The following is the text of the Ralph Stacey Memorial Lecture which I gave at Hertfordshire Business School on Weds 5th October 2022. It accompanies the video which you will find in the post below.
The response to the lecture was give by Patricia Shaw, who co-founded the Doctor of Management programme with Ralph and the late Doug Griffin.
Every once in a while, someone emerges with unique insight, who reframes the way we see the world. Ralph Stacey was such a person. He created a new vocabulary, and thus new ways of thinking and acting. Ralph developed a body of work, and founded a psychodynamic doctoral research programme, the Doctor of Management (DMan), with Doug Griffin and Patricia Shaw. At the heart of the perspective informing the intellectual position and DMan is taking experience seriously, and becoming reflexive. It remains a pioneering approach to combining insights from the complexity sciences, pragmatic philosophy, process sociology and group analytic theory, and it continues to evolve and develop.
In the Ralph Stacey Memorial Lecture, just over a year after his death and birthday, I will reflect on Ralph’s rich and varied life, his deep humanity and his intellectual contribution. Patricia Shaw will respond, offering insights into the continuing relevance of the ideas for the enduring dilemmas we find ourselves facing.
Outline programme:
4pm – 5.30pm – Experiential group. Face to face only.
6.00pm Ralph Stacey Memorial lecture by Chris Mowles, response by Patricia Shaw.
Q and A/observations.
7.45 Informal drinks and conversation.
The event will be live-streamed. Joining instructions will be sent out nearer the event.
In order for us to plan for numbers/send a link for streaming, RSVP c.mowles@herts.ac.uk
There are still some places remaining for the 2022 Complexity and Management conference. You can book here.
One of the things that delegates always remark upon about the CMC is how refreshing it is to get straight into conversations that matter. You can do this from the moment you arrive: on Friday 3rd June @7pm in the evening you get to meet other delegates for an inaugural dinner from all kinds of practice backgrounds and from all over Europe.
On Saturday morning we have the renowned practice scholar Prof Davide Nicolini @NicoliniDavide who will talk about the importance of a practice orientation in theory.
The afternoon is given over to delegates to talk about dilemmas in the workplace using each other as a resource to think further.
Early Saturday evening there will be a tree-planting ceremony to commemorate the life and work of the late Prof Ralph Stacey, who founded the Doctor of Management programme and the conference, and who loved Roffey Park.
There will be more more lively conversation accompanied by great food on Saturday night.
On Sunday morning we will respond to the key note and themes which have arisen during our discussions on Saturday.
Then there is one more round of reflection until lunch and close at 12.30 on Sunday.
Look forward to seeing you there.
The theory of practice and the practice of theory
When people sit together to talk about what’s going on, how they experience work, how they feel about their jobs, there may be some colleagues who complain that this is ‘just a luxury’. There is no time to sit around in a ‘talking shop’ when there is so much to do. And anyway, post-pandemic, haven’t we learnt that we can achieve just as much online?
If you are of the view that sitting around talking and thinking about how we are thinking and talking, what we find ourselves doing at work, then this year’s Complexity and Management Conference is probably not for you. As a broader research community we make an explicit assumption that one of a manager’s key tasks is to talk with their team about what they think is going on, what sense they make of it, and what it means for the group in taking the next steps together.
As a partial answer to the second point, why we are not running it online, we have organised this conference for the past two years online, and have benefitted from a broad range of participation from delegates who live too far away to come. From across time zones and sometimes great distances they have enriched the experience of paying attention to what we are doing. But it’s also the case that some qualities get lost. If we are concerned not just to talk about ideas, but to experience them, then occasionally there is no substitute for getting bodies together in a room. No more so when we choose to talk about the paradox of theory and practice. There is a practice in talking about theory, and the experience of doing so enhances learning in ways which are more than cognitive. We are moved into a different relationship with others and ourselves, a process which is attenuated online. Maybe everyone has recently experienced the difference of coming back to the workplace to work together in the same location as colleagues and has noticed the difference that encountering others makes. Having been out of practice, sometimes it may have felt overwhelming.
There is of course an environmental cost too to organising an in-person conference.
So, we have thought carefully about what we are doing and why, and we delighted to have Prof Davide Nicolini @NicoliniDavide to give us material to think about in his key note on Saturday morning 4th June. Thereafter the afternoon will be given over to anyone wanting to present their work or ideas in parallel workshops. On Sunday we respond to the previous day, and continue the discussion till lunchtime.
The conference fee includes all board and lodging. Roffey Park is set in a beautiful garden bordering a large meadow with a forest beyond. The food is of a high standard, the quality of conversation even higher and we would be delighted to see you there.
Here is the link to book. Early bird rates ends 30th April 2022.
