informal coalitions

Taking Complexity Seriously

The following was first published as a series of posts on LinkedIn

1 Introduction

As Edward de Bono once put it, “You can’t dig a hole in a different place by digging the same hole deeper”. And we badly need to ‘dig a different hole’, when it comes to the way in which we understand how organization works – and what this means for life more generally.  Most importantly, we need a perspective that foregrounds the real-world complexity of everyday human interaction, through which we are all perpetually creating the future together.

Instead, we continue to deepen the hole that we’ve been digging ourselves into for the past several decades, based on reality-denying assumptions of order, predictability and control. And we’re now using a super-fast ‘mechanical digger’ – in the form of so-called artificial ‘intelligence’ – to dig this same hole quicker and deeper still; fuelled by vast quantities of data that reflect what I have described elsewhere¹ as “the suffocating grip of management orthodoxy”.

Collaborating with AI

 

Is anyone else concerned about the increasingly pervasive notion of humans “collaborating” with AI? 

Relationship of mutuality

Collaboration - whatever its diverse motivations and means of expression - is a relationship of mutuality between living and breathing human beings. Properly perceived and applied, so-called “artificial intelligence” undoubtedly has a lot to offer us in support of the living of our lives. But it needs to be seen as a technological aid to our human being, doing and becoming; not as in any way equivalent to it.

The U ’n I at the heart of communication

We can probably all agree that communication is a fundamental aspect of organizational practice and performance. At the same time, it is important not to view this simply as an act of message-passing from those who are formally in charge, and supposedly “in the know”, to other participants. 

 

However well-crafted, information-rich, and skilfully presented such messages might be, these communicate nothing. Instead, they serve as an invitation for those on the receiving end to communicate amongst themselves. And this is something that they do informally, in small-group and one-to-one interactions; seeking to make sense of what they’ve heard and deciding how, if at all, they’re going to respond. Communication takes place only in real-world; U ‘n I interactions - with all of the informality, messiness and ‘hidden agendas’, etc. that these entail. And this applies equally well, of course, to those in formal management roles as it does to everyone else.

Practice-based evidence

In a recent LinkedIn post and related article, Mike Cardus argued strongly in favour of organizational consultants basing their work with clients on the use of evidence-based practice.  I’m afraid that, in the context of organization and management practice, I disagree equally strongly with this line of argument.  This post outlines some of the reasons why I advocated the use instead of what I call "practice-based evidence".

Mastery, mystery and muddling through - 2

Through the widespread interplay of our own and everyone else’s ongoing interactions, we are perpetually creating the future together.

Within this, and in our diverse ways, we each desire to be masters of our own destiny. At the same time, we have to find our way through what the poet John Keats once described as the “uncertainties, mysteries and doubts” of life. As such, we have no option but to muddle through the twists and turns that emerge along the way. But we can – if we so choose - seek to do so with purpose, courage and skill.

The language of organization

Some years ago, whilst working with a client in Germany, I thought it would be interesting to learn a little of the language. I opted to use a CD-based course on German, by the linguist Michel Thomas. Throughout this, he spends very little time on vocabulary; emphasising instead the process of sentence formation and how this is affected, in particular, by verb usage. At the end of the introductory module, he argues that if you understand the verbs, you understand the language. “The rest,” he says, “is just vocabulary”. As we all learnt way back at junior school, verbs are ‘doing’ words. They relate to process. The ways in which these are used define the pattern of the language. Other aspects of vocabulary add in the ‘content’ – the who, what, when, where, how and why, etc. of the doing.

Organizational consulting – Taking complexity seriously

To what extent do your offerings as an organizational consultant, or those that you receive as a prospective client, foreground the complex social dynamics of organization and the implications of these for management practice and performance? Or are these framed instead in neatly packaged, ‘if you do this, you’ll get that’, terms?

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.