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.

I first came across Ralph’s work around 1990, in the form of his first book, Strategic Planning for the 1990s. At the time, although pre-dating his immersion in complexity science and its implication for organization and management practice, this provided a refreshingly different perspective from others on offer at the time. I found it particularly helpful and thought-provoking, as a manager in the recently privatized electricity supply industry.

A couple of years later, someone within National Power sent me a copy of Chaos, Management and Economics. “You’ll probably like this,” they said. They were right. Ralph’s notion at the time, that much of management was “extraordinary”, resonated strongly with my own experience of the messiness, informality, and shadow-side processes that seemed to account for much of what was actually going on.

It seems surprising to me now that I wasn’t aware of ‘the Stacey textbook’, Strategic Management and Organisational Dynamics, when it was first published in 1993. I did, however, buy a copy of the Second Edition, which saw the birth of his now discarded - but still popular - “Stacey Diagram”.  Ralph argued for the past several years that it gets in the way of a proper understanding of organizational complexity, and that it should not be used. However, as I confessed in a note to him on his retirement, I had often referred to it myself in the past!

By the mid-90s, Ralph had embraced the notion of organizations as Complex Adaptive Systems and, in the paper supporting my 1997 application to study for an MSc in Managing Change, I referred briefly to his then current views on the dynamics of organization. Organizational complexity, centred around my notion of informal coalitions, later provided the main focus of my learning contract, which also majored on other Stacey-esque concepts, such as language and conversation, paradox, and shadow-side dynamics.

In mid-1998, I attended the annual conference for MSc alumni, at which Ralph was the guest speaker. There, he generously shared his developing thinking on organizational dynamics; acknowledging that his ideas were not fully formed. He said that he and some close colleagues were moving decisively away from seeing organizations as systems; without, at that stage, having formulated what later became the complex responsive process view of organization. “It’s something to do with conversation,” he said at the time, “and the self-organizing nature of the brain.” He wasn’t too impressed when I suggested that Edward de Bono had said similar things about the brain and thinking in 1969!

Following this, we invited Ralph to lead a day-long session at one of our MSc residentials in April 1999, with conversational dynamics to the fore. Later, at BA Headquarters in January 2000, he further shared his emerging thoughts, at a meeting of our newly formed OD Innovation Network.

Suitably impressed, and drawn in by these various contributions, I attended several workshops at the University of Hertfordshire, in the early 2000s. These related to a new series of books that had been published on aspects of the complex responsive process perspective of organization, which Ralph had articulated along with his colleagues Patricia Shaw and Doug Griffin. By then, the unique Doctor of Management programme had begun at UoH, centred around these emerging ideas.

At around this time, in 2002, I had submitted a book proposal for Informal Coalitions. After several “Thanks, but no thanks” replies from a number of publishers, another arrived from Routledge, who had published many of Ralph’s books.  In it, they said that they did not think that such a book was marketable. Since I knew Ralph – albeit not very well at the time – I emailed him to ask if he could advise me on how I might address this.  In response, and in typical fashion, he generously said that my proposed inclusion of diagrams, lists and the like ought to make the book more marketable than his own(!).  Overall, he was very supportive; suggesting some practitioner-oriented publishers and offering a number of comments, including one that was pivotal to its eventual publication. “My advice,” he said, “Is to write the book you want to write and then find a publisher.”

Although it was another three years before I finished writing the book, my next attempt to interest a publisher resulted in three offers within the first week. Helpfully again, Ralph had read the final manuscript and commented very positively about the general tenor of the book. Crucially, too, he had suggested that it might be a good idea to send my updated proposal and a couple of chapters to several publishers simultaneously – and to let them know that I was doing so. 

Fast forward to 2010 and I attended the Complexity and Management Conference (CMC) at Roffey Park for the first time. Here again, I was hooked. And I have attended these events every year since then. On the first evening, Ralph sat next to me at dinner and we spoke extensively about all things organizational and life more generally. It seems that we had both joined the Social Democratic Party (SDP) at its formation in 1981 - clearly, a reflection of our shared interest in ‘both A and B at the same time’ paradox!

As another particular highlight, I received a call in 2011 from Prentice Hall. They were finalizing the sixth edition of Strategic Management. and Organisational Dynamics. Having read my comment on Amazon about the fifth edition, they asked if I would be happy for them to use an extract from this as a back-cover endorsement. It didn’t take me too long to say “Yes” to the somewhat surreal proposition that I should be asked to endorse a book by Ralph Stacey!  The particular extract they used was:

“Strategic Management and Organisational Dynamics is a landmark academic text. As well as continuing to offer a well-argued critique of conventional management wisdom, it provides a unique and authoritative treatise on what is a truly distinctive application of the complexity sciences to organizational leadership and change.”

After lunch on the final day of the 2018 CMC event, which had been designed to mark Ralph’s forthcoming retirement and to acknowledge his immense contribution to our understanding of organizational dynamics, I gave him a framed copy of a collage that I’d produced for the occasion. This featured the extensive range of books that he had written over the previous three decades, and included a tongue-in-cheek reference to the so-called “Stacey diagram” (which, as mentioned above, he had been at pains to dismiss for several years, despite its continuing popularity with practitioners). Given his passion for gardening, I suggested that the collage might go well in his shed. A slightly modified version of the picture is included below. In the original - to my dismay at the time – I discovered that I’d mistakenly failed to include his second book, The Chaos Frontier. This only became clear when, in her formal tribute to Ralph at the celebratory reception on the first night of the conference, Patricia Shaw had highlighted this as having been particularly influential on her thinking at the time!

Finally, when I was sitting alongside Ralph during one of the final-day sessions, I asked him if he was planning to attend the CMC in the future. He was very enthusiastic about the prospect.  In true style, though, he said that he would not take part in 2019, to enable Chris Mowles and the rest of the DMan Faculty to move forward in their own way. Unfortunately, with Covid intervening, the 2020 and 2021 CMC events had to be held online and, regrettably, Ralph chose not to take part.  Despite his passing, he will, of course, be there at next year’s event – in the particulars of people’s interactions, as these are influenced by their diverse levels of involvement with his ways, words and wisdom.

Enough said, I think. Ralph made a unique and unparalleled contribution to the understanding of organizational dynamics from a complexity perspective. His call for managers to base their practice on an approach that more properly reflects their everyday lived reality is as important today as it has ever been. Arguably more so, given the continuing failure of many of the so-called complexity-based approaches to organization and management practice to take seriously the very dynamics of organization on which they claim their prescriptions are based.

For my part, it has been an immense privilege and pleasure to have been able to ‘hitch a lift’ along the way.

Comments

[Stephen Billing]

This is a lovely piece Chris

[Chris Rodgers]

Many thanks, Stephen. A significant influence on our thinking - and a very sad loss.

All the best, Chris.

[Keith Wolter]

Thank you for sharing, Chris. Well-said.

[Chris Rodgers]

Many thanks, Keith. A great inspiration and a sad loss.