In the recent general election in the UK in May the political discussion sometimes turned on the idea of hope. Each of the political parties was keen to convince the electorate that their particular plan for the UK, their ‘vision’, was the best recipe for hope. They each promised UK citizens a better future (although the vote may have come down to people’s perception of the least worst option). Equally, the current leadership election contest in the Labour Party which has been triggered by the party’s humiliation by the Conservatives, has provoked some jostling amongst the candidates. Each has been arguing that their particular platform offers most hope particularly to the poorest in society who have been most severely hit by government initiatives which target benefits.

To a degree you can see how politicians are caught in something of a double bind. One the one hand if they fail to set out some kind of transformative ‘vision’, a promise of hope, then no-one will follow them (even if it is as simple as ‘yes we can’, or ‘change we can believe in’). On the other hand, and because we have come to distrust politicians with their grand promises, any grand narrative is bound to be met with a sceptical response. Nonetheless, each of the candidates seems to be setting themselves the impossible task of coming up with a ‘clear vision’ for the future.

It seems to me that hope figures very prominently in contemporary organisations too, and not just those which have been founded with an explicit moral purpose, such as NGOs. This may have something to do with the increasing dominance of work and the idea of fulfilment through working life, and the commensurate decline of other forms of meaningful social association, such as church/mosque/synagogue/temple, trade union or other community associations. Organisations have become much more dominant in our lives and the lexicon of contemporary management often reflects the ambition to motivate employees through appeals to the soul, passion, spiritual fulfilment, or some other more mystical counter to the flattened world of targets and procedures. Management literature emanating from north America is particularly guilty of this. The contemporary organisation is supposed to be the place where we can meet all our needs, including our hopes for a better future.

Having been part of any number of strategy process in organisations which promise a transformation in its fortunes into becoming the world-leading this or that, I can testify to how uplifting it can be, at least temporarily, to feel part of a greater ‘we’, to be swept up in the idea of a better future. There are still organisations which develop strategy using what has become referred to as the idealised design method – think of the idealised state you would like to attain, then work backwards logically from there.

However, and for any number of reasons, not least from a perspective informed by an interest in the inherent uncertainty and unpredictability of social life, the certain quality of ‘clear visions’ and promises of transformation become more and more problematic. This is particularly the case when they are supposed to emanate from someone else. But is this the same as saying that for those of us interested in uncertainty there can be no basis for hope?

During this year’s Complexity and Management Conference we discussed the politics of every day organisational life and one of our speakers, Professor Svend Brinkmann reminded us that the philosopher Simon Critchley has observed that philosophy begins not with hope, but with disappointment. This is a disappointment that things can be other than they are and that we perceive a mismatch between what we hope for and the world that we encounter. Ironically, disappointment may propel us to action, which provokes hope again in the dialectic of hope and disappointment. Hope preoccupied both Ernst Bloch of the Frankfurt school, but also the pragmatists, who were hopeful that through our intelligent engagement with every day problems with others a better world is possible. The kind of hope they articulate is not teleological, meaning that we cannot know where our engagement is leading as an end point (Bloch developed what he referred to as an ontology of not-yet-being), but is a hope which manifests itself in the making. It is a groundless and endless hope in the sense that it seeks not fixed ground towards a determined end point, but ground which is good enough to proceed to the next step of self-generating hope.

In response to the certainties and fixities of hope as expressed in contemporary management theory, where it is the senior leaders who decide what an imagined future should look like, which for me constitutes the colonization of hope, I wondered what a pragmatic version of hope would be. If I assume that hope cannot be instrumentalised into a logical framework, and that I cannot know what utopia would look like tomorrow, then how might I think about it? How might we understand hope from a perspective informed by complexity?

• I could assume, in the pragmatic tradition, that there are no beginnings and no ends. This would mean taking an interest in how we have become who we have become, and how we are becoming, and what was important to us along the way. Rather than always rushing towards an idealized future, which seems to me to be a contemporary habit, we might show greater curiosity about how we got here in the first place. The present makes the past, which makes the present, which makes the future possible. In the present, then, we might take more time to think about what we are doing and what we have been doing and the reasons we gave ourselves for doing so.

• This also points to the paradox of tradition, which Dewey noticed most prominently. On the one hand our traditions, our habits of thought, have developed because they have been useful to us. On the other hand we are probably encountering problems which we have never met before and for which our traditions may not equip us well.

