informal coalitions

Self-organization and emergence

Too often, comments are made about organization and management practice - supposedly offered from a complexity perspective - that position self-organization and emergence as the opposite of so-called “command and control”. The resulting prescriptions then present these as superior design, development and delivery options to those top-down approaches that have come to dominate mainstream management thinking and practice.

In depth...

You can read in more depth about the wiggly world of organization, and the hidden, messy and informal dynamics of organizational change, in The Wiggly World of Organization - Muddling through with purpose, courage and skill and Informal Coalitions - Mastering the hidden dynamics of organizational change.

Whilst rooted in a radical understanding of the complex social process of organization, both of these books set out to explain and explore these dynamics from a practitioner's perspective.

From CoCoNuke to ReStCoNuke?

Whilst thumbing through some old papers recently, I came across the above mind map that I had drawn in the mid-1970s. At that time, I was a young engineer in what was then the UK’s publicly owned Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB). The ‘map’ summarises the company’s energy policy of the time, which was referred to as “CoCoNuke”; emphasising its three central elements of coal, conservation and nuclear.  I thought I'd share it here, with a few quick reflections on some of the shifts that have taken place in this area over the past 50 years or so.