Category Archives: complex responsive processes

Further thoughts on the tools and techniques of leadership and management

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In this blog I hope to develop some of the points made in previous blogs on the tools and techniques of management. What is generally meant by the term ‘tools and techniques of leadership and management’ is ways of applying instrumental rationality to solve problems and control outcomes. In fact, in an ambiguous and uncertain world none of these tools and techniques can do what is claimed for them but they do constitute the techniques of disciplinary power which enable leaders and managers to control the bodies and bodily activities of
people in the organization. All of these tools and techniques take the form of rules, procedures and models. However, there is a difference between competent performance, on the one hand, and proficient, expert performance, on the other.
The difference is that following rules, procedures and models may produce competent performance, but proficient, expert performance requires moving beyond the rules, procedures and models. Management tools and techniques of
instrumental rationality may promote competence but the development of expertise is beyond them. Experts are unable to articulate the rules governing their performance because they simply do not follow rules; instead, as a consequence of long experience, they exercise practical judgment in the unique situations they find themselves in. Through experience they are able to recognize patterns, distinguishing between similarities with other situations and unique differences. The patterns they recognize are the emerging patterns of interaction that they and other people are creating. In other words, they are recognizing the emerging themes in conversation, power relations and ideology reflecting choices. The key resource any organization must rely on is surely this expert interactive capacity in the exercise of practical judgment
by leaders and managers. If we cannot identify rules, procedures and models  as ‘drivers’ of expert practical judgment, does it follow that we can say nothing about practical judgment and have to leave it as a mystery?

I do not think there is anything mysterious about the exercise of practical judgment and we can inquire into the exercise of practical judgment and explore whether it is possible to identify any ‘techniques’ of practical judgment. Continue reading →

Some thoughts on the 2011 CMC conference

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I wanted to write about some of the themes  at the CMC conference this year as an invitation to further discussion, and perhaps as a way of involving others. There were a number of things which happened during the weekend which I think made a strong case for the methods being developed by the Complexity Research Group at the University of Hertfordshire and the importance of paying attention to the experience of every day life.

So I was struck by a quite ordinary intervention by Iver Drabaek in the final plenary of the weekend. This was a session convened to explore what different conference participants were doing in their work and to ask whether insights drawn from the complexity sciences, or from complex responsive processes were proving helpful in what people found themselves trying to do. There had been a number of diverse observations about what was going on in the group: that the discussion didn’t seem to be leading anywhere, or that it wasn’t easy to speak into the big group, as we struggled to make sense of this particular way of meeting together. As Nick Sarra has pointed out, there often is a struggle in big group discussions, and sometimes this struggle is about avoiding the discomfort of recognising each other in this kind of context.  Iver pointed out that for him it was different. It wasn’t that he was holding back but that every time he went to speak into the group he found that he had changed his mind about what he wanted to say, depending on what the last person had said. This for me was a very good example of what we are trying to describe on the faculty at Hertfordshire when we are drawing attention to the transformative potential of everyday interaction. Iver was displaying a patient attention to everyday experience, his own experience of the group, which then raised ideas of recognition, mutual recognition, identity and ideology for me. In drawing attention to the way that he was responding, to what was going on for him in the moment and articulating it, he provoked me (without of course realising it) into recognising myself in what he was saying. I would expect that for others it called out an entirely different response, or perhaps no response at all, but in that moment I came to understand my own participation in what was going on, recognising myself in the other, differently. Continue reading →

Leadership as the Agency of Disciplinary Power

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In 1977, Zaleznik published a paper drawing a distinction between managers and leaders. According to Zaleznick , managers differ in motivation from leaders and in how they think and act – they emphasize rationality, control, problem solving, goals and targets. They co-ordinate and balance conflicting views and get people to accept solutions. They are tactical and bureaucratic. Leaders work in an opposite way. Instead of limiting choices, they develop fresh approaches and open up new issues. They project their ideas into images that excite people. They formulate visions and inspire others to follow them. It is also generally thought to be the role of an organization’s leaders to shape its values or culture, understood to be the deep seated assumptions governing the behavior of the individual members of an organization. One of the most influential writers on leadership and organizations, Schein , said that the primary function of leadership was the manipulation of culture. An equally influential writer, Senge , talks about the building of a vision, purpose and values as the ‘governing ideas’ of the organization. In successful companies, leaders are supposed to deliberately construct values and teach their people in training sessions to act according to them. The leader forms a personal vision and builds it into a shared vision through ongoing dialogue in which people suspend their assumptions and listen to each other. So we now think in terms of a distinction between leaders as the top people who articulate visions and provide direction and a hierarchy of managers who implement what is chosen by their leaders, all in the interests of shareholders. According to this dominant discourse, the leader is presented as an unconstrained, autonomous individual with the ability to choose what happens to an organisation, while managers are presented as highly constrained individuals who must be aligned to the leader’s direction and implement the actions required to follow it.