• One way of thinking about ourselves and our habits is through the practice of reflective and reflexive discussion. In doing so we might discover degrees of freedom from what has determined us and come to notice more clearly our irrational/unconscious selves. At the same time we might give up on the idea of pretending that we can predict and control what is happening, and what will happen. Reflexivity offers the possibility of noticing our rational/irrational selves caught up in the game with others.

• Brinkmann urged conference participants to resist the modern preoccupation with reinventing the self – we should sack our coaches, he said – and encouraged us instead to appreciate the constancy of self. To this I would want to add that we might instead appreciate the paradox of constancy and the potential for change in ourselves. We constantly surprise ourselves and others in our ability to be ourselves and not ourselves. If there was only constancy there would be no novelty. Paradox, then, is at the heart of a pragmatic understanding of hope.

• For Bloch and for the pragmatists, hope is a process of engagement and it is the quality of engagement which makes hope possible. It is a self-generating, responsive engagement, a dialectical engagement between the self and other selves.

• Richard Rorty took the pragmatic project further in his exploration of hope, and argued in favour of solidarity, which sounds today like a rather old-fashioned word. I do not imagine that Rorty intended us to set aside our differences by encouraging solidarity, or even meant it as an idealized state. Instead, what I think he was pointing to was the importance of what Dewey referred to as the ‘urge to find working harmony amongst diverse desires.’ As usual with the pragmatists, there is an attempt to bring about a stably-unstable idea of unity in diversity, a dynamic pluralism.

All of the above implies an ability to act politically, to form alliances, to persuade and be persuaded, and in doing so to deepen and widen the sense of community. It is an active and emergent process of hope which involves all of us, not just our ‘visionary’ leaders.

New edition published this month: the revised, refreshed and updated version of Ralph’s textbook including sections on process organisation studies, new organisational examples, a bit more theory and more up-to-date references.

I have worked with two different groups of managers over the last couple of weeks to introduce, or reintroduce them to the ideas which inform a complex responsive process perspective on organisations. This perspective, for those unfamiliar with this blog, draws by analogy on the sciences of complexity, and on social science resources to think about social complexity. The intention is to struggle with what it means to consider social order, human action, and social change as complex and non-linear.

The main conceptual pillars contributing to this perspective are insights from complex adaptive systems theory, the pragmatists, political theory and psychoanalytic traditions. It takes an interest in everyday conversation, gossip, politics and power, values and ideology, and the strong feelings provoked by processes of inclusion and exclusion in social life. But in the end the perspective is a theory of theories. It’s possible to read the same scholars and draw different conclusions, or one could stitch them together differently. But as a constantly evolving constellation of ideas it is an attempt to understand social complexity and offers an alternative to thinking that organisations are things to be manipulated by managers based on ideas of predictability and control. In the context of organisational theory there are a substantial minority of scholars who write into similar traditions noticing the complex and processual nature of human organising, although they may not draw on the complexity sciences in the same way or reach the same conclusions. The perspective of complex responsive processes is coherent and radical, but speaking generally is certainly not the only game in town.

If I had to sum up the most important aspects of the perspective for me, it is as an encouragement to think that things could be other than they are and so to pay attention differently.

I am still interested, though, by the strong reactions of groups of managers who listen to the ideas, even if they have come across them before. These reactions arise predictably and unpredictably as a pattern: it is very rare not to encounter them, but the precise way they manifest themselves are slightly different each time.

One response is for managers to claim that they will resist ‘believing in’ what I am saying until I can produce evidence of organisations who have ‘applied’ this way of thinking and have been successful, or I myself can demonstrate how they can ‘apply’ the ideas. Of course it doesn’t always help to argue that there is nothing to believe in and nothing to apply. It is simply (and of course I know it isn’t simple) a way of understanding how we are already participating in the social world drawing on a number of thinkers who have thought systematically about stability, change and human action. Understanding our own participation differently, drawing on other people’s insights may lead to noticing different things and participating in different ways, which in turn is another thing to notice. It may set off a different chain of events simply through the sequence of noticing, acting, making sense differently. This is consistent with the perspective that big changes can arise from the amplification of small differences. This formulation may be a partial response to a second objection, that somehow the perspective is not ‘practical’, in the sense that managers are used to being given grids and frameworks to understand their tasks. It is practical in the sense that it is likely to make a difference to practice, what you find yourself doing at work.

