Culture, Communication, Complexity.

Tag: systemic failure modes

Sensemaking in Organisations

Post author By G
Post date Jan 10, 2026
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Karl Weick’s Sensemaking in Organizations emerged from a dissatisfaction with how organisations were typically described: as decision machines, information processors, or rational planners. Weick’s work cut against that grain. Drawing on psychology, sociology, and organisational studies, he focused instead on how people inside organisations actually come to understand what they are doing, usually after they […]

Tags action and interpretation, administrative decision making, algorithmic decision systems, attention management, authority and compliance, automation and governance, brittle institutions, bureaucratic rationality, bureaucratic systems, causality in social systems, collective cognition, communication in organizations, complex adaptive organizations, compression of feedback loops, coordination versus adaptability, crisis management systems, cybernetics and organizations, decision cycles, delay in organizations, digital bureaucracy, entropy in organizational systems, feedback and control, governance systems, high reliability organizations, information overload, institutional behavior, knowledge management limits, language and administration, logic of coordination, managerial ideology, media ecology in institutions, operational coherence, operational resilience, operational tempo, organizational control, organizational dynamics, organizational fragility, organizational learning failure, organizational sensemaking, philosophy of action, platform organizations, policy implementation, political organizations, political philosophy of institutions, procedural language, psychology of organizations, public sector management, retrospective meaning, signal and reception, structural realism in organizations, system design principles, systemic failure modes, systems theory in management, technocratic governance, technological acceleration, temporal structure of decision making, uncertainty management

politics technology

The Engine of Tyranny

Blame draws breath. Inhale the fear of other people. Exhale the accusation that keeps the fear alive. Each cycle promises control—naming enemies, drawing boundaries, standing strong—but strength here is a mask. What passes for rebellion only generates new codes, new rituals, new obligations. Rules always return, harsher and more brittle, precisely because they are denied. […]