Category Archives: management

Complexity and Management Conference 5th-7th June 2020. Outline agenda.

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This year’s Complexity and Management Conference on the theme of Complexity and Collaboration – implications for leadership and practice will be highly participative, and will involve lots of conversation about the everyday experience of trying to collaborate with others.

The outline programme is as follows:

Friday 5th June            9.30-5.00

Workshop on the main principles of the perspective of complex responsive processes: a highly participative introduction to complexity and its organisational implications drawing on delegates workplace experience – Chris Mowles.

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Improvising in the complexity of collaboration and conflict, a workshop introducing techniques of improvised theatre through ‘working live’ with professional actors on participants’ stories from their workplace. The workshop is convened by Prod Henry Larsen and Prof Karen Norman.

7.00pm            Reception and conference dinner.

Saturday 6th June

9.00am            Key note speech by Professor Barbara Simpson on the dynamics of collaborative leadership.

10.30               Break

11.00               Discussion groups on the key note.

12.30               Lunch

2.00                 Workshops convened and presented by delegates on topics related to the conference theme.

3.30                 Break

4.00                 Workshops convened and presented by delegates on topics related to the conference theme round II.

5.30                 End of day.

Sunday 7th June

9.00                 Response to key themes emerging from yesterday.

10.30               Break

11.00               Discussion groups

12.00               Plenary

13.00               Lunch then conference ends.

It is possible for delegates to attend the workshops and not the conference, as well as the other way round. For those attending the Friday workshops only, lunch is included but not accommodation. For those attending only the conference, the conference fee includes all bed and board. The conference is held at the Roffey Park Institute.

You can book for the conference here.

Looking forward to seeing you there.

 

 

Complexity and Management Conference 5-7th June 2020

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This is to give you advance notice that next year’s Complexity and Management Conference will be 5th-7th June 2020, at Roffey Park, speaker and topic to be decided.

Complexity and Management Conference 17-19th May: agenda

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What does it mean to be critical? – complexity, reflexivity and doubt in everyday organisational life.

For this year’s Complexity and Management Conference we are delighted to have Professor André Spicer from the Cass Business School, City, University of London to give the keynote on Saturday morning. André holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne. He has held visiting appointments at universities around the world. André is the author of many academic articles and nine books. The most recent are ‘Business Bullshit’, ’The Stupidity Paradox’ and ‘Desperately Seeking Self Improvement’.

The agenda for the one day introduction to complex responsive processes on Friday 17th May and for the conference on Saturday 18th and Sunday 19th May is here: CMC Agenda

There are still some places available, both for the one day workshop and for the conference, and you can book your place here.

Complexity and Management Conference 17-19th May 2019 – one month to go.

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Particularly from a UK perspective, where public discourse has become highly repetitive, accusatory and frankly boring, there has never been a better time to stop and think about what’s going on for us and whether our current ways of thinking about the world serve us well. What does it take to reflect together, to think critically about the predicaments we find ourselves in, and to question our own assumptions? How might we become more skilful in widening our circles of concern?

There is just a month to go until the annual Complexity and Management Conference 17-19th May entitled: What does it mean to be critical? – complexity, reflexivity and doubt in everyday organisational life. There are still some remaining places at the conference, as well as for the one day introductory workshop on complexity

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Socrates in the Louvre

and management on Friday 17th May. It is also now possible just to book for the Saturday to hear the keynote and attend workshops presented by delegates on Saturday afternoon. The booking page is here.

Our key note speaker on Saturday 18th May is André Spicer from Cass Business School, who has developed an international reputation for confronting fads of management, ‘wellness’ and the idea of smart organisations for example, to provoke us to think about what we are encouraged to take for granted. André will talk about his forthcoming book on critique and doubt.

The conference is an unusual forum for creating time to discuss what matters to the delegates – to rediscover who we are becoming and how we might take the next step together.

Hope to see you there.

Complexity and Management Conference 17-19th May 2019 – booking now for early bird rates.

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There are just three weeks to go before the end of early bird booking for this year’s Complexity and Management Conference 17th-19th May. As for the last two years we will also be offering a one-day introduction to complex responsive processes on Friday 17th May for anyone interested in the ideas, whether or not you go on to attend the conference.