I am also encouraged by people’s resistance. Management is predisposed to faddism, and why should people accept the next set of ideas uncritically? For the shadow side of stubborn rejection is blind conversion, when there is a tendency to seize upon a complex responsive processes perspective as ‘the truth’. It is important for people to recognise themselves in relation to the ideas rather than being swallowed up by them, although I suspect that that the resistance is also a form of identity-preservation. In order to learn something new one’s understanding of oneself in relation to others is highly likely to change. But to a degree, resistance also closes down the possibility of being someone who thinks differently about what they may have taken for granted, if thinking is understood as a sustained activity.

A third response from some managers is to claim that complex responsive processes is a perspective which is quite helpful in some circumstances, but they intend to pick and mix from their existing ways of thinking when they consider it appropriate. This response may be based on a misunderstanding that somehow the perspective of complex responsive processes is ‘against planning’, or even against managing, rather than encouraging us all to think about the limits to planning and what may be emerging as we are managing. It may be a response similar to the above, a way of preserving identity, and it may also recognise the reality of contemporary organisations and the power relationships therein, where managerialism is pervasive and reflection and critical engagement may be seen as a distraction from ‘delivery’. But I can’t help also feeling that it maintains the idea of the rational, choosing manager, a consumer, picking and mixing amongst the different methods to ‘apply’ as they find appropriate. This is consistent with the times we live in where there is a prevailing idea of individual choice and the autonomy of the chooser. In this latter understanding, for me complex responsive processes and rational management techniques are incommensurable. In my view it is impossible to think that an organisation is at the same time patterns of interaction and a thing which can be manipulated as a whole and ‘moved in a certain direction’ if you pursue the ideas consistently.

So alongside the provoking of questions of identity and the anxiety that this may produce, resistance to the new and possibly faddish, the tendency to construe new perspectives in terms of dominant forms of thinking, there is also a question of the degree to which managers in the groups to whom I am presenting are thinking systematically about the ideas. To what extent can they maintain the contradiction of believing what they currently believe, and entertain the possibility of an alternative?

Perhaps this is what John Dewey is pointing to when he offers this definition of reflective thinking: ‘(the) active, persistent, and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it, and the further conclusions to which it tends’. The most radical part of this definition for me is the implication of further conclusions to which a particular way of understanding tends. For the radical potential of any different and critical perspective on management and organisational life is the impossibility of unthinking a way of understanding once you have thought it seriously, and once the ground has begun to open up underneath your feet.

For those readers not from the UK, the story about the collapse of the not-for-profit Kids Company, an organisation set up to work with children and young people with complex needs in inner cities, may have passed them by. The organisation was founded by a very charismatic and telegenic psychotherapist 20 years ago who continued to be the organisation’s director. She became the darling of governments of all persuasions and seems to have been very successful at direct lobbying of senior ministers, and even the Prime Minister, for money and attention.

The organisation collapsed very dramatically and very suddenly despite the current government donating a £3 million grant, and on a weekly basis the newspapers carry stories of claim and counter-claim and mutual recrimination. These back and forth arguments resolve around the extent to which the organisation was or wasn’t well managed, did or didn’t produce good outcomes for children, had or hadn’t been audited properly, did or didn’t have an effective governing body. This post will focus on the struggle over the definition of what it means to be well managed, particularly with regard to strategy.

There is so much smoke around the organisation that it is really hard to know how too form an option about what happened. I hold no candle for this organisation and have as much understanding of what went on as anyone else who has followed the story in the media. The claims that there are more innovative models of service provision involving clients and users, or that the promotion of one organisation lead to the marginalisation of others, could be well-founded.   But the speed with which governments and public figures rushed to support Kids Company is matched only by the speed with which they have retreated since it fell from grace. Despite the contemporary emphasis on outcomes, audit, performance, Big Society, austerity and hard-headed business-like decision-making, even in not-for-profits, what appears before our very eyes is charisma, personal lobbying, influence, political calculation about status and face-saving, rhetoric and persuasion.

