Faith, Evidence, and Action: Better Guesses in an Unknowable World

A system's willingness to become aware of problems is associated with its ability to act on them. When people develop the capacity to act on something, then they can afford to see it. More generally, when people expand their repertoire, they improve their alertness. And when they see more, they are in a better position to spot weak signals which suggest that an issue is turning into a problem which might well turn into a crisis if it is not contained. Belief and faith are prerequisites of organizing and sensemaking. Organizing is the act of trying to hold things together by such means as text and conversation, justification, faith, mutual effort (heedful interrelating), transactive memory, resilience, vocabulary, and by seeing what we say in order to assign it to familiar categories. Efforts to hold it together are made necessary by interruptions such as regression, thrownness, inconsistency, cosmology episodes, forgetting, the unexpected, threats, and disasters. The job of researchers is to develop theories about what "holding it together" means, what it depends on, and when what it depends on happens.