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Reflections: Change Agents As Change

Poets – On Reconnecting Flux and
Hunches
a
Karl E. Weick
a
University of Michigan, USA

Version of record first published: 24 Feb 2011

To cite this article: Karl E. Weick (2011): Reflections: Change Agents As Change Poets – On
Reconnecting Flux and Hunches, Journal of Change Management, 11:1, 7-20

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 Journal of Change Management
Vol. 11, No. 1, 7 –20, March 2011

Reflections: Change Agents As Change

Poets – On Reconnecting Flux and
Hunches
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KARL E. WEICK
University of Michigan, USA

ABSTRACT Crucial to the performance of change management is the conversion of the experience
of perceptual flux into evocative conceptual hunches as well as activities that reverse this
conversion. Change agents encounter problems when they work with images that incorporate too
little flux and images that misplace concreteness. Reconstruing change management as a poetics
of change practised by change poets is proposed as a means to emphasize the concreteness of
flux, the abstractness of hunches and the reciprocal movement among them that is necessary for
effective change.

KEY WORDS : Sensemaking, change agent, flux, unfreezing, language, meaning

Introduction
Truly practical men give their minds free play about a subject without asking too
closely at every point for the advantage to be gained; exclusive preoccupation
with matters of use and application so narrows the horizon as in the long run to
defeat itself. It does not pay to tether one’s thoughts to the post of use with too
short a rope. (Dewey, 1910/1997, p. 139).

This series is called ‘Reflections,’ but what reflection means is left to the author.
Reflection ‘usually implies a turning of one’s thoughts back upon or back to some-
thing that exists, has occurred, is without explanation, or the like; it implies quiet
and serious consideration or study’ (Merriam Webster’s Dictionary of Synonyms,
1984, p. 835). After reading that definition, my first reflection was that it basically

Correspondence Address: Karl E. Weick, Stephen M. Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, 701
Tappan St., Ann Arbor, MI, 48109-1234, USA. Email: karlw@umich.edu

1469-7017 Print/1479-1811 Online/11/010007–14 # 2011 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/14697017.2011.548937
 8 K.E. Weick
describes the way I work when dealing with issues such as organizing (Weick, 1969),
sensemaking (Weick, 1995) and managing the unexpected (Weick and Sutcliffe,
2007). I gloss (Weick, 1981) older work in order to draw attention to its contemporary
relevance. Thus, my work illustrates Stinchcombe’s (1982) description of ways in
which scholars use predecessors as touchstones and sources of fundamental ideas.
My second reflection on that definition is that the reference to turning one’s
thoughts back to something that is ‘without explanation or the like,’ describes
what I think is the basic condition faced by people who manage change. They
deal with experiences that are without explanation, such as when the unexpected
occurs, when closer attention reveals the need to alter the speed of ongoing change
or when changing itself generates moments of senselessness. The shorthand that
this article seeks to develop for all of this is that change management is about
the reciprocal connecting of flux and hunches.1
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The protagonist of the effort is the change poet. The activities of the poet are
especially salient when the topic is organizational sensemaking (Weick et al.,
2005). Robert Frost put it well when he said ‘poetry is what is lost in translation.
It is also what is lost in interpretation’ (quoted in Untermeyer, 1964, p.18). Sense-
making omits details, but it is details lost during conceptual substitution and
interpretation that often are clues to obstacles whose change needs to be
managed. Access to those details is a matter of language and discourse as people
like Shotter (1993), Barrett et al. (1995), Cunliffe (2001), Czarniawska (2003)
and Boje et al. (2004) have shown us. Change poets create evocative images in
the sense that their words include more of the flux of direct experience and fewer
of the surface categories that reduce options. Change poets reconstitute larger frag-
ments of experience. Although it is tough to be evocative using ordinary language,
that is just what poets do (Valery, 1958). What is crucial for change is that ordinary
words are recombined to lend substance to absent things. What is often ‘absent’ in
change management is a vivid picture of the flux associated with first-hand experi-
ence. Also missing are concepts and hunches that preserve small, subtle details
whose foregrounding can produce large consequences (Weick, 1993a).
I will argue that change management involves a preoccupation with connecting
flux and hunches by change poets who support change agents. I want to use a
passage from Shakespeare’s (1990) A Midsummer Night’s Dream to position
the discussion. The image of a change poet is suggested in Act V, Scene I
where Theseus says,