There is a clear separation between the rational narrative, about what an organisation ‘should’ be focusing on in terms of strategy, governance and impact, and what actually happens in order to achieve any of these things. Managers in organisations may well have a strategic framework, may well produce performance information and ‘results’ and at the same time they will present their organisation to the good, lobby, persuade and twist arms to ensure survival. One might understand both of these approaches as being ‘strategic’, the public and shadow narrative of strategy if you will.

It’s also interesting to note the horror expressed by some commentators that the organisation was financially precarious. During my 30 years or so experience of being involved in the public and voluntary sectors as employee, consultant, board member, and client/patient, I know of very few organisations which are anything other than financially precarious, particularly given our straitened financial times and the culture of bidding for grants with criteria which constantly change. This is a point reiterated in a recent post on The Conversation:

“…the critics have no understanding of the stringent criteria laid on such organisations or the endlessly counter-intuitive and contradictory demands placed on them from funders and auditors.”

If all organisations which are financially unstable were to be closed, we would be in deep trouble in the UK. NHS Foundation Trusts, for example, are predicted to be £2bn in the red by the end of the financial year. It is also interesting to note one story carried by the BBC that the organisation ‘bullied’ ministers to part with more cash – I’m sure that his will come as a big surprise to employees in many, many public sector and voluntary sector organisations whose daily experience is bullying in the opposite direction by donors and civil servants.

What interests me additionally about  the heat generated around the organisation’s collapse, which is not just to do with the organisation itself, is the clashing of variety of different discourses and ideological positions. The case allows for the re-assertion of some taken-for-granted orthodoxies as though we would all agree with them.

Take, for example, the managerialist position, that the organisation collapsed because of a failure of an ability to manage strategically. This argument was made recently by Prof Carey Cooper in the Guardian newspaper. Cooper seizes on the fact that the founder-director was still doing case work with clients at the time of the organisation’s collapse and sees this as a good example of an inability to understand the importance of the ‘strategic role’. It would have been better if the director had ‘spen(t) more time managing and engaging in the strategic role that will take their organisation forward.’ This is a very common, taken-for-granted idea of the abstracted, detached position of a director who has moved away from working with clients and focuses instead on ‘strategy’ with a view from nowhere . Strategy is the ‘big picture’, although there is little insight about the details from which the picture is built up.

I think it would be possible to take entirely different position, particularly in not-for-profit organisations focused on caring, that if senior leaders and managers spent less time in their offices discussing ‘strategy’, whatever is meant by that, and got out and about to find out what was going on in their organisations, their ability to manage them, strategically or otherwise, would be enhanced. I am not making the case that there is a wood or trees choice here, but a perspective of both the airman and the swimmer, as I argued in my recent book. Employees in many pubic and voluntary sector organisations struggle to implement the ‘strategic changes’ deemed necessary by senior managers precisely because they are described from an abstract position away from the detail of the work and often make little sense to practitioners who have a feel for the game.

Whatever we might mean by strategy, it can only arise from a longer term understanding or an organisation’s history and becoming in the context in which it was formed, as well as a detailed grasp of emergent themes of importance which arise in the every day hurly-burly of organisational life. It also involves politics and the struggle over symbolic power in terms of who has the most convincing narrative of ‘what really happened’.

Taking complexity seriously – what difference does it make in organisations? 

Venue: Roffey Park Management Centre

A familiar question from many managers who respond to our presentations on the relevance of insights from the complexity sciences to people organizing, is to ask what their practical application could possibly be. If they consider step-wise prescriptions for success to be ‘concrete’, or are looking for tools and techniques, then the injunction to take every day experience seriously may sound quite ephemeral. If the focus in strategic management is on the ‘big picture’ and wholesale change, then the recommendation to pay attention to how the ‘whole’ emerges in everyday interaction sounds very surprising. However, with some managers what we describe strikes a chord.

Additionally, the overwhelming majority of 60-plus graduates of the Doctor of Management programme have found the experience of paying attention to their practice with others transformative, both for themselves and for the organisations in which they work. Every year participants in annual Complexity and Management conference, who come from a variety of organisational backgrounds, bring many examples of how taking the everyday complexity of organizational life seriously makes a difference to expanding possibilities for action. This experience is matched by an increased focus in the scholarly literature on everyday processes of organizing.

In this year’s conference we will discuss the complexity of practice and the difference it makes to pay attention to what we are all doing together to get things done.