This year we are expecting a good turn-out, partly because of our speaker Professor Andre Spicer, and partly because the event is a lively and thought-provoking occasion, where we talk about what matters with no particular end in view. Book soon to ensure you secure a place.mia_project_153_01

The title of this year’s conference, What does it mean to be critical? – complexity, reflexivity and doubt in everyday organisational life draws attention to the importance of making sense of contemporary organisational life in ways which call into question taken for granted assumptions.

Some of the things we might discuss at the conference, which I suggest are current pathologies of management, are set out below. None of these phenomena is new or unremarked upon and critiqued. Yet they still prevail in organisational life in ways which can lead to unhelpful behaviour in groups. They can distract from more productive ways of working which pay attention to the difficulties of getting things done together in the here and now. Continue reading →

2019 Complexity and Management Conference 17-19th May

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stamp_hannah_arendt-2The 2019 Complexity and Management Conference booking page is now open and can be accessed here.

The title of this year’s conference is: What does it mean to be critical? – complexity, reflexivity and doubt in everyday organisational life.

On Saturday morning we are delighted to have Professor André Spicer from the Cass Business School, City, University of London to give the keynote on Saturday morning. André holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne. He has held visiting appointments at universities around the world. André is the author of many academic articles and nine books. The most recent are ‘Business Bullshit’, ’The Stupidity Paradox’ and ‘Desperately Seeking Self Improvement’.

On Saturday afternoon we ask conference delegates to suggest workshops that they themselves would like to run consonant with the theme of the conference, so if you would like to suggest something, then do let me know.

As usual, the event will be highly participative and will offer lots of opportunities for discussion and exploration of the key themes with other delegates. The conference begins with an inaugural dinner on Friday evening 17th May, and ends after lunch on 19th May. The conference fee includes onsite board and lodging for the duration of the conference. Early bird rates apply before 1st April 2019.

As with previous years we are also offering a one day introductory workshop on some of the key ideas informing the perspective of complex responsive processes on Friday 17th May.

Hope to see you there.

What does it mean to be critical? – complexity, reflexivity and doubt in everyday organisational life.

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Complexity and Management Conference – 17th– 19th May 2019, Roffey Park Institute.

One of the difficulties of thinking, as Hannah Arendt pointed out, is that it tends to unravel things. Next year’s conference will address a theme which has come up again and again in previous conferences, the degree to which questioning, particularly of our own assumptions and value positions, can unsettle. It’s not always easy to question what’s going on, particularly in organisations which encourage us to align and be positive, but what are the ethical consequences of not doing so?

In a recent piece of research carried out for LFHE/Advance HE, we discovered that senior managers in Higher Education establishments may feel conflicted about some of the change projects they are responsible for. Keen to do a good job on the one hand, on the other they may also entertain doubts about the long-term effects of the changes they are implementing. One requirement of surviving in an environment which values change, then, may be the ability to entertain doubt and uncertainty, and to find ways of critically reflecting with others.

Equally, consultants trying to navigate the crowded field of concepts and management fads may find themselves working for clients who seem to be asking for support which the consultant doubts will be helpful – what does it mean to be a critically reflective and reflexive consultant, and what are the ethical implications?

We are delighted to have Professor André Spicer from the Cass Business School, City, University of London to give the keynote on Saturday morning, and help us think these things through.  Originally from New Zealand, André holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne. He has held visiting appointments at universities around the world.

André is the author of many academic articles and nine books. The most recent are ‘Business Bullshit’, ’The Stupidity Paradox’ and ‘Desperately Seeking Self Improvement’ He has worked with a range of organisations including Barclays, TFL, Old Mutual, the City of London, the House of Commons, IBM and CAA. He frequently appears in the international media and writes regularly about work and organisations for The Guardian. He is currently working on a book about skepticism and doubt.

On Saturday afternoon we ask conference delegates to suggest workshops that they themselves would like to run consonant with the theme of the conference.

As usual the conference booking page will go live on the university website early in the New Year. The fee for the conference covers all board and lodging from the inaugural dinner on Friday night 17th May, through to lunch on Sunday when the conference finishes.

In addition we will offer the usual one day introduction to the basic concepts of complex responsive processes of relating on Friday 17th.

 

What leaders talk about when they talk about transformation.