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet

Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast Hell can hold,
This is the madman; the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen’s beauty in the brow of Egypt.
The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of the things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
 Change Agents As Change Poets 9
While there may be lunatics and lovers among change agents, I am more interested
in those who function as poets preoccupied with the co-evolution of flux and
hunches. Flux in the case of Shakespeare is ‘airy nothing’ that begins to materia-
lize when it is imagined into hunches about forms and shapes, which are then
pinned down to a local habitation and given a name. Although this sequence
looks like a transition from the abstract to the concrete, it is actually just the oppo-
site. And this is where change agents need to hone their poetry.
The focus on change poets will be developed in the following way. First, I
preview the basic argument. Second, I focus on the transition from flux to
hunches, suggesting that it is a move from the concrete to the abstract. Third, I
focus on the transition from hunches to flux and argue that it is a move from
the abstract to the concrete. Fourth, I conclude with summary observations on
change management viewed as a site where flux, hunches and poets converge.
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The Basic Argument

The core insight that is the foundation for the poet’s work is straightforward:

perception prompts our thought, and thought in turn enriches our perception. The
more we see, the more we think; while the more we think, the more we see in our
immediate experiences, and the greater grows the detail and the more significant
the articulateness of our perception. (James, 1996, pp. 108– 109)

Poets wrap perceptions in conceptions and in doing so attempt both to gather more
flux and to preserve what has been gathered using images that narrow the gap
between continuous flux and discrete names. Poets talk airy nothing into existence.
I refer to the ‘existence’ that is created by change poets as ‘hunches.’ Hunches
have been described by Perin (2005) and Locke et al. (2008) as an undifferentiated
sense of something, as well as doubt shadowed by discovery. Hunches resemble
poetic discourse that reconstitutes absent events: ‘a hunch is a sense of something
we are omitting in what we are currently capable of articulating and verifying’
(Locke al., 2008, p. 913). Whenever I use the word ‘hunch’, I am treating it as
a synonym for the word ‘concept.’ Hunches are conceptual substitutions for per-
ceptual experience. The word ‘hunch’ is in the family of words associated with
‘conjecture’ (Merriam Webster’s Dictionary of Synonyms, 1984, pp. 177 –178)
meaning ‘to draw an inference from slight evidence.’ Although concepts can be
rich pragmatic tools for sensemaking, they remain discrete samples of continuous
flux and therefore are loosely coupled to evidence. The image of a hunch high-
lights the provisional nature of concepts and the fact that they are substantial
abridgements of perceptual reality. There is also a normative tinge to my use of
the word hunch in the sense that I attribute many of the problems in organizations
to misplaced concreteness. Attempts at organizational change often go awry when
people reify and try to change ‘things’ that are already in motion (Tsoukas and
Chia, 2002).
When change poets talk airy nothing into existence, they and their clients are
clearly managing change. Robert Chia suggests the complex texture of this mana-
ging. ‘Managing [change] is firstly and fundamentally the task of becoming aware,
 10 K.E. Weick
attending to, sorting out, and prioritizing an inherently messy, fluxing, chaotic
world of competing demands that are placed on a manager’s attention. It is creat-
ing order out of chaos. It is an art, not a science. Active perceptual organization
and the astute allocation of attention is a central feature of the managerial task’
(Chia, 2005, p. 1092, the word ‘change’ added). Chia and Shakespeare share
common ground and describe basically the same process. Shakespeare’s airy
nothing ¼ Chia’s ‘fluxing, chaotic world;’ glancing ¼ ‘attending to;’ imagin-
ing ¼ ‘becoming aware;’ forms and shapes ¼ ‘sorting out’ and ‘active percep-
tual organization;’ and, local habitation and names ¼ ‘prioritizing’ and ‘world of
competing demands.’

