Managing in Uncertainty : Complexity and the paradoxes of everyday organizational life

© 2015 Chris Mowles. All rights reserved.The reality of everyday organizational life is that it is filled with uncertainty, contradictions and paradoxes. Yet leaders and managers are expected to act as though they can predict the future and bring about the impossible: that they can transform themselves and their colleagues, design different cultures, choose the values for their organization, be innovative, control conflict and have inspiring visions. Whilst managers will have had lots of experiences of being in charge, they probably realise that they are not always in control. So how might we frame a much more realistic account of what’s possible for managers to achieve? Many managers are implicitly aware of their messy reality, but they rarely spend much time reflecting on what it is that they are actually doing. Drawing on insights from the complexity sciences, process sociology and pragmatic philosophy, Chris Mowles engages directly with some principal contradictions of organizational life concerning innovation, culture change, conflict and leadership. Mowles argues that if managers proceed from the expectation that organizational life as inherently uncertain, and interactions between people are complex and often paradoxical, they start noticing different things and create possibilities for acting in different ways. Managing in Uncertainty will be of interest to practitioners, advanced students and researchers looking at management and organizational studies from a critical perspective

What we talk about when we talk about leadership in South Sudan.

© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Development in Practice on 19/09/2019, available online: https://doi.org/10.1080/09614524.2019.1662770It is important to think critically about how we develop leaders, particularly in highly unpredictable countries like South Sudan. This article gives an account of a yearlong reflective and experiential programme in Juba which sought to straddle the paradox of outside and inside: it took seriously the critical insight that leadership development needs to take greater account of endogenous experience. However, to do so we drew on methods developed elsewhere, but which prioritise local experience. The programme focused on the everyday interdependencies of group life, rather than an abstract and often idealised understanding of leadership favoured in many business schools.Peer reviewe

The Paradox of Stability and Change : Elias’ Processual Sociology

The chapter explores the contribution of the process sociologist Norbert Elias to processual organisational scholarshipPeer reviewe

Consultancy as Temporary Leadership : Negotiating Power in Everyday Practice

Orthodox theories of consultancy address power relations between the consultant and their contractors. However, they can suggest that either the consultant should manipulate those they work with 'for the good', or they should give up their power 'for the good'. This article offers an ethical critique of these points of view and argues for an alternative understanding of power and the role of the consultant. Drawing on a profoundly social understanding of the dynamic between the self and other, the author argues that consultants should engage with others in processes that privilege the exploration of similarity and difference, continuity and change in a shared discovery of the good. Drawing attention to the daily relationships between staff and their own participation, consultants can offer a different opportunity for sense making and a different and temporary form of leadership, where all participants in the process make themselves more accountable to each other.Peer reviewe

Rethinking Management : Radical Insights from the Complexity Sciences

In Rethinking Management, Chris Mowles argues that management courses may cause as many crises as they alleviate. Taking examples of managing and leading in contemporary organisations, his book treats uncertainty as central to the task of leading and managing and explores the limits of current management theories. It provides alternatives to grids and frameworks and encourages management professionals and educators to recognise judgment, improvisation and experience are vital to good management and leadership

Strategic Management and Organisational Dynamics : The challenge of complexity to ways of thinking about organisations

Ralph D. Stacey and Chris Mowles, Organisational Dynamics: The challenge of complexity to ways of thinking about organisations, 7th Edition (Harlow: Pearson Education Limited, 2016), ISBN: 978-1-292-07874-8 (print), 978-1-292-07877-5 (eText).Strategic Management and Organisational Dynamics remains unique amongst strategic management textbooks by taking a refreshingly alternative look at the subject. Drawing on the sciences of complexity as well as a broad range of social scientific literature, Stacey and Mowles challenge the conceptual orthodoxy of planned strategy, focusing instead on emergence and the predictable unpredictability of organisational life

A complexity approach to leadership development : developing practical judgement

Over recent years, complexity perspectives have been taken up more broadly in scholarship and teaching about leadership with leadership development providers such as Ashridge Business School, Roffey Park, Harvard Business School, and the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education (Leadership Foundation), incorporating aspects of complexity theory into their programmes. In this paper we argue that the perspective of complex responsive processes of relating advances a radical interpretation of the complexity sciences that has profound implications for the way in which management education and development might be usefully conducted. In staying with a radical interpretation of the complexity sciences the perspective calls into question the conventional paradigm of predictability and control in organisational life. That is, many leadership development programmes, even ones which claim to draw on the complexity sciences in their pedagogy, steadfastly maintain that organisations are open to manipulation by powerful leader-managers who are able to choose organisational futures and control them at will. From this paradigm of control, leadership is seen as a natural, neutral, individualistic activity that tends to the good. The perspective of complex responsive processes of relating, developed over the last 15 years at the University of Hertfordshire, proffers a radically different view that understands leadership to be a contested, social and relational activity that has a shadow side. We argue that organisations are intensely political places and that leaders and managers are particularly powerful players in the game of organisational life. As the game unfolds, so leaders play and are played by the game; influencing while simultaneously being influenced. In this paper we offer a view of organisations as patterns of human interaction constantly emerging in both predictable and unpredictable ways in the living present, mostly through conversational activity. Consequently, helping current and future leaders develop their practice means basing much of the content of organisational development programmes precisely on this perspective, encouraging them to pay attention to what they are doing and the conversations they are presently engaged in, as much as what they think they should be doin