Our key note speakers are:

Session 1

Henry Larsen, Professor of Participatory Innovation at Southern Denmark University, graduate of the DMan programme, ex- member of the Da Capo theatre company. His research interest is in exploring spontaneity and improvisation in the everyday processes of relating.

Professor Karen Norman of Kingston University and doctoral supervisor on the Doctor of Management programme. Karen was formally Chief Nursing Officer in Gibraltar and Director of Nursing for Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust (BSUH). She is also a graduate of the DMan programme and continues to take an interest in drawing on insights from complexity theory to inform clinical practice aimed at improving the experience of health care for patients.

Mark Renshaw Deputy Chief of Patient Safety at Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust, Mark facilitated a range of quality improvement and patient safety initiatives and co – led the BSUH falls reduction programme – an initiative that started after a patient died after falling in hospital. This work has reduced the incidence of patient falls by 48%  over five years.  His role has allowed him to explore his interest in complex systems and how behavioural change in clinical practice emerges out of group dynamics and professional ‘habitus.’

Henry, Karen and Mark will talk about their collaborative research project on reducing patient falls.

Session 2

Pernille Thorup – Pernille is on the senior management team of COK (Center for Offentlig Kompetenceudvikling), which is the strategic partner in public sector development for KL (Kommunernes Landsforening), the organization of Danish Municipalities. She has recently undertaken a three year strategy process within the company, drawing on insights from the complexity sciences, which has now involved COK’s clients. The changes in her own organisation and the discussion this has provoked in Denmark more widely, will form the subject of her talk.

A booking page on the university website will be uploaded in the New Year.

‘What Mead is proposing is a different way of thinking about everyday social interaction, not as observers of experience but rather as participants in experience, the nature of which is self-organising sense-making. He is drawing attention to what we are doing every day in all our actions and arguing that we have developed the habit of ignoring it. How could this be possible? How could we become so blind to something so obvious? Mead’s argument is quite simply that we have developed the habit of regarding the present as something apart from the future and the past. It has become a habit of thought for us to think ourselves as also being apart from our experience as the present movement of time.’ (Griffin, 2002: 179).

The quotation above is taken from Doug Griffin’s book The Emergence of Leadership: Linking Self-Organization and Ethics which was published in 2002, and it points to the focus of this year’s Complexity and Management Conference 2016. As many of you will know, sadly Doug died on 17th December 2015 and we will be celebrating his contribution to the development of the perspective of complex responsive processes and the vibrant life of the Doctor of Management programme at this year’s conference. It was exactly to this area of inquiry, taking everyday complex experience seriously, that Doug was most committed, and the conference is another way of marking and honouring his work.

In this year’s event guest speakers will set out how paying attention to the everyday complexity of experience has made a difference to the work of their particular institution or area of research. The speakers are:

Henry Larsen, Professor of Participatory Innovation at Southern Denmark University, graduate of the DMan programme, ex- member of the Da Capo theatre company. His research interest is in exploring spontaneity and improvisation in the everyday processes of relating.

Professor Karen Norman of Kingston University and doctoral supervisor on the Doctor of Management programme. Karen was formally Chief Nursing Officer in Gibraltar and Director of Nursing for Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust (BSUH).

Mark Renshaw Deputy Chief of Patient Safety at Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust, Mark facilitated a range of quality improvement and patient safety initiatives and co – led the BSUH falls reduction programme – an initiative that started after a patient died after falling in hospital. This work has reduced the incidence of patient falls by 48%  over five years.

Pernille Thorup – Pernille is on the senior management team of COK (Center for Offentlig Kompetenceudvikling), which is the strategic partner in public sector development for KL (Kommunernes Landsforening), the organization of Danish Municipalities. She has recently undertaken a three year strategy process within the company, drawing on insights from the complexity sciences, which has now involved COK’s clients.

We expect the usual richness and diversity of discussion at the conference.

The conference booking page is now live and can be found at: http://tinyurl.com/hougy85 and as usual there is a discount for early-bird bookings.

Look forward to seeing you there.

1 Everyone knows what good leadership is in the abstract and the ideal. But there is no leadership in the  abstract. There is only what you do when you show up at work, and this will never be ideal. So if you are a leader you are always a work in progress making it up as you go along with your colleagues. You won’t always know what to do, and that’s ok. One of the central tasks of leadership is how you work out what needs to be done together.