From Flux to Hunches, From Concrete to Abstract

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The transition from flux to hunches is usually taken for granted because change
agents work mainly with concepts. It is less common for people to examine
how those concepts came to be used and what the original experiences were
that triggered their creation and adoption. And it is even less common to
portray this transition as a move from the more concrete to the more abstract.
These shifts are issues that matter to change poets.
A circumstance of ‘airy nothing’ is equivocal. The question is not so much
‘what’s the story,’ but which of many stories is this one? William James describes
his version of ‘airy nothing’ this way:

Perceptual flux means nothing. . . (I)t is always a much-at-once, and contains innumer-
able aspects and characters which conception can pick out, isolate, and thereafter
always intend. . .. [O)ut of this aboriginal sensible muchness attention carves out
objects, which conception then names and identifies forever – in the sky ‘constella-
tions,’ on the earth ‘beach,’ ‘sea,’ ‘cliff,’ ‘bushes,’ ‘grass.’ / (T)he intellectual life of
man consists almost wholly in his substitution of a conceptual order for the perceptual
order in which his experience originally comes. (James, 1996, pp. 49– 51, italics in
original)

The perceptual flux of airy nothing begins to become something when we ignore
most of what is streaming, bracket some portion of it, imagine patterns that exist
within the brackets and finally ‘ground’ our progressive selecting in the abstrac-
tions of a locale and a name. But a crucial role for the change poet is to ensure
that the ‘names that identify objects forever,’ do not. Instead, the poet continues
to experiment with hunches that incorporate more of the perceptual flux that
shapes experience.
William James elsewhere used the image of a sieve to make the activity of sub-
stituting more concrete. When concepts are substituted for the perceptual,

the conceptual scheme is a sort of sieve in which we try to gather up the world’s con-
tents. Most facts and relations fall through its meshes, being either too subtle or
insignificant to be fixed in any conception. But whenever a physical reality is
caught and identified as the same with something already conceived, it remains
on the sieve, and all the predicates and relations of the conception with which it
 Change Agents As Change Poets 11
is identified becomes its predicates and relations too; it is subjected to the sieve’s
network, in other words. (James, 1981, p. 455)

