Tag Archives: leadership

Reminder – Complexity and Management Conference 2nd-4th June 2023

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Complexity, uncertainty, breakdown: coping, recovering and finding hope in dark times.

The naïve discourse about disruption presents it as the preserve of charismatic tech gurus or as an instrument of management that has the potential for bringing about transformation for the good. Our every day experience of disruption is that it emerges as a consequence of longer term socio-economic trends, the interweaving of intentions, of which no one is in control, not governments, and certainly not senior management teams. There may indeed be opportunities which arise from extremely turbulent times, but there are also costs: winners and losers, threats to identity and a sense of permanent dislocation from ourselves and from others.

What does it mean to collaborate when the ground is always shifting? Where are the sources of hope? What are more or less helpful ways of dealing with uncertainty beyond the tired prescriptions of many contemporary management perspectives?

This is a reminder that the Complexity and Management Conference 2023 will address what can feel like a constant state of breakdown, potentially undermining things we may previously have taken for granted, such as plans, rules, loyalties, markets, knowledge, and how we exercise authority in groups.

The conference will be organised around contributors to the recent Complexity and Management series published by Routledge, which include the titles Complexity and Consultancy, Complexity and Leadership and Complexity and the Public Sector. Contributors will talk about their experience of leading, managing and consulting to a wide range of organisations, particularly the public sector. An invitation is also extended to all delegates attending the conference who want to offer a workshop on Saturday afternoon 3rd June.

If you are interested in the difference it makes to take the complex interplay of relationships seriously, particularly in dark times, then book for the conference, 2nd-4th June. The conference is highly discussive and conversation is the currency of participation. It will greatly enhance the conference if delegates bring concrete examples of their workplace dilemmas. Participants are encouraged to offer workshops on something they are currently working on.

The conference is organised in collaboration with KIOL Executive Programme at University College Copenhagen.

The booking site will be opening soon and offers an early-bird discount until the end of April.

Complexity and Management Conference and workshops 5/6th June 2020

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Complexity and Collaboration – implications for leadership and practice

The booking sites for the workshops on Friday 5th June and the Complexity and Management Conference on Saturday 6th June are now open to the public.

The workshop Improvising in the complexity of collaboration and conflict on Friday 5th June 9-5pm will explore the enabling constraints of ‘working live’ whilst remaining socially distant from colleagues. The workshop is likely to be most beneficial to delegates who have previously attended one of our programmes or conference, or are familiar with our way of working. Access to Zoom and a desk based PC plus a phone or a tablet is required.

The workshop  is convened Prof Karen Norman, Prof Henry Larsen and colleagues from the Universities of Southern Denmark and Hertfordshire and is open to 20 participants (with a wait list if oversubscribed).

The booking site is here.

The workshop An Introduction to Complex Responsive Processes on Friday 5th June 9-5pm is on the main principles of the perspective of complex responsive processes, which we offer every year. It is a highly participative introduction to complexity and its organisational implications drawing on delegates’ workplace experience, and is offered by Prof Chris Mowles. Maximum 30.

The booking site is here

This year’s conference entitled Complexity and Collaboration – implications for leadership and practice is on Saturday 6th June 9.00– 5 pm and we are delighted to have Prof Barbara Simpson as our keynote speaker from first thing in the morning. The rest of the day will be highly participative and discussive, involving break out groups to discuss the keynote. In the afternoon workshops will be offered by conference delegates on aspects of their work related to the theme. Members of faculty will sum up some of the key themes of the day in a final plenary which will be as participative as the size of the conference will allow online. Maximum 60 people.

The booking site is here.

Looking forward to seeing you there. Apologies if you have already received this information elsewhere.

 

Complexity and Management Conference on Collaboration 5-7th June 2020. Booking open now.

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Complexity and Collaboration – implications for leadership and practice

Being part of a group engaged in a joint enterprise provokes all kinds of mixed feelings and responses in people: it can be uplifting and satisfying, while at the same time triggering frustrations and petty rivalries. Without other people it’s hard to get work done, while at the same time work would be easy if it weren’t for other people. Collaboration pitches us into the uncertainty of exploring our interdependencies with others. It has also become a buzz-word in contemporary organisational life and has been linked to idealisations of innovation, trust and highskydiving-functioning teams. But is collaboration more like happiness – we will know after we have collaborated successfully that we have done so, but the moment we set it up as a goal to be achieved instrumentally it will continue to evade our grasp? When are we collaborating and when are we colluding?

This year’s Complexity and Management Conference 5-7th June at Roffey Park near Horsham UK , will take the experience of collaboration seriously and explore the implications for management, leadership and practice more generally. To support us with the task Prof Barbara Simpson has kindly agreed to be our key note speaker on Saturday 6th June. In the afternoon of the Saturday there will be workshops led by conference delegates linked to the conference theme. If you would like to put your name forward to convene such a workshop, please let me know.