At the heart of the community of inquiry developing the perspective of complex responsive processes of relating is the Doctor of Management (DMan) programme. It has been running for more than 20 years and to date has produced 75 doctoral graduates. In the pragmatic tradition we encourage students to take their every day experience seriously, and to think sociologically about how their daily travails are informed by, and inform broader socio-economic trends. They are encouraged to take the perspective of the pilot, and at the same time the perspective of the swimmer, caught up along with everyone else amid the swirling currents of every day organisational life. If the theses graduates produce have one thing in common, it is that they are all extended exercises in reflexivity. We encourage managers and consultants to think about how they are thinking and acting with others, and to bring their assumptions about the world more the fore. In doing so they are complexifying experience, but when they do so they are still obliged so say something of relevance and interest to colleagues working in similar domains. They produce knowledge from practice for practice.
If this video makes you interested in the DMan, the conference, or anything else, then please get in touch. The book is available here: https://amzn.to/3GIZYFj . Many thanks to David O’Dwyer for making this video.
My latest book, Complexity – a key idea for business and society, arises out of a community of inquiry, where a conversation about complexity and organising which has been going on for more than 20 years.
Contributing to the conversation are my faculty colleagues, Kiran Chauhan, Emma Crewe, Karen Norman, Nick Sarra and Karina Solsø, the students and graduates of the Doctor of Management (DMan) programme at the University of Hertfordshire, and the wider research community who attend the annual conference.
If this video makes you interested in the part time professional doctorate the DMan, which is run psychodynamically, the conference, which this year takes the theme of the theory and practice or anything else, then please get in touch.
The book is available here: https://amzn.to/3GIZYFj . Many thanks to David O’Dwyer of https://lnkd.in/edgdxwgA for making this video.
How might we think about the politics of waiting – who waits the longest and for what? If organisations exist in a state of frenetic standstill, where we never catch up with ourselves before embarking on the next change, does ‘slow management’ help? What is involved in the decision to wait or to act, and in what ways is waiting also a form of action? What did periods of enforced lockdown, waiting for things to open up, enable and inhibit?
Complexity and Management Symposium Nov 20th 2021 – booking now.
If you are interested in spending the day discussing, reflecting and arguing with other colleagues, then the Complexity and Management Symposium offers an opportunity to explore the nexus of waiting and time. With a mixture of large group and small in the morning, and presentations on the theme of the complexity of waiting in the afternoon, the Symposium is booking now.
The waiting is over.
This year we held another highly participative conference to discuss the complexity of practice. In order to help us frame the day, we invited Prof Hari Tsoukas of Cyprus and Warwick Universities to give us his thoughts on complexity and practice, which you can watch below.
In the meantime, the Complexity and Management Conference is planning an online symposium for Saturday November 27th 2021, another date for your diaries.
The Complexity and Management Conference 4-6th June 2021 – The Complexity of Practice, is open for booking now. Here is the booking page.
This year we are delighted to have Professor Hari Tsoukas, who is well known to many of you, as our key note speaker. Hari is Columbia Ship Management Professor of Strategic Management at the University of Cyprus and Distinguished Research Environment Professor of Organization Studies at Warwick Business School. He is best known for his contributions to understanding organizations as knowledge and learning systems, for re-viewing organizational phenomena through the lens of process philosophy, for exploring practical reason in organizational contexts as well as the epistemology of reflective practice in management, and for bringing insights from Aristotelian, Wittgensteinian and Heideggerian philosophy to organization and management studies.
The staging of this year’s conference is no less an uncertain undertaking than last year’s. So we are organising for a face to face event, but at the same time preparing to go online. This means that the booking page requires you to make two payments. The first is a deposit (£100), and the second (£700) is to top up the payment to the full conference fee amount (£800). Should the face to face event be cancelled and we move online, we will refund you the top-up amount (£700) and keep the deposit as payment for the online event. This is the way the university best copes with refunds and it will save you going through the whole process again.
The event will, as usual, be highly participative and deliberative. If face to face, the conference begins on the evening of Friday 4th June with complementary drinks and gala dinner, and ends after lunch on Sunday 6th June. The conference fee covers all board and lodging for the event at Roffey Park Institute, Horsham UK. If we move online the conference will be just Saturday 5th June from 9am till 5.30pm.
There are limited places, so book early to avoid disappointment. I will send out an agenda early May once it is clear what kind of event we will be staging.
Whether face to face or online, the afternoon of Saturday 5th will comprise seminars presented by conference delegates emerging from some aspect of their work related to the conference theme on which they would like to convene a discussion. If you would like to convene such a seminar, please contact me.
On Friday 4th June, whether face to face or online, there is an introductory workshop to the ideas which inform the Doctor of Management (DMan) programme, a perspective we term complex responsive processes of relating. The workshop too will be very participative and discussive, drawing on delegates’ every day experience at work.
Looking forward to seeing you there, one way or another.
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.
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
Complexity & Management Centre 