Organizational Redesign As Improvisation

In this chapter, Weick challenges, and greatly enriches, our understanding of organizational design. Highlighting the dynamic and fluid nature of organizations, he calls for a perspective that emphasizes design as a verb rather than design as a noun, a perspective that acknowledges unpredictability rather than one that seeks and portrays stability. He goes further and reminds us that an organization’s design is what people believe it to be, that what people believe it to be reflects what they believe it was, that perceptions of what it was are therefore the basis for what people do, and that what people do in organizations is, in effect, the organization’s design.