Since the 1990s, there has been an increasingly rapid growth in the provision of leadership development programmes, provided not just by the elite business schools and consultancies but even more by the education and development departments of most organisations. Leadership academies and programmes have been established by governments and others to provide for leadership development, for example: the International Leadership Association, the Institute of Leadership and Management in the UK, and programmes for the military, defence, health and higher education. Even academic researchers at universities are invited to go on a leadership programme. This trend is not confined to the UK but is as much in evidence throughout Europe and North America. Such programmes are now common throughout the developing countries too. Participants on these programmes are introduced to one or more of the leadership theories indicated in the previous section, usually presented in a ‘model’ claimed to be specific to the sector mounting the programmes. It is quite common for participants to be presented with: exercises using various games; experience of the theatre, for example, actors and directors may interpret the leadership qualities of, say, Shakespeare’s Henry V; conducting an orchestra; engaging in various outdoor activities such as trekking through the wilds and dealing with hazards such as mountains and river crossings. The aim is for participants to have the experience of leading teams in addition to understanding the theories of leadership so that they will be more likely to apply them in practice. Also participants are often asked to identify the leadership qualities of great leaders, such as Mahatma Ghandi, Nelson Mandela and Mother Teresa, so that they might imitate them in order to improve their own leadership skills. Continue reading →

Complexity and Management Conference 3/4/5/ June 2011

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Complexity and the embodiment of power and identity in organisations


About the conference

The eighth annual Complexity and Management Conference of the University of Hertfordshire’s  Business School will take place at Roffey Park starting at 7pm on Friday 3rd June 2011 and ending after lunch on 5th June. This event is a very informal conference where prepared papers and presentations are minimal and serve the purpose of introducing themes for discussion amongst conference participants.  In organising this conference we seek to maximise the possibility of discursive conversation. The original purpose of the conference was to provide an opportunity for past, present and possible future participants on our MA/Doctor of Management programme to discuss their experience and ideas with one another, but over the years leaders, managers, consultants and academics who are interested in our work on complexity and emergence in organisations have also attended the event making it very vibrant and diverse.

This year’s theme

Much contemporary organisational literature is highly abstract and is replete with tools and techniques. There is very little acknowledgement that organisations arise from the interactions of thinking, feeling bodies engaged in conflict and co-operation in a particular context at a particular time. Somehow this central aspect of human experience is covered over, or denied. Does this partly arise because of the appeal to scientific method and the idea of management as science, with the assumption of the detached, objective observer? What has contributed to our suspicion of subjective experience and how possible is it to talk of ‘embodiment’ without in turn mystifying what we are talking about, or perhaps instrumentalising the body as a tool of management, in effect reaffirming Cartesian subjectivity rather than challenging it?

In this year’s conference we have decided to address what we consider this neglect of this core aspect of human relating and have invited Dr Ian Burkitt of Bradford University (Social Selves: Theories of Self and the Body, London: Sage, 2008; Bodies of Thought, London: Sage: 1999) to help us initiate our discussions on Saturday morning 4th June. In the afternoon Professor Ralph Stacey will respond to Dr Burkitt’s keynote with some reflections of his own. On Sunday morning Dr Karen Norman and Professor Henry Larsen will talk about a piece of work they have undertaken together using theatre and improvisation with groups of managers.

There will be parallel sessions following the keynotes, where conference participants will be able to explore themes which have struck them as being important in conversation with others. Between now and June we will be uploading posts on this blog  to talk to the theme and to provoke discussion in advance of the conference. Anyone wishing to put forward ideas for parallel sessions is welcome to do so.

You can download the conference brochure here: Complexity and Management Conference brochure

Contact Chris at  c.mowles@herts.ac.uk or Angela Digby a.m.r.digby@herts.ac.uk  for payment details.

Systems thinking and complex responsive processes – can they be integrated?