The image of a sieve singles out qualities of change management that define the
domain of poets. These qualities include that which is subtle, seemingly insignif-
icant, and weighed down by prevailing predicates and relations. Poetic work re-
maps this domain.
As the original experience moves through a sieve, it becomes a world largely
independent of its origins and increasingly vulnerable to the unexpected. This is
precisely the trajectory that Diane Vaughan (1996) detected prior to the Challen-
ger launch disaster when signals of potential danger were misinterpreted.
Anomalies and deviations from performance specifications were ‘normalized’
and became accepted as routine, taken-for-granted occurrences. The subtle and
the seemingly insignificant were ignored and left to incubate under the guise of
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being treated as normal and expected. Significance is cultural and in the eye of
the beholder which means that what falls through as seemingly insignificant,
may be significant in a different context. The theme that begins to emerge is
that a change poet’s job is to change the mesh of the sieve, catch facts and relations
that previously fell through, remain sensitive to the subtle, question the seemingly
insignificant, and rethink the predicates and relations that are attracted by items
collected on the mesh.
What gives an edge to this portrayal of substituting is that it basically happened
a second time in the Columbia shuttle disaster. Again, data that remained on the
mesh of the sieve were connected to all the predicates and relations of the con-
ceptions with which it was identified. In the Columbia shuttle disaster (Starbuck
and Farjoun, 2005), NASA interpreted the puff of smoke that occurred at the
root of the left wing 82 seconds into the launch as one more instance of foam shed-
ding. NASA attached predicates of prior foam shedding such as expected, normal,
in-family and fixable-when-it-lands, with the result that upper management can-
celled requests for further images of the possibly damaged area (Weick, 2005).
During re-entry this breach enlarged and the shuttle exploded.
The transition from flux to concepts is significant for change management.
When direct experiences of flux are compounded into abstractions they often
‘mean something wholly independent of their origins. . . (E)ach new whole is
less than the sum of its parts. . .. (W)e are surrendering part of the unique, idiosyn-
cratic experience of the individual (so that we can) share, impart, partake, make
known in common’ (Irwin, 1977, pp. 25– 26).
The compounding of abstractions in the interest of common ground is the
central theme of Baron and Misovich’s (1999) concept of a ‘shareability con-
straint.’ They argue that sensemaking starts with knowledge-by-acquaintance,
which is acquired through active exploration. Active exploration involves stimu-
lus-driven, on-line cognitive processing in order to take action. This involves
exposure to airy nothing, perceptual flux and forms. Once people start abstracting
direct experience, they substitute names and concepts for the things they see, they
develop knowledge-by-description rather than knowledge-by-acquaintance, their
cognitive processing is now schema-driven rather than stimulus-driven, and
they go beyond the information given and elaborate their direct perceptions into
 12 K.E. Weick
types, categories, stereotypes and schemas (Tsoukas, 2005a). These are the local
habitations and names.
The relevance of these shifts for change management becomes more apparent
when this transition is labelled as a ‘shareability constraint’ (Baron and Misovich,
1999). Informally, this constraint means that if people want to share their cognitive
structures, those structures have to take on a particular form. More formally, as
social complexity increases, people shift from perceptually based knowing to cat-
egorically based knowing in the interest of coordination. The potential cost of
doing so is greater intellectual and emotional distance from the details picked
up by active exploration. Thus, people who are preoccupied with coordination
tend to be guided by the name of the original experience rather than the qualities
that were observed and felt at the time of imagining, forming and shaping. If sig-
nificant details occur that lie outside the reach of these names, then coordinated
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people will be the last to see them and the first to be affected by them unless
poets intervene.
There are ways to work within the shareability constraint. For example, it is
possible to institutionalize learning, imagination and doubt by means of processes
that generate mindful knowing (Weick et al., 1999; Weick and Sutcliffe, 2006).
The progression from undifferentiated perception to shared public perceptions
that are named, dimensionalized and treated as facts (Irwin, 1977), can be done
more mindfully if there is: (1) active differentiation and refinement of existing dis-
tinctions (Langer, 1989, p. 138); (2) creation of new discrete categories out of the
continuous streams of events that flow through activities (Langer, 1989, p. 157);
and (3) a more nuanced appreciation of the context of events and of alternative
ways to deal with that context (Langer, 1989, p. 159). This combination of
differentiation, creation and appreciation captures more details, evokes a wider
variety of roles, and synthesizes those details and rules into richer conjectures.
I think this is what Beer et al. (1990) have in mind in their classic analysis, ‘why
change programs don’t produce change.’ They argue for the alignment of roles,
relationships and responsibilities around key tasks to solve specific problems.
The focus is on fine-grained, grassroots change that starts at the periphery of
the corporation and moves to the core. This focus tempers the shareability con-
straint in the sense that the particulars of local knowledge-by-acquaintance
remain local when they are converted into local knowledge-by-description in
the interest of coordination. If this looks like each department is reinventing the
wheel, this is to be expected when units are diverse. The result of tightened coup-
ling between flux and hunches at the local level is swift revitalization that can be
used as a model for other units. Beer et al. are wary of planned changes that get
caught up in abstractions that substitute for detailed understanding.
The role of the change poet in connecting flux to hunches is to help people turn
circumstances into situations that make sense. Taylor and Van Every (2000, p. 40.)
describe sensemaking as an activity where ‘circumstances [i.e. airy nothing] are
turned into a situation that is comprehended explicitly in words [i.e. via concepts]
and that serves as a springboard to action’. In an early draft of this article, I typed
the preceding quote from memory and got one word wrong. I thought the quote
had said ‘serves as a platform for action’ whereas it actually said, serves as a
springboard for action. I wouldn’t mention this except that it is a perfect
 Change Agents As Change Poets 13
example of the point I am making. The word ‘platform’ refers to a raised, flat hori-
zontal surface, whereas a springboard is ‘a flexible board mounted on a fulcrum
with one end secured, used by gymnasts to gain momentum, as in vaulting.’
(American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 1992, p. 1744). Words
that have sufficient flexibility to add momentum to action are quite different
from words that serve largely as a ‘surface raised above the level of the adjacent
area’ as in a theatre stage (American Heritage Dictionary of the English
Language, 1992, p. 1387). The work of change poets matters because they
rework hunches back into perceptual flux and reimagine forms, shapes, locales
and names. As Hari Tsoukas (2005b, p. 99) puts it, ‘There is hardly an organiz-
ational change which does not involve the re-definition, the re-labeling, or the
re-interpretation of an institutional activity. Such acts of re-definition and re-
interpretation are, partly at least, performative speech acts that help bring about
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what speakers pronounce’ (p. 99).

