informal coalitions

A passionate 'muddler througher'

    

Every Sunday, during the Pienaar's Politics programme on BBC Radio 5Live, there is a section entitled, Backbenchers Questions. Yesterday, it was the turn of Bob Stewart, MP for Beckenham and one-time Colonel in the British Army, to take the hot seat.

At one point, stand-in host Chris Mason asked him whether or not he was confident about the forthcoming negotiations on Brexit.

"In the end," he replied, "We always muddle through and get something."

"Is muddle through good enough, though?" challenged Mason.

"That's what happens in life," said Stewart, with a hint of incredulity in his voice that anyone should ask such a question.

And so it is.  Muddling through is what happens in life.  It's what all of us do. All of the time.

Mason signed-off the section by describing Colonel Stewart as, “A passionate ‘muddler througher’”. 

Je ne regrette rien - taking comfort from complexity

Over recent years, many articles have been written  about the need to "defeat", "overcome", or otherwise "eliminate" organizational complexity. By this, the writers invariably mean the overly-complicated structures, systems, and procedures that tend to grow up over time and which can outlive their usefulness. 

 

Simplifying unnecessarily complicated ways of working is to be welcomed, of course. But this surface-level, as-designed view of organization says nothing about the underlying dynamics of what's going on. That is, the complex social process of everyday human interaction, through which organization is continuously (re)enacted and outcomes emerge in practice. 

 

Immersed in the 'game of life'

 

Taking this further, these same dynamics are also at play in our living of life more generally. That is to say, beyond the natural world, everything that happens in our life emerges from the world-wide interplay of our own and everyone else's ongoing interactions. Some of these are intentional. Others are habitual.  Some are planned. Others occur spontaneously or by chance. Some are bound up in the full trappings of formality, whereas others reflect informal networks of relationships. Some are acted out in person. Others exist solely in our imaginations. This relational process will sometimes be co-operative. At other times the exchanges will be competitive and conflictual. Rarely will the differences be clear-cut. Even though we are conscious of a lot of what is going on, large chunks of our lives remain outside our conscious awareness. 

Reclaiming the C-word

 

It’s time to stop pussyfooting about. We need to reclaim the C-word.

 

To some people, the word is taboo. It never crosses their lips or appears in their writing.  Not the sort of thing that a properly educated and well-ordered understanding of the world should concern itself with. 

 

Others reluctantly acknowledge its existence and even use the word now and again as a focus for their angst. But they see it as something that gets in the way of the idealized image of the world that they've been brought up to believe in and revere. A crude expression, suggesting a lack of refinement and confused thinking in those who persist in its use. Something that has no place in  'proper' social intercourse and the accepted way of being. Something, in fact, that needs to be designed-out of everyday life. 

Then we have those worldly-wise people whose communication is peppered with the C-word - whether spoken or implicit.  

The C-word is, of course, COMPLEXITY.  

 

If we're really serious about understanding how the world 'works', and how we might participate more usefully in it, we need to take complexity seriously.  Whether we're concerned with the course of our personal lives, the nature and success of the organizations we co-create daily, or the condition of society more generally, the complex social dynamics of human interaction are always in play. 

 

Complexity just is. We need to get over it. And get into it!