2 Whenever I work with senior people it is only a matter of time before someone mentions Steve Jobs, Martin Luther King (I have a dream) or Gandhi (be the change you want to see). You are none of these people, nor do you need to be an exceptional world leader to do your job. You might be good at your job and the right person to be leading, and you might just have got lucky or speak the right kind of leaderly language. But the more you play into the ‘exceptional leader’ narrative the more you will invite denigration and opportunities for people to point out that you have feet of clay. As a leader you will have a strong role in people’s fantasies and imaginative life (because of the strength of the leadership discourse) , and this will need to be handled with caution.

3 Relax about the vision thing (see 1 and 2 above). Saints and prophets have visions, and visions of the corporate variety are often so grandiose or vacuous as to be meaningless: everyone wants to be ‘best in class’, ‘world leading’, or ‘internationally renowned’, so what does it mean if you do too? This is not the same as saying that you shouldn’t be ambitious for your organisation, set high standards and want that you and your colleagues do the best you all can. It might be perfectly obvious to you and your senior colleagues what needs to be done, but so might something else in six months time when the game has changed.

4 You are highly unlikely to ‘transform’ anything if you mean by this that you can guarantee bringing about wholesale change for the good. Changes you make will bring about the expected, the unexpected and the unwanted. There will always be unintended consequences, and ‘success’ will depend upon who is judging and when the judgment is made. Large initiatives may make little difference and widespread change might come about from a conversation in a corridor. You must live forwards but can only understand backwards. Leadership, as an academic pointed out, is often about the ‘extraordinisation of the mundane’ – much of what you do as a leader is no different from what most people do at work, but the ordinary conversation you have with a colleague may have special significance because you’re the boss.

5 No one can design organisational culture, not even the most powerful and successful leader, if by culture we mean what we’re all doing together. You can change people’s work, set them targets, punish and cajole, tell them that they have to demonstrate certain behaviours and reward them accordingly, but how they respond to this will be largely beyond your control (unless you live in North Korea). Attempts to manipulate people’s values may well result in resistance, more or less overt, and/or superficial compliance. If people don’t have a choice about their values, rather their values ‘choose them’, then what are you getting in to if you try to dictate your colleagues’ values?

6 And You won’t be able to choose your leadership ‘style’ if by this you think you can rationally chose the kind of leader you want to be before you show up at work, like choosing an outfit. You are much more likely to be moulded by the organisation you work for than to mould it. You will find yourself responding to the game of organisational life in ways which will surprise you as you run to keep up, even if you’re the boss. You’re in charge, but you’re not always in control, not even of yourself.

And the thing which should keep you awake at night is that if you said any of these things in an interview for a leadership role you probably wouldn’t get the job. This is because leadership, as one academic has pointed out, is the subject of much dogmatically stated nonsense which seems to have a grip on the public imagination, not least because some of the tropes about the powers of exceptional leaders are repeated over and over so they are taken for granted as self evident truths. Everyone these days is thought to need leadership training, no matter how lowly their job, and many organisational problems are ascribed to ‘absence of leadership’.  The myths about leadership are now self- sustaining.

Here are three I ideas I take from reading Byung-chul Han’s The Burnout Society in relation to what interests me in complex social processes of identity formation.

The first is his idea that we live in an achievement society rather than a disciplinary society. Byung-chul Han may be taking Foucault to his logical conclusion when he argues that rather than being exploited we have now come to exploit ourselves voluntarily. In contemporary society there is no limit to the extent to which we are encouraged to be flexible accommodating and self-improving. We commit to stretch targets and KPI’s, more for less, smart working, efficiency savings and we make ourselves life-long learners. We focus on our own health and the habitual improvement of the body. Byung-chul Han argues that freedom and constraint now combine in the same individual so we are both the exploiter and the exploited as we endeavor to achieve more and more. As a result, he argues, we risk depression and burn-out. We are encouraged to commit to the dictum that ‘nothing is impossible’, but as a consequence the opposite is also true, that nothing is possible. We can go on improving ourselves, fitting in, meeting new and more exacting targets, getting more for less without end, until we hollow ourselves out. There is no-one else to look to for help or guidance if we are all to be self-starting entrepreneurs. We are entirely responsible for our own futures, we must depend on ourselves rather than others.