From Concepts Back to Flux, From Abstract to Concrete

The purpose of this article is to focus attention on the ‘connecting’ of flux and
hunches as a crucial practice in change management. While the transition from
flux to hunches is relatively well-charted territory (Starbuck and Milliken,
1988), the transition from hunches back to flux is less so. It is true that ‘unfreezing’
(Lewin, 1951) is a major tool in change management and can produce flux, uncer-
tainty and insecurity. But unfreezing tends to move horizontally from an older set
of names and routines to a newer, different set. The move tends to be from one set
of abstractions to another, not from abstract to concrete to abstract. Lateral moves
in unfreezing run the risk of ‘misplaced concreteness.’ The fallacy of misplaced
concreteness ‘consists in neglecting the degree of abstraction involved when an
actual entity is considered merely so far as it exemplifies certain categories of
thought. There are aspects of actualities which are simply ignored as long as
we restrict thought to these categories’ (Whitehead, 1978, pp. 7– 8, italics
added). To move from the abstract to the concrete, from the hunch to the flux,
is to restore the provisional to categories and to move toward unconceptualized
first-hand experience (Weick and Sutcliffe, 2006). The change poet who connects
hunches back to flux practises generative doubt (Locke, et al., 2008). Poets are
insistent that what seems most concrete may in fact, be most abstract, and that
the opposite is also true. This perspective on change management suggests that
organizational change is resisted not just because the prospect of uncertainty is
unsettling, but also because proposed changes seem too far removed from first-
hand experience to have any relevance or meaning.
The transition from hunch to flux can be illustrated by means of an exercise that
actually involves movement in both directions. The relevant activity is Sir Frede-
ric Bartlett’s serial reproduction exercise (1932). In Bartlett’s exercise, which is
better known as the parlour game ‘telephone’, a person listens to a complex
story such as the War of the Ghosts (the flux), tells it to a second person, who
tells it to a third, and this continues until the final version is compared with the
original and is typically found to be a massive simplification of the original (the
hunch). Now, imagine that, after some lapse of time, the story is sent back
 14 K.E. Weick
through the people who originally simplified it. Will the story regain its original
complexity or will it continue to be simplified even more? The answer, as
Kurke et al. (1989) found, is that nuance and complexity are restored. The rel-
evance of this demonstration for change management is that the hunches that
hold a group together currently may be caricatures or superstitious residues of
less orderly but more direct experience. To move back toward continuous flux
is to see in more unlabelled detail a complex basic issue, a crucial turning
point, a choice that turned out to result in the highly consequential simplifications
that constrain action. The beauty of the transition back to flux is that people have a
chance to redo their hunches, substitutions and interpretations. In the example of
the Bartlett exercise, when the Ghosts story is restored back to something of its
original form through reverse transmission, the story can be transmitted a
second time. The second transmission occurs in a different context, with a differ-
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ent awareness and aspiration, and with sensitivity to different features and differ-
ent solutions.
When the change poet reintroduces flux, this is akin to relaxing of the social
order. The relevant image is found in Chia (1999).

