The combination of inexplicable events and weakened resources for sensemaking is part of the scenario that leaders face right now. Either explanation, oddly enough, is soothing, since the prospects of having no explanations at all and no ways to cope, are even more frightening. But either explanation is better than nothing. Since many of us feel frightened and out of control, then this must "mean" that whatever we face is something we need to flee from or fight. We often find the initial meaning of events by drawing inferences from how we feel. And what we get hold of are the automatic explanations we have lived with longest and invoked most often.
The first impulse is to grasp for some explanation, any old explanation. Our weaknesses come rushing to the forefront. And to make it worse, many of our ways of making sense of the inexplicable seem to have collapsed. The breech in the defences opened by crisis creates a sort of vacuum" (Pat When the chaos arrives, it serves as "an abrupt and brutal audit: at a moment's notice, everything that was left unprepared becomes a complex problem and every weakness comes rushing to the forefront. Our ability to deal with chaos depends on structures that have been developed before the chaos arrives."We tolerate the unexplained but not the inexplicable" (Erving Goffman).Two of the reasons why these are such trying times are signaled in the following quotations:
They don't make sense for at least two reasons, and those reasons are leverage points where leaders can make a difference. We are all struggling with events that don't make sense. Leadership When Events Don't Play By the Rules
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