What does it mean to say the world is complex? Implications for practice.

If the bios on LinkedIn are anything to go by, it would seem as though most people working in organisational context now accept that the world is complex. However, taking that initial step is easy. What we might do about that insight depends how we understand complexity.

Management is an instrumental discipline and still has tendencies to assume that complexity can be managed. For example, there might be an assumption that we can create the kind of complexity we want, or that organisations are complex sometimes and other times they’re not; we get to choose.  There’s planning, and then there is emergence understood as the absence of planning, as though planning and trying to implement the plan aren’t also emergent activities. These are fantasies of prediction and control which fall back on if-then causality, the efficient causality that the complexity sciences call into question.

But accepting that the world is complex with radical implications for practice is not the same as saying we can do nothing. The pragmatic question is: what is it that we already find ourselves doing, and what sense do we make of that?

For next year’s conference we are delighted that Dr Jean Boulton has accepted our invitation to be keynote speaker and give us food for thought. You can read her bio, but in brief Jean has a PhD in theoretical physics, and is a visiting academic at the University of Bath and Cranfield. Her publications include Embracing Complexity, written with Peter Allen and Cliff Bowman (2016), and The Dao of Complexity,  which was published last year.

Jean will speak to the following:

It’s complex whether you like it or not

The word complexity might suggest an impossible, chaotic, ambiguous, useless muddle: a bad thing we should aim to simplify, organise and master.

But what if complexity is the natural way of things, and in its depths lie the source of novelty, creativity and adaptability? 

The science of complexity conveys a view of the world as dynamic, richly interdependent and full of variety. It is a world – organic and emergent, shaped by history and context – that is naturally patterned yet always in process.

In this session, Jean Boulton will explore this view of complexity emerging from physics and biology, consider how this resonates with the work of others including Ralph Stacey and Paul Cilliers.

She will then explore what this means for practice. How does ‘embracing complexity’ impact leadership, strategy development, change and the shaping of organisational forms?  

The conference is held in the beautiful setting of the Roffey Park Institute near Horsham, UK. The food is good, the company uplifting and the currency of the conference is conversation.

I will post the booking page on the University website in January, but in the meantime, hold that date.