Organization, therefore, is an ongoing change-resisting and, hence, reality-maintain-

ing activity which stabilizes the ‘real’ sufficiently for us to act purposefully in
response to a deluge of competing and attention-seeking external stimuli. Simplifi-
cation of the dynamically complex and the consequent economizing of effort in
action are thus the ultimate aims of the impulse to organize . . . what this means is
that ‘organizational change’ is not something that needs deliberate intervention or
orchestration. Instead, merely relaxing the deeply entrenched organizational and
institutional habits, which keep ‘organizations’ together and which enable them to
be thought of as ‘thing-like’, is itself sufficient to allow change to occur of its
own volition. Chia (1999, p. 225)

This means that if the order is formal or formalized (Irwin), named and localized
(Shakespeare), or constrained by knowledge-by-description (Baron and Miso-
vich), then to reverse or unfreeze those fixed names you have to create a
common experience that draws attention toward forms, perception, and sensation.
This also may be an important pathway by which experiential learning promotes
change. The actual experience is captured inadequately by pre-existing labels, this
confusion induces a cosmology episode writ small (‘I’ve never been here before
and I have no idea where I am or who I am,’ Weick, 1993b), and the bewildered
experiencer redefines the experience with an altered set of labels and a newer
appreciation for details that previously were ignored. The change poet basically
reminds people that it could be other. When people relax a formal order, action
becomes more varied which means that it takes more varied interpretations to
render it sensible.
Practices that move people closer to the experience of flux are illustrated by the
ways in which high-reliability organizations (HRO) (Roberts, 1990) direct
mindful attention to flux (Weick and Sutcliffe, 2007). Organizations that form
around air traffic control, flight operations on carriers, nuclear power generation,
emergency medicine, electric power dispatching and avalanche rescue share in
 Change Agents As Change Poets 15
common a set of principles that guide their varied practices. While these principles
are concepts and the practices they foster are hunches, what sets these organiz-
ations apart is that their ways of organizing foster continuous interrelating of
flux and hunches. Unlike conventional organizations that focus on success, keep
things simple, focus on strategy, invest time in planning and are governed by hier-
archical authority, high-reliability organizations use a different model. They pay
more attention to failures than success, avoid simplicity rather than cultivate it,
are just as sensitive to operations as they are to strategy, organize for resilience
rather than anticipation, and allow decisions to migrate to experts wherever
they are located. These may sound like odd ways to make good decisions, and
that may be true. But decision-making is not what HROs are worried about.
Instead, they are more worried about making sense of ongoing flux and enacting
order back into what they experience. In that context, their attention to failure,
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simplification, operations, resilience and migrating expertise makes perfectly

good sense. All five preserve more of the direct experience of flux, curb the ten-
dency to lock onto concepts that name their experiences ‘forever,’ and institutio-
nalize wariness by moving continuously back and forth between flux and order.
These five shifts in attention practised by HROs serve to connect local words
and practices back to concrete experiences, perceptions and flux. Change poets
reinforce this connecting when they help people pursue questions such as these:

1. Questions such as: Do you see what I see? Should that be doing that? What did
you expect?; begin to focus on failure.
2. Questions such as: How would you describe this? Is that the right word for this?
Have we seen this before?; begin to focus on simplification.
3. Questions such as: Are we making things worse? What are we actually doing
about this? Do you have a feel for what’s going on?; begin to focus on
operations.
4. Questions such as: Are we stretched too thin? How do we recover and
regroup?; begin to focus on resilience.
5. Questions such as: What expertise do we need and where is it located?; begin to
focus on expertise.

