"Leap in order to look" An interesting post by Diane Coutu on dealing with an uncertain business environment:

Leap While You Look: Moving forward in the Recession A cosmology episode is the opposite of a déjà vu experience. When you experience déjà vu, everything suddenly feels inexplicably familiar. By contrast, in a cosmology episode, everything seems completely strange and dangerous, unknown. In cosmology events, people feel that they don't know what to do because they've never been here before. Panic and fear bubble to the surface, and folks become so anxious that they find it almost impossible to take action. Weick's insight about how to move forward during a cosmology episode is as counter-intuitive as it is compelling. The people who really get in trouble, he says, are those who rationalize everything before taking any action. Instead, leaders need to act before they have defined and refined all their hypotheses. "Action, tempered by reflection, is the critical component in recovering from cosmology episodes," he told HBR readers. "Once you start to act, you can flesh out your interpretations and rework them. But it's the action itself that gets you moving again. That's why I advise leaders to leap in order to look, or leap while looking."

Countu's "cosmology episode" echoes some of the findings of Cohen and Gooch's Military Misfortunes. In particular, the French high command in 1940 exhibited exactly the sort of quiet, cerebral paralysis that Weick predicts. Setbacks were not met with frantic reaction. Rather, the generals fell into the grip of a calm acceptance of the "inevitable". UPDATE: Bob Sutton sounds the same theme:

Reward Success and Failure, Punish Inaction