On Friday 5th June there are two one day workshops. One is an introduction to the perspective of complex responsive processes, which informs the professional doctorate, the DMan, offered by the University of Hertfordshire. This workshop is suitable for people who would like a basic introduction to the ideas and is convened by Prof Chris Mowles. The second workshop, Improvising in the complexity of collaboration and conflict, introduces 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.

The conference booking page is now open and can be accessed here. Workshops and conference can be booked separately and together. The conference fee comprises all board and lodging.

 

Now booking! Complexity and Management Conference June 6-8th 2014

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Can leaders change organisational culture? – alternatives from a complexity perspectiveImage

What do we mean when we talk about the ‘need to change organisational culture’? This is a way of speaking about culture which is now taken for granted, whether in relation to banking, the UK’s National Health Service or sometimes whole societies. What is organisational culture anyway, and to what extent can even the most powerful leaders and managers (or politicians) change it in ways that they decide? And if we were to conclude that it’s not possible to change culture, at least not in predictable ways, then why has this way of speaking and thinking become so widespread? What else might be going on, and what purpose does the culture-change narrative serve?

This year’s Complexity and Management Conference will follow on from last year’s discussion of leadership and will encourage the exploration of a term which is widely used but poorly understood. Participants will be encouraged to share their own experiences of organisational change, particularly when it is framed in terms of changes in culture. We will explore together the implications of the discourse of culture change for leaders and managers.

The key note speaker this year is Prof Ralph Stacey, co-founder of the Doctor of Management programme at UH and a groundbreaking scholar with his work on the complexity sciences and their relevance to leading and managing organisations.

The conference will be informal and highly participative, as in previous years. The conference fee will include all accommodation and food. The conference will be held at Roffey Park Institute in the UK: http://www.roffeypark.com as usual.

The booking page can be found here. There is a discount for early-bird bookings before May 1st 2014. A more detailed agenda will follow but the conference begins with a drinks reception @7pm on Friday 6th June and ends after lunch Sunday 8th June.

Participants wishing to set up a particular themed discussion in a working group during the conference should contact Chris Mowles: c.mowles@herts.ac.uk

Changing organisational culture: a moral and disciplinary project

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This post is another contribution to thinking about organizational culture in preparation for the Complexity and Management Conference due to be held 7-9th June this year, 2014, which will be dedicated to this theme.

The Christmas period provided a very good example of the dominant thinking about organisational culture change, which I wrote about earlier in a previous post on this blog here. The new CEO of Barclays Bank, Anthony Jenkins was the guest editor for BBC Radio 4’s flagship news programme, Today, and he used the opportunity to draw attention to ethics, leadership and organisational transformation. You can find some of the clips from the programme here.

The banking world in general and Barclays in particular have been rocked by a number of scandals, including mis-selling of financial products and the manipulation of the inter-bank lending rate, LIBOR. Jenkins sees his task as rebuilding the bank and restoring public trust by ‘transforming the culture’ of the bank away from short-termism and a narrow definition of maximising shareholder value which he feels has predominated over the last 30 years, towards an understanding the banks serve society at large.th

To achieve this Jenkins has started a review of all the bank’s activities and has set alongside it an organisational change programme called Transform. The Transform programme sets out what Jenkins describes as five core values: respect, integrity, service, excellence and stewardship. All of these are to be ‘embedded’ in the organisations and measured episodically with numerical scores to give a reading of the bank’s progress towards operating differently. To give a token of his seriousness, Jenkins argues that he and his colleagues have developed a set of ‘explicit behaviours’ which staff have to exhibit in order to demonstrate the values. They will be recruited, promoted and developed according to these standards. According to Jenkins this change in culture will take up to ten years. Continue reading →

On organisational culture change

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There is a great deal of discussion in contemporary organisational life of the need to ‘change the culture’ in organisations. This is a way of talking that assumes that organizations do have discrete cultures and that they are manipulable, although the discourse can have it both ways with the term: on the one hand culture is known to be symbolic, intangible and abstract, on the other it can be the object of conscious and rational redesign and reframing. A good example of this way of talking about organisational culture can be found in the 4th edition of the eminent management scholar Edgar Schein’s book Organizational Culture and Leadership[1].

Usually a prime role is assumed for leaders or senior managers in making the changes to organizational culture because they are considered to have the necessary abilities and skills to diagnose what is wrong with the current culture and to design a better one: one which fits better with the environment. Schein states this very explicitly in his book: ‘In this sense culture is ultimately created, embedded, evolved and ultimately manipulated by leaders’ (2010: 3).  As a result of their leaders’ efforts, employees will be obliged to commit to a fresh set of values, or reaffirm an existing set which are thought to have become moribund, as well as demonstrating a suite of required ‘behaviours’ or new procedures. The new values and procedures are then set ‘at the heart of everything we do’, are vigorously communicated and disseminated and form the basis of widespread training programmes for staff, and are then subject to regimes of inspection and performance management. Such change programmes can consume weeks and months of organizational time and resources.

The whole process is a good demonstration of the systemic assumptions behind organizational realignment: values, behaviour, systems, procedures, training, communication and quality regimes are all supposed to line up and fit over each other and form a coherent whole. The emphasis is on integration, stability and alignment. It is a huge reduction of the complexity of what is at stake when attempting organisational change.

