informal coalitions

The Wiggly World of Organization - Read all about it!

My new book, The Wiggly World of Organization - Muddling through with purpose, courage and skill, iwas piblished on 17 May 2021. An outline of the contents, etc. is included on the Routledge website.  

Publication is the result of great work by the team at Routledge.

Many thanks also to Dominic Mahony, for commenting on the emerging text and for penning the Foreword. Also to Chris Mowles, Cliff Oswick and Sharon Varney for their generous endorsements

Remembering Ralph - A personal reflection

Ralph Stacey 10/9/1942 - 4/9/2021

A unique and unparalleled contribution to the understanding of organizational dynamics from a complexity perspective

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Since Ralph Stacey’s sudden and untimely death, there have been many tributes to his life and work from friends, colleagues and others (see here, for example).  I’m sure that there will be many more. In sending him a personal copy of my new book in May, I was lucky enough to be able to thank him for the significant influence that he has had on my thinking and practice for the past 30 years.  He was generous, as always, in his response and looked forward to our meeting up again at next year’s Complexity and Management Conference.  Sadly, that will not now happen.

12Ps Worth on The Wiggly World of Organization

Earlier, I posted a simple, "What does this make possible?" story about the wiggliness of organization and the muddling-through nature of real-world management practice.  Building on this, the 12 ‘P-words’ listed opposite describe key aspects of organization that are at play in all human contexts.

Each of these is summarized below, and the ideas discussed in depth in my new book, The Wiggly World of Organization  Taken together, these present a fundamental challenge to conventional thinking about the dynamics of organization, and they have important practical implications for managers and other practitioners - from CEO to the front line.

From a wiggly world perspective then, organization is…

Gaslighting

""As stated in Wikipedia, 

"Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation in which a person or a group covertly sows seeds of doubt in a targeted individual or group, making them question their own memory, perception, or judgment."

In an important article on the Becoming International website, which is aimed at leadership and development for women, Alison Maitland calls this out and offers some practical help for those affected by this pernicious practice. 

I penned a relatively short comment in response to Alison's LinkedIn post on this, but the site's 'word counters' intervened and prevented my posting it in the form that I had intended.  So I scrapped the comment and decided to post my response on the blog.   So here it is...

The Wiggly World of Organization: A new possible...

In a recent post on LinkedIn, Jeanne M. Lambin suggested using Kenn Adams’s “Story Spine” as a way of provoking shifts in established patterns of thinking, and as a basis for “imagin[ing] a new possible”.

 

As she describes it, the Story Spine takes the following form:

Once upon a time...

Every day...

But one day...

And because of that...

And because of that...

And because of that...

Until finally...

And ever since then...

To get my mind off Derby’s defeat at home to Norwich(!), I thought I’d spend a few minutes setting out what Lambin calls the “What Does This Make Possible Story” for my soon-to-be-published (strictly non-fiction!) book, The Wiggly World of Organization.

So here goes...

Catch(Up)-22 - Reflections on organization and management

 

Last Thursday, it was 22 years since I moved from in-house manager to management consultant.  Reflecting briefly on this at the time, I decided to set down some of the main themes relating to organization and management practice that I’ve explored with managers during that time. 22 seemed like a good number to aim for...