informal coalitions

Facilitating change #6 – Dealing with uncertainty and complexity

As we arrive at the latest stop on our ‘back to the future’ journey to the land of organizational planning, we come face-to-face with the issues of uncertainty and complexity (see Footnote).

These topics were dealt with in separate chapters in the 1980 paper.  But the two are so intimately interwoven in my present-day understanding of organizational dynamics that I’ve chosen to wrap them together for the purposes of this post.

In his latest treatise on organizational dynamics, Complexity and Organizational Reality, Ralph Stacey discusses these concepts in some depth. There he argues that analogies drawn from the sciences of uncertainty and complexity offer a more resonant view of organisational reality than that offered by the science of certainty that underpins the dominant management discourse.

He later goes on to suggest that it’s perhaps best not to think of management and leadership as sciences at all but rather to recognize that these are social phenomena. Despite this, uncertainty and complexity feature heavily in his particular take on organizational dynamics and in the social complexity perspective embodied in informal coalitions. 

Facilitating change #5 – Who’s in control?

This chapter of my 1980 paper on the planning task in organizations looks at the issue of control.  The question here is to what extent – if at all – the view of organizational dynamics embodied in the paper reflects that contained in Informal Coalitions. And, if so, what inferences we might draw from it in relation to the 'parallel' task of facilitating organizational change (see Footnote).

This chapter repeated one of the primary themes of the original paper; that is, that planning and control are the responsibility of line managers, not of the planner.  In this respect, as reflected in extracts from the paper in earlier posts, it echoes the point made in the book that change leadership is a line management task.

However, when looking at an organization as a complex social process, the issue of control is seen to be paradoxical. That is, managers are both ‘in control’ and ‘not in control’ at the same time.  In Informal Coalitions, I call this “the leadership paradox”.  Philip Streatfield describes this same notion as “the paradox of control”, in his book of the same title.  So, when the original paper talks of managers as being in control of the organization’s resources, this is only partially the case.