and enough humility to recognize that his crew might not follow, that his invention might not work, that the situation had exceeded every framework he possessed. The attitude of wisdom is the organizational and personal precondition for
bricolage under extreme