A book recently published calling for radical change in the NHS is a refreshing attempt to explain why ‘culture change’ in organisations is likely to be highly problematic. [2] Instead of assuming that whatever we might mean by the term culture is contained within one organisation, even one as big as the NHS, Ballatt and Campling, an ex-senior manager and psychotherapist within the NHS, explain why the institution reflects much wider conflictual social processes, as well as provoking profound questions about what it means to be human. That is, they try to bring together society-wide trends in social patterning in the UK and beyond in terms of their impact on changes in the NHS, and they wrestle with the profound human difficulties and dilemmas involved in professionalising the often spontaneous and improvisational human response of caring towards another human being in need. Though written specifically about the NHS, I think the book also raises important questions for anyone thinking about what is involved in processes of organisational change and echoes some of the themes from the perspective of complex responsive processes of relating. There are some key differences, however, which I will also explore below. Continue reading →

Complexity and Management Conference 7-9th June 2013 – Exploring the Cult of Leadership alternative ideas from relational and complex responsive processes perspectives.

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Key note speaker: Professor Ann Cunliffe
This is just to draw to your attention to the fact that the early bird rate for the CMC, which saves you £50 on the full conference fee, ends on Friday 26th April.
You can book on the university website here: http://tinyurl.com/crm734w

3 Critiques of Leadership: preparing for the CMC conference

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At the Complexity and Management Conference in June this year we will be hosting discussions about leaders and leadership from a critical perspective. As a way of warming up for the event it might be interesting to rehearse three recent and different critical perspectives on the ineluctable rise of ‘leaderism’ in contemporary society. The first, by Rakesh Khurana[1] (2007), charts the development of the discourse of leadership and the way it has colonised and captured American business schools coterminous with the ascendancy of neo-liberal economics. The second, by Martin and Learmonth (2012)[2], looks at the way that the discourse on leadership is used to co-opt a broad range of actors into particular projects to ‘reform’ the public sector, and the third, by Alvesson and Spicer [3](2011), explores the way that a more nuanced critique of leadership might be developed to help employees struggle with the exercise of authority in organisations. Mats Alvesson is a previous guest at the CMC conference. Continue reading →

Complexity and Management Conference 7-9th June 2013 – Exploring the Cult of Leadership

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‘Leadership is leadership, and talent is talent’. So said a Minister from the UK Home Office when called upon to respond to criticisms of recent government proposals to open up some of the middle management positions in the police force to applicants from business and the community. In expressing himself thus, he gave a very good example of the way in which the cult of leadership has taken hold in current discourse about the management of organisations, and is taken for granted. By implication we all know what leadership is and  can feel confident that certain individuals, particularly from a business background, are good leaders whatever the context. Leadership has become a foundational concept.

In this year’s Complexity and Management Conference we will be calling into question this blind faith ubiquitously expressed in the notion of leaders and leadership. Some of the topics we may find ourselves discussing are whether the  assumption that leadership is distinct for management really holds; whether the necessary exercise of authority in organisations can always be understood in terms of what leaders are doing; whether the concept of leadership has been so widely stretched and differentiated (servant leadership, distributed leadership, self-leadership, leadership and followership, even upwards leadership) that it has become meaningless and unhelpful. Because it is so widely spoken about, yet so little understood,  it becomes a very important topic for critical reflection.

From the perspective of complex responsive processes, and from the insights offered by our guest speaker, Professor Ann Cunliffe of Leeds University, we will be trying to understand leadership as a highly social phenomenon co-created by people as they negotiate how to go on together.

The conference attracts a wide diversity of participants every year: academics from other institutions, consultants and managers, as well as graduates and current students from the Doctor of Management programme.

If you would like to book for the conference the payment page at the University of Hertfordshire site is now open and can be accessed here: http://tinyurl.com/crm734w

As usual, there is a discount of £50 for early-bird bookers up till April 26th.

We look forward to seeing you there.

 

 

Trust in Organisations

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A search of Google Scholar indicates that books and journal papers to do with trust, organisations and leadership numbered a few hundred per annum during the 1960s, jumping to the low thousands during the 1970s, and approaching 10,000 per annum in the 1990s. During the early years of this century the number of publications has numbered around an average of 40,000 per year. These numbers indicate a major increase in, and concern about, the presence and role of trust in organisational life, including the exercise of leadership. In this note I want to give a brief indication of how this issue is approached in the management literature and how it is approached in the sociology literature. To aid in the comparing and contrasting I will draw on Hosmer’s[i] classification of four different approaches to understanding trust:

  • Trust as an optimistic individual expectation, focusing on expectations that others will perform in competent and morally correct ways.
  • Trust as an interpersonal relation, focusing on the dependence of the trustors on the trustees to respect the trustors’ interests. The relationship is one of vulnerability for the trustor.
  • Trust as a rational decision to  do with protecting one’s interests made after risk analysis or a calculation in terms of economic transactions costs (which I will not cover in this note).
  • Trust and social structure. Continue reading →