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In a recent paper written by Luoma et al (Luoma, J., Hamalainen, RP. And Saarinen, E.  (2011) Acting with systems intelligence: integrating complex responsive processes with the systems perspective, Journal of the Operational Research Society, 62: 3-11.), the authors argue that there is very little disagreement between systems thinking and complex responsive processes of relating, the body of theories set out in this blog. What’s more, the authors put forward the idea that a complex responsive process approach could be integrated within their own method, which they term ‘systems intelligence’.

Systems intelligence (SI), according to the authors, is when a subject engages ‘successfully and productively with holistic feedback mechanisms of her environment.’ SI is exhibited by an individual operating in ‘systems settings’, and is influenced both by the positive psychology literature and by systems thinking. Thus SI ‘looks for positive opportunities and personal improvement actions’. According to the authors a system does not have to be an abstract ‘thing’ with a boundary. It might be ‘the context’, ‘the situation’, or ‘the environment’, amounting to ‘an integrated whole on a time axis in the process of becoming’. ‘System’ for the authors, is a meaningful unit of analysis worthy of attention, which calls out intelligent engagement. The authors claim a ‘liberal, broad and general interpretation of the notion of a ‘system’’, and not one that necessarily conceives of the subject in any way ‘outside’ the system. The broad notion of system is a helpful conceptual tool and human beings are natural systematisers: indeed, being able to systematise makes us human, according to the authors. Continue reading →

Workshop on leadership and improvisation – Gibraltar Oct 6th-8th 2010

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How do power and politics constrain and enable us at work? How might we think differently about our practice as leaders and managers?

The Complexity & Management Centre has organised an innovative workshop from 6th -8th October in Gibraltar together with the Gibraltar Health Authority and the Da Capo Theatre Company from Denmark to explore these issues in a highly practical way. The purpose of the workshop is to create  opportunities to understand what is becoming recognised as an increasingly important element of leadership: how we improvise in our everyday management practice, and the impact of local organisational politics and power in our work.

In collaboration with participants in the conference, professional actors from Da Capo will create scenes familiar to us from our everyday working life. Participants will then be invited both to take part in the scenarios as well as to reflect upon them drawing on a range of theoretical approaches, in particular using analogies from the complexity sciences, to help us find new ways of understanding how change occurs, (or may not occur), in organisations.

If you are interested in attending, you can download the conference booking form here: Leadership and improvisation conference.

Complex responsive processes of relating and critical management studies

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The following is an abridged version of the talk given at the Complexity and Management Conference on 6th June 2010.

What would it mean for the practice of management education and research if we were to take up the ideas in the body of thought we are calling complex responsive processes of relating? How do the ideas in complex responsive processes of relating compare and contrast with critical management studies, for example?

Drawing on an eminent exponent of critical management studies (CMS) such as Mats Alvesson as an example, we would find that complex responsive processes and CMS share a lot in common. Both are concerned to engage in critical reflection on institutions; both resist the strong pressures of normalisation; both would entertain the idea that all knowledge creation is political, value-laden and interest-based. Alvesson’s ‘4 I’ framework (identity, institutions, interests and ideology) is a very helpful way for organisational researchers to think about the research they are undertaking (how are identities being constructed in this episode of organisational life; how are people engaged in thinking about the institution; whose interests are being served and what does this say about the ideological claims?). Alvesson encourages reflection and reflexivity as a way of producing complex and rounded accounts of organisational life, accounts which are ‘rich in points’. Continue reading →

Continuing the discussion on complexity – guest contribution by John Tobin

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The following post is by guest contributor John Tobin. John has served for many years as the CEO of a community hospital in the US. He earned a Doctor of Management at the Business School of the University of Hertforshire in 2003 and remains interested in the ongoing work of the Complexity Research Group at the University of Hertfordshire and the challenges of bringing that perspective into everyday management practice in a community hospital setting.

Doug, in your first post, you touched on an issue that I find both fascinating and disconcerting, –the increasingly close ties between public officials and special interests, and the mostly unacknowledged role of public policy in creating the current financial mess, a dysfunctional health care system, and other problems.  This interconnectedness is by no means limited to business CEOs and high ranking government officials.  Anyone familiar with the political process in Washington knows that the place is actually run by platoons of bright, ambitious twentysomething congressional staffers.  The staffers become the focus of lobbyists’ attention because they know specific issues better than the Members themselves.  Many of these staffers will go on to careers as lobbyists or elsewhere in government, reinforcing those linkages.  In my home state, legislators are closely tied to the public employees’ unions (the Speaker of our House of Representatives was an organizer for the Service Employees’ International Union before being elected Speaker).  Organized labor is supposed to balance the power between workers and business owners and the professional managers who represent the owners’ interests.  In a government setting, this worthy purpose is corrupted when the workers become the managers, and no one truly represents the owners’ (taxpayers’) interests.  Getting government spending under control becomes next to impossible. Continue reading →

