informal coalitions

In depth...

You can read in more depth about the wiggly world of organization, and the hidden, messy and informal dynamics of organizational change, in The Wiggly World of Organization - Muddling through with purpose, courage and skill and Informal Coalitions - Mastering the hidden dynamics of organizational change.

Whilst rooted in a radical understanding of the complex social process of organization, both of these books set out to explain and explore these dynamics from a practitioner's perspective.

Mastery, mystery and muddling through - 2

Through the widespread interplay of our own and everyone else’s ongoing interactions, we are perpetually creating the future together.

Within this, and in our diverse ways, we each desire to be masters of our own destiny. At the same time, we have to find our way through what the poet John Keats once described as the “uncertainties, mysteries and doubts” of life. As such, we have no option but to muddle through the twists and turns that emerge along the way. But we can – if we so choose - seek to do so with purpose, courage and skill.

The language of organization

Some years ago, whilst working with a client in Germany, I thought it would be interesting to learn a little of the language. I opted to use a CD-based course on German, by the linguist Michel Thomas. Throughout this, he spends very little time on vocabulary; emphasising instead the process of sentence formation and how this is affected, in particular, by verb usage. At the end of the introductory module, he argues that if you understand the verbs, you understand the language. “The rest,” he says, “is just vocabulary”. As we all learnt way back at junior school, verbs are ‘doing’ words. They relate to process. The ways in which these are used define the pattern of the language. Other aspects of vocabulary add in the ‘content’ – the who, what, when, where, how and why, etc. of the doing.

Organizational consulting – Taking complexity seriously

To what extent do your offerings as an organizational consultant, or those that you receive as a prospective client, foreground the complex social dynamics of organization and the implications of these for management practice and performance? Or are these framed instead in neatly packaged, ‘if you do this, you’ll get that’, terms?

Self-organization and emergence

Too often, comments are made about organization and management practice - supposedly offered from a complexity perspective - that position self-organization and emergence as the opposite of so-called “command and control”. The resulting prescriptions then present these as superior design, development and delivery options to those top-down approaches that have come to dominate mainstream management thinking and practice.

From CoCoNuke to ReStCoNuke?

Whilst thumbing through some old papers recently, I came across the above mind map that I had drawn in the mid-1970s. At that time, I was a young engineer in what was then the UK’s publicly owned Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB). The ‘map’ summarises the company’s energy policy of the time, which was referred to as “CoCoNuke”; emphasising its three central elements of coal, conservation and nuclear.  I thought I'd share it here, with a few quick reflections on some of the shifts that have taken place in this area over the past 50 years or so.