Answers to questions like these provide details closer to perceptual flux and
direct experience. They are closer in the sense that people are reporting on
small failures, oversimplification, operations, the existing repertoire to handle
the unexpected, and expertise needed to handle the reported flux. These reports
represent details of experience which can then be enacted back into flux to stabil-
ize it and used as the basis for more detailed substitutions.
The role of the change poet in connecting hunches to flux is to help people
increase the meaning of their present experiences. ‘If history shows progress it
can hardly be found elsewhere than in this complication and extension of the sig-
nificance found within experience. . .. If we wished to transmute this generaliz-
ation into a categorical imperative we should say: “So act as to increase the
meaning of present experience”’ (Dewey, 1922/2002, p. 283). The change poet
needs to help people linger over an experience so that they extract more distinc-
tions and create language that preserves more of these distinctions. Said
 16 K.E. Weick
differently, to increase meaning is to linger over a present experience rather than
label it swiftly, simply and stereotypically. To increase meaning is to turn more of
an ‘unverbalized sensation’ into images and hunches that enable some control
over subsequent flux. Dewey’s imperative also applies to reflection in the opposite
direction (‘glance from earth to heaven’), namely, movement from local habi-
tations and names toward shapes. In this latter case, to increase the meaning of
one’s experience with a name, is to be more explicit about where the name falls
short (recall Locke et al.’s preference for ‘generative doubt’). People become
more aware that the referent for the name is more complex than they thought,
that their treatment of the named idea as concrete is misplaced, and that to
rework the category means to take more seriously the connotations of direct
experience that had previously been ignored.
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Conclusion
I have argued that a small corner of change management involves reconnecting
flux and hunches in ways that remove some of the sharp differences between
continuous perceptions (flux) and discrete concepts (hunches) (James, 1996).
The goal of reconnecting is to recover details lost during conceptual substitution
that point to obstacles in need of change. Recovery necessitates words that
include more of the flux of direct experience and fewer of the surface categories
that reduce options. What complicates this recovery is that flux is concrete and
hunches are abstract, which runs contrary to what many change agents assume.
Airy nothing is not senseless. We acquire knowledge by acquaintance when we
figuratively ‘run our hands over the world’ (Irwin, 1977, p. 25). We edit that
experience when we abstract it into hunches that we can describe and justify
locally. Those hunches contain blind spots that inhibit functioning. Those
blind spots are not created solely by the urge to avoid unpleasant realities.
They also are created by the recurrent ways in which people turn circumstances
of form and shape into situations that are comprehended explicitly in words. The
problem for change management is that the words are recurrent. Poetic dis-
course can raise doubts about this recurrence. That’s why I attach so much
importance to Dewey’s imperative, ‘So act as to increase the meaning of
present experience’ (1922/1997, p. 283). To merge two images used earlier,
it seems to me that to increase the meaning of present experience is one way
to lengthen the rope that ‘tethers one thoughts to the post of use.’ (Dewey,
1910/1997, p. 139).
The image of a change poet may seem to direct attention toward content and
away from process. That is not intended. The change process assumed to underlie
the poetics of change has four components. A wide variety of images of flux facili-
tate change if they: (1) animate people and get them moving and generating exper-
iments that uncover opportunities; (2) provide a direction; (3) encourage updating
through improved situational awareness and closer attention to what is actually
happening; and (4) facilitate respectful interaction in which trust, trustworthiness
and self-respect (Campbell, 1990) develop equally and allow people to build a
stable, nuanced rendition of what they face. What is distinctive about the
present argument is the proposal that poetry can be just as powerful in driving
 Change Agents As Change Poets 17
change as can prose (Dewey, 1934). There is nothing special about the content of
change programmes per se that explains their success or failure. What matters is
the extent to which the programme triggers sustained animation, direction, atten-