Transformational Change in the Higher Education Sector: an inquiry into leadership practice

This is a report which inquires into the practice of the members of leadership teams in six UK universities undertaking projects of transformation in their institutions. The researchers interviewed senior managers bilaterally and in groups to ask them how they had been working, what they thought were the difficulties of bringing about change, and how they understood ‘transformation’. The research team brings more than 20 years of experience in developing a complexity perspective on stability and change in organisations, which pays particular attention to everyday interactions and the way people talk and think about change. Our perspective assumes that all social change is probabilistic because it arises as a result of the interweaving of everyone’s intentions in the game of organizational life. Senior managers may be particularly influential players of the organizational game, but they too are as much played as playing. What was it like, then, to play their particular institutional game, and how did they now understand that experience? Senior managers were generous with their time and observations and led us to believe that they were fully aware of the demands on the sector arising from increased marketisation, and were realistic in their acceptance of the need to adapt to survive, whether they agreed with the changes or not. Nonetheless, rapid change often provoked deep anxiety in them as to whether they were changing fast enough, and whether they were calling it right. The fast pace of change often brought about a good deal of turnover amongst their senior colleagues, which brought the impact of change close to home. It also led them to be sympathetic towards their colleagues in the kinds of demands that were being placed on them, which was often, as Churchill noted, one damned thing after another. Senior managers had found a variety of creative ways of conveying the need for change, and for coping with the intended and unintended consequences. This involved enhancing their own managerial skills and professionalizing project management approaches, developing a critical distance from some of the jargon and taken-for-granted assumptions about how change happens, prioritising relationships and communication (both formal and informal), and developing better judgement about how and when to intervene. Senior managers differed in the degree to which they felt they were in control of, and could shape ‘organisational culture’, and were aware that over-optimistic claims of ‘positive transformational change for the good’ could alienate as much as motivate. Nonetheless, their experience had left almost everyone who contributed to the research with examples of how they and their colleagues had brought themselves into a different relation with each other where new things were possible. The report identifies seven qualities and capabilities of senior managers which might be underrepresented in most accounts of transformational change in organisations. These are: 1 The ability to live with contradictions, ambivalence and doubt, and the ability to cope longer with uncertainty. 2 The development of practical judgment about when to intervene and when not to, when to express doubt, how to ‘read’ a group, and how to get alongside people. 3 The ability of leaders/managers to take themselves seriously as managers and seek different ways of developing their capacities technically, as well as developing greater reflective abilities and critical self-awareness. 4. Leading involves developing enhanced political judgement about how to work productively with power, when to encourage, when to direct, and gaining deeper insights into interdependencies. 5. Developing better political judgement implies an ability to work more skillfully in groups and to accept that conflicting over who ‘we’ think we are and what ‘we’ think we are doing together is immanent in all groups trying to achieve things together. 6. A greater capacity to work in groups implies an enhanced ability to endure the negative emotions that inevitably result from profound processes of change, such as feelings of loss and lack of recognition, and the feelings of vulnerability which may arise when confronted with colleagues’ strong emotions. 7. Senior managers are story-tellers in chief, sensemakers-in-chief, recognisers-in-chief. They may be in charge, but they are not always in control. The report calls for more research into everyday examples of conceiving, developing and implementing change projects from the ground up as an antidote to more inflated and idealized accounts which are usually more readily available

Theoretical approaches to managing complexity in organizations: A comparative analysis

This paper aims to identify the differences and similarities in the way to explain self-organization from the different theories of complex systems used in management, which we have grouped as complex systems theories, complex adaptive systems (CAS) and organizational cybernetics. For this purpose we suggest three parallel and complementary dimensions to delimit the conceptual spaces where these theories can be placed. Using this classification as an analytical lens we summarize the core arguments suggested by each of these complex systems approaches, regarding the ideas of emergence and new order. This analysis helps us to conclude that the three theories coincide in their interest for studying nonlinear complex systems, but diverge in the nature of the complex problems studied. Finally we analyze the consequences that recognizing the similarities and differences between these approaches have, when using them for the study and research of social and business organizations and their management