Agir é fundamental

Mais um conjunto de trechos retirados de "Making Sense of the Organization, Volume 2 - The Impermanent Organization" de Karl E. Weick. Particularmente adequados a estes tempos pós-pandemia em que muita coisa, depois de congelada não volta ao que era aquando do descongelamento. Depois, tem uma lição semelhante à dos húngaros perdidos nos Alpes, mas com um papa dos Pirinéus. Quando não se sabe o caminho, começar a caminhar e estar atento aos sinais pode ser a primeira solução para sair da incerteza paralisadora. Ontem vi num noticiário da TV uma pequena reportagem de Verão sobre um projecto, "Maratona de Sabores", que ilustra o papel da acção. Uma casal de Mirandela com experiência na restauração estava fechado em causa por causa do confinamento. Decidiram que em vez de esperarem iriam meter pés ao caminho. Um ano depois estavam com uma empresa com 10 trabalhadores.

"If uncertainty is unwelcome in organizations, equally unwelcome should be the admonition that members should doubt what they think they know. ... In an impermanent world, events may be other than they seem and can abruptly turn otherwise. Doubt is adaptability writ large, but certainty is adaptation to current conditions that is written even larger. Certainty is insensitive to change, and doubt is one of the few means to restore that sensitivity.

...

1. If the environment is dynamically complex it is impossible to know and understand everything in advance, therefore you need to be able to doubt your existing insights
2. If the ability to doubt is of crucial importance for organizations dealing with dynamic complexity, organizations need to organize their ability to doubt . . . . A spirit of contradiction should be organized.

To organize doubt is to engage in meaningful argumentation. Matters of controversy are deliberately sought and discussed. ... doubt becomes organized when sense-discrediting balances sensemaking, but such balancing is fruitless without action since the real problem is being open to the unknown.

Real openness implies that a system is open to information that it has never thought of before. For this reason, action is an important informer for systems . . . . If presented with the unknown, systems can be confronted with circumstances in which they need to act before they think. New experiences are therefore the source for discrediting.

Action is crucial because doubt, by itself, is dangerous. ... Leaders who legitimize doubt need also to legitimize attempts. That means modulating feelings of fear about what might happen.

...

untested presumptions and unexplored doubts become reality. The resulting pattern of organized relations becomes closed, retained knowledge becomes transformed into complete knowledge, and the current adaptation becomes the final adaptation to circumstances that outrun the pattern.

Inserting doubt into an already impermanent organization seeking certainty is not for the faint of heart. However, if circumstances keep changing, and yesterday’s organizing is partially obsolete, [Moi ici: Pimenta Machado. Rings a bell?] simultaneous doubt and belief directed at current functioning is necessary. To legitimize doubt is to act as if ambivalence is the optimal compromise."

Jordan Petersson reconhece a validade do argumento inicial do pós-modernismo, mas depois malha no pós-modernismo por causa dos seus frutos e outros argumentos. Julgo que Jesus disse, segundo os Evangelhos, que conheceremos a boa árvore pelos seus frutos. Isto faz-me recuar ao paradoxo de Zenão, em teoria o corredor nunca ultrapassará a tartaruga, na prática é o que vemos. Agir é fundamental, depois é estar aberto aos resultados e voltar a agir em função do que se pretende. Por isso, depois destas citações, Weick esccreve que num mundo de incerteza ter uma bússola é mais útil do que ter um mapa.