tion and respectful interaction (Weick, 2000). It is these four activities that make it
easier or harder for people to make sense collectively of what they currently face
and to deal with it.
Change poets are mindful not only of words that animate change, but also of
implicit values, both their own and those of their clients. Change poets often
are driven by values that are similar to those of ‘reliability professionals’ who
manage the complex activity of dispatching (Roe and Schulman, 2008). These
professionals work to reconcile macro designs with everyday problems that
were not anticipated. The work of change poets is not that different. Before any
proposed change is given serious thought by reliability professionals, it is sub-
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mitted to what amounts to a two-item reliability test. First, will the change increase
the options that operators have when they work to match consumer demands with
producer inputs from power generation facilities? Second, will the proposed
change reduce the volatility of the environment being managed? Considered
more generally, when organizations are in need of change, this tends to happen
when they have fewer options to deal with environments that are becoming
increasingly volatile. If flux increases, and if separately the options to cope
decrease, then adaptive functioning is lost. If people deal with this widening
gap by normalizing, all this does is mask the increase in volatility and give spur-
ious confirmation to the fiction that sufficient options are in hand. Such a misread-
ing can hold up just so long. It remains for the change poet to rework categories in
ways that counteract these losses.
In theory, change poets need to control the first abstraction of flux and the first
movement toward concreteness of an abstract hunch. In both cases, they are
molding reality. The first abstraction from concrete perceptual flux sets the bound-
aries for subsequent abstracting. Each successive abstraction abstracts a prior
abstraction. Experience gets lost when it is treated as too subtle or too insignificant
to preserve in categories. Likewise, the first conversion of a condensed abstraction
back into the flux of perceptual experience weakens the boundaries of the abstrac-
tions. Change poets recover direct experience by acts that unname, decontextua-
lize, blur shapes, drop forms, clear the imagination, accept airy nothing, and
reimagine the flux, slowly, back toward shapes, local habitations and names.
In discussing change management I have not used the conventional terminology
of vision, strategy and plans. Typically, we regard vision as an end state (it takes
up one page in a notebook), strategy as how to achieve the vision (10 pages in a
notebook) and plans (an entire notebook) about how to implement strategy (Kotter
and Cohen, 2002). The terminology that I have used has a bearing on these tra-
ditional labels. Planners of change strive for visions that embody the concreteness
of imagined forms, but typically the vision amounts to alterations of abstract
names in the mistaken belief that those names are what is concrete.
A well-regarded map for change and organizational design is McKinsey’s
durable language of 7S: strategy, skills, structure, superordinate goals, style,
systems and staff (e.g. Hermel and Ramis-Pujol, 2003). My argument also lends
itself to 7S, although mine are somewhat different. If we treat change management
 18 K.E. Weick
as the interrelating of flux and hunches, then the relevant terminology includes
streams, sensations, sieves, sensemaking, substituting, springboards, and share-
ability. These 7Ss point both to the fluxing problems and to the hunch-like solutions
that jointly constrain each other in a sufficiently orderly way to manage change.
Change poets are a little like ‘Sisyphus, who was doomed eternally to roll up a
hill a vast stone that would always fall back just as he was about to reach the top.
The dignity of life derives from mankind’s continual perseverance in projects for
which the universe affords no foothold or encouragement’ (MacIntyre, 1967,
p. 150). One change project that affords no such foothold is the effort to grasp
pure experience as part of managing change. Change poets never succeed comple-
tely in doing so but they persevere nonetheless. Their reflections, as is true of
mine, are tempered by the admonishment that the person ‘who reflects too
much will accomplish little’ (Johann von Schiller in Bartlett, 1980, p. 413, #32).
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Acknowledgements
I am indebted to Kathleen Sutcliffe, Dave Thomas, and Kyle Weick for their help
with this manuscript.

Note
1. The phrase ‘flux and hunches’ is used by Hernes (2008, p. 120).

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