Speaking of managers and leaders being ruthless: The deepening crisis of everyday ethics in business

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In this posting I would like to contribute to the discussion of making sense of the current crisis in the financial sector as it has been taken up in recent postings by Chris Mowles and Karen Norman, and especially by Ralph Stacey in his recent book Complexity and Organizational Reality: Uncertainty and the need to rethink management after the collapse of investment capitalism.  Specifically I would like to respond and add to Ralph’s argument that we need to rethink the nature of communication and social interaction if we are to get at core crisis of ethics, particularly as it has been emerging in Western thinking.

 There is great deal of horror and astonishment being expressed about the greed, ruthlessness and lack of even any pretence of professionalism in the conduct of managers and leaders in the financial community.  Chris Mowles mentions the reaction of the English Queen in his post.  This reaction is in a sense surprising since the Windsors have been key figures in the shifting political and ethical culture of English society and the London business community and must have noticed and reflected to some degree on the radical changes of the last decades which they themselves will have experienced as an important stakeholder.  Michael Lewis in his book The Big Short gives a detailed description of the almost complete lack of professionalism and ethics in the financial sector, focusing on Wall Street.  But Lewis resorts to humor and a ‘cocktail party’ air of detachment from the events, presenting in detail the moves of those who, beginning in 2007 (or earlier) saw the crisis coming and began not to call for reform or appeal to reasserting basic values, but rather to bet against the doomsday scenario they perceived as inevitable and to amass sizable fortunes for themselves and their hedge fund investors.

 The ethical crisis is grounded in the way we have formalized ethics and divorced it from everyday life.  As a consequence this reduction of ethics to universalist and principled thought before action, actors, or perhaps better players, for instance in the financial sector, feel no responsibility for negotiating the ethics of the game as it now rapidly changes, with the emergence of new communication possibilities and innovative new technologies reshaping the politics of everyday interaction.  To the contrary, one is deemed as rather stupid if not involved in gaming the system before newly emerging loopholes are discovered and perhaps brought under regulation.  But the very political leaders who would be the ones to enact reforms are now moving quickly and easily between high level ministerial positions and the activism of receiving exceedingly high remuneration by lobbying for special interests, as has become evident in the long debate over health care in USA, the current scandal in the UK labor government over former ministers racing to take up lobbying jobs, and Schröder and Fischer in Germany moving immeditately not to the tedious politics of opposition but rather to lobbying positions after their tenure in government.

 I would like to suggest that one factor in the crisis of ethics is that there is something especially about leadership which we have a hard time talking about; namely, that it is, as a matter of fact, if it could be separated from being embedded in the everyday politics in which it emerges, ethically ‘neutral’.  Many authors, in major works on leadership, speak in introductory chapters, about this, but then quickly move on to basically looking at leadership as good in itself, as a ‘simple’ ideal. But of course one person’s freedom fighter is another’s terrorist.  Gangster families also have leaders who plan, with those who recognize them as leaders, the best strategy for the survival of their organization.  Bullies work together with those who subserviently recognize them to further the aims of their organizations. We need to think about how these ethics are embedded in the everyday political negotiations in our societies if we are going to seriously take up the crisis of business ethics. Continue reading →

On Values

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On values

This post sets out some thoughts provoked by my reading Ralph and Chris’ contributions. It is intended to provoke further conversation and act as an invitation to others to make a further comment.

The observations made by them that speaking about management differently can appear to others as though I am not taking ‘the game’ seriously or calling ‘the game’ into question can be seen as ‘anti-management’; that re-thinking the dominant discourse invites us to think of ourselves differently and therefore to question our identities as managers, and to rethink management from within the practice of management, resonate strongly with my own experience in my working life as a nurse manager. Hence, as I challenge many of the theoretical assumptions I had previously made about management, so my practice as a manager shifts because, quite simply, it no longer makes sense to do some of the things I was doing before. To try and explain more clearly what I mean. I shall write a short piece of narrative based on a conversation that struck me as interesting. Reflective narrative is an important component of the research methodology we are developing on the D.Man programme as part of the theory of complex responsive processes of relating. Continue reading →