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What exactly is transformational change, and what kind of leadership qualities are required if one finds oneself in charge of a project which claims to be transformational? What might we learn about leadership from studying a sector, the Higher Educations sector in the UK, where there are profound changes going on, introduced by successive governments?

These are some of the questions I and colleagues, Dawn James, Jana Filosof, Kevin Flinn,  Rachelle Andrews, Phil Mason and Nigel Culkin from the University of Hertfordshire were commissioned by AdvanceHE (formerly the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education) to ask of the top teams from 6 UK universities. The report we produced will be published very soon. Continue reading →

Complex responsive processes – 4 pillars of thought, 5 key insights.

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Before starting this post, and for those readers interested in attending the next Complexity and Management Conference, next year it will be slightly earlier: 17-19th May 2019.

Introduction

This post is the theoretical introduction to the perspective of complex responsive processes of relating, which I gave in the afternoon of the one-day workshop preceding this year’s Complexity and Management Conference. It informs a whole raft of publications written and edited by Ralph Stacey, Doug Griffin, Patricia Shaw and myself along with all the theses of graduates of the Doctor of Management (DMan) programme at the University of Hertfordshire, who now number 72 (60 doctorates and 12 MAs). The perspective has also been adduced by a wide range of consultants, scholars and graduates of other programmes. I mention this at the beginning of the post because I often get asked ‘what next for complex responsive processes?’, or ‘what or who constitutes the complex responsive processes community?’ I think the question is sometimes aimed at asking who decides what the perspective of complex responsive processes is, to which the answer must be, the original authors, everyone and no one. The glorious thing about ideas is that once published, they belong to everybody, irrespective of whether they are reproduced or developed in ways in which the ‘original’ scholars would recognise. And when other people develop the ideas in their own way, then this just leads to opportunities for further discussion. This is not to suggest that as far as I am concerned ‘anything goes’. The point about having an intellectual position is that you are prepared to argue for it, whilst acknowledging the perspectives of those you argue with.

The perspective of complex responsive processes rests on four pillars of intellectual tradition: it draws on insights from the complexity sciences; it is based in Norbert Elias’ processual sociology; it takes up key ideas from pragmatic philosophy, particularly from Mead and Dewey; and it borrows from the group analytic tradition as set out by SH Foulkes, particularly in terms of the working methods which we adopt on the DMan programme. What all four have in common is that they are concerned with phenomena in a state of flux and change over time, and they are focused more or less on how global patterns arise from micro-interactions, or how micro-interactions embody global patterns. Our particular interpretation reads paradox into the working of complex adaptive systems models (CAS), just as see paradox deployed by Mead, Dewey, Elias, and to a lesser degree, Foulkes. In other words, and in the perspective of complex responsive processes you can see Heraclitan dialectic running through our interpretation of CAS, in the work of the pragmatists and Elias, which draws on Hegel, and perhaps more falteringly in Foulkes. Elias and Foulkes are also informed by the thinking of Freud. There are links, then, between the four pillars of thought which underpin the perspective. Continue reading →

Working in groups – an overview of themes from the 2017 Complexity and Management conference.

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This year’s Complexity and Management conference invited delegates to think about groups. In my response to the three previous speakers, Martin Weegmann, Nick Sarra and Karina Solsø Iversen I asked delegates to consider the importance of groups against a backdrop of an increasingly individualised age, where identification with groups, whether they be communities, trades unions, social movements or other vehicles of collective identification seem increasingly difficult to maintain. This is a phenomenon remarked upon by a wide variety of sociologists in different countries, for example by Robert Putnam in the United States in his book Bowling Alone[1], and to which I drew attention in last year’s conference summing up here. Last year I talked about the way in which we are invited to become ‘entrepreneurial selves’, a trend which Foucault was one of the first to identify as an inevitable consequence of the hegemony of neoliberal capitalism[2].

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Although this is a very powerful way of thinking, this isn’t experienced everywhere the same as I think the two contrasting pictures of train carriages show,  no matter how strong a global trend it is.

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But the phenomenon which Elias in particular described, where we are invited to think of ourselves as closed off from one another is widespread and amplified by modern technology and social media. Our devices are helpful for communication but may also amplify the tendency towards a sense that we are monads: technology can increase individualising and alienating social tendencies which are already emerging, as Sherry Turkle documents in her book Alone Together[3]. It is in this context that groups and groupwork become so important. Continue reading →