informal coalitions

25 years on…

Today, 20 August 2023, marks 25 years since Chris Rodgers Consulting Ltd was created. During that time, we've had the privilege of working with a wide range of talented managers and other specialists, across a broad spectrum of organizations and in several countries across the world. This post captures a few aspects of the Company's positioning and practice that have emerged along the way.

Helping clients to take complexity seriously

The organizational world is awash with ‘do this and you’ll get that’ prescriptions, one-size-fits-all administrative policies, tick-box regulatory regimes, sound-bite media commentary, and the like; all of which fail to take seriously the complex social reality of everyday organizational life. The vast majority of these start from the belief that success will be assured, provided that people do things ‘better’ and get them ‘right’ in line with the specified requirements. When things don’t turn out as planned, this is usually put down to poor leadership and/or implementation failures, rather than a result of flawed thinking about the nature of organization and the implications of this for management practice.

Lauren James’s ‘Missing Hat-Trick’

Originally posted on LinkedIn on 1 August 2023

Lauren James’s ‘Missing Hat-Trick’ v The Complex Social Reality

One of the highlights of England’s win over China, in today’s FIFA Women’s World Cup, was the performance of Lauren James. As well as her three ‘assists’, she put the ball in the net three times. Unfortunately, her second ‘goal’ was ruled out by VAR, due to what was adjudged to be an infringement by one of her teammates.

After James’s third effort had found the net, the commentator expressed regret that, despite the quality of her play, she had been denied a hat-trick by VAR. After the match, and echoing this sentiment, former England player, Jill Scott, said, “If only that goal had been allowed, it would have been a perfect hat-trick”. No doubt our newspapers will be full of similar comments tomorrow.

Other than acknowledging the quality of James’s contribution, though, why am I mentioning this?

The reason is that these post-event commentaries expose the flaws in what I call “Big Dot Thinking”, which provides superficially rational explanations of what has happened (by ‘joining the big dots’), rather than recognizing the complex social reality of people’s actual lived experience. In the context of organization — and life ‘in the round’ — this same line of thinking creates the illusion that management, government and the like can similarly be reduced to a series of linear, ‘if you do this, you’ll get that’ prescriptions. And so the fantasy continues.

Returning to today’s WWC match, there is only one thing that we can say with certainty about James’s ‘missing hat-trick’. That is, that if her second ‘strike’ had not been ruled out by VAR, the second goal that she actually scored would not have occurred at all. In fact, every kick from that point on would have been different. Nothing that actually happened would have taken place. And we have no idea what would have emerged overall.

And so it is with organization and life more generally. Everything that happens is an emergent outcome of the widespread interplay of people’s in-the-moment interactions. As the interactions change, so does everything that emerges from them.

Related Posts:

The match turned on the penalty. Or was it the throw-in?

Ashley's dropped catch

'Corridor conversations'

In the middle of a chat about all things organizational, a client once told me that the Company’s CEO had said to him and other senior colleagues, “We’ve got to stop the corridor conversations.”  Leaving aside the naivety of the CEO’s comment, in the pre-COVID days when the possibility of in-person exchanges was ever-present, his remark also betrayed a basic lack of understanding of how organization works. In particular, it failed to recognise the fundamental role that informal conversations such as these play in determining the overall nature and quality of people’s individual and collective perspectives, practices and performance.  Ironically, of course, informal conversations would have been just as much a part of the CEO’s own practice as they were of everyone else's.

Reflections on "Complexity is not supposed to be complex"

Well-known writer and speaker on organizational complexity, Sonja Blignaut, recently set out her thoughts on the need to normalize complexity as a fundamental aspect of everyday human life. Her excellent post can be found here.

Complexity is often dismissed as something that we need to get rid of. But Sonja, quite rightly, disagrees with this. In her introduction to the post, she states her view that she is "convinced of the need to make the wisdom of complexity available more broadly".  At the same time, she says that she is, "increasingly frustrated by how we obfuscate it with big words, theoretical constructs, and increasing intellectual debates". Instead, she argues, "the challenges of our times invite us to reconsider, to reframe our learned dislike for complexity and reconnect with our inate ability to dance with it...".

I see many common threads between the eight points that Sonja makes in her post, and my own view of what's going on from a "Wiggly World/Muddling Through" perspective. I've set out a few of these below, using Sonia's headline point in each case.