I see echoes of this argument in what Svend Brinkmann put forward to the Complexity and Management conference in 2015 (read some of the main themes of the conference here) – the narrative of self-improvement and continuous development militates against ever being rooted, of reflecting and staying put. His injunction was that we should say no to self-development, no to the life coach, no to endless flexibility and fitting in.

The second argument I take from Byung-chul Han is the pressure we are under not to reflect on our current situation of self-exploitation: that contemporary multi-tasking which arises from the bombardment of new technology and the pattern of work does not lead to freedom, but to fragmented attention. Hyperactivity makes us passive, where we are always responding and never initiating. A similar argument is made by Sherry Turkle in her latest book Reclaiming Attention: the Power of Talk in a Digital Age, further arguing that our constant preoccupation with our gadgets makes us avoid eye-contact and face to face communication, diminishing our capacity for empathy. Byung-chul Han riffs with Walter Benjamin on the importance of being bored, of languishing undistracted to be with one’s own thoughts. And he turns Hannah Arendt on her head by pointing out that although she ultimately valorizes action over contemplation, in the end it is contemplation, thinking, which is most help to us ‘when the chips are down’.[1] It is a great skill to learn not to act immediately to a stimulus, but to reflect, resist, or say no. Only through continuous attention can we recognize what is important about a lived life.

The third argument which interests me in Byung-chul Han’s book is that contemporary society society suffers from an excess of positivity, an absence of negative constraint. He understands constraint in Hegelian terms, that we are defined as subjects through the negation of others: we negate the negation of others, and in doing so become ourselves through and with the other. Further drawing on Freud Byung-chul Han argues that our characters were formed through the repression of desires and instincts in order to conform to a disciplinary society. Without the constraint of a disciplinary society, of an orientation to the otherness of others, we are lost to ourselves, suffering from indeterminacy[2] as the German sociologist Axel Honneth puts it. We are plagued with narcissistic disorders where we are unable to find ourselves and each other. As self-defining entrrepreneurs, as achievers, we are supposed to define ourselves; however, are incapable of pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps. Computers, for Byung-chul Han, are symptomatic of the age, since they are the epitome of autistic self-referentiality requiring no otherness to perform. And in a sense we come to mimic them, endlessly performing, exploiting ourselves, in a self-referencing loop.

So, sack your life-coach, take a day off the gym, resist your targets, put your phone down, take your colleagues out for a coffee, reflect together, think about your life, do nothing. Be bored.

References

[1] Arendt, H. (1971) Thinking and Moral Considerations, Social Research, 38:3, 417-446.

[2] Honneth, A. (1999) Suffering from Indeterminacy: an Attempt at a Reactualization of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Amsterdam: Van Gorcum.

A friend alerted me to a website for a consultancy which claims to be offering new insights on management for a new world of work. Apologies for what sounds like, and no doubt is, a caricatured paraphrase of what I found, but here is what I think the site is saying:

We live in a networked world. There’s a lot of change. There is going to be more change and top down command and control is now an old paradigm of management. Some of this change is good, some of it isn’t, but mostly it’s good. But what we need to do is be more aware of the changes and prepare to design more change of the kind that we want. This will mean spreading power around a bit more and being alert to complexity. Leaders need to have visions and set targets to achieve them, then they coach their followers. They will need to be deeply aware and mindful. Followers need to work out how to be empowered and of service. They too will need to be deeply aware and mindful. If we all trust each other a bit more and deal better with complexity we can have more meaningful conversations. Then we’ll get the future that we want. In a more networked world we need: Knowledge. Trust. Credibility.  A focus on results.

This way of thinking is not just confined to people selling consultancy services, but extends to academia as well. In more scholarly form there is a paper from 2007 by Mary Uhl-Bien, Russ Marion, and Bill McKelvey[1], three eminent scholars who bring in the complexity sciences extensively in their work. The paper argues that top-down bureaucratic forms of management were effective for the industrial age but a new form of leadership is needed for the knowledge age. This requires the development of a new framework for leadership, which the authors term Complexity Leadership Theory (CLT). They then draw on Comples Adaptive Systems (CAS) theory to argue that organizations are CAS which have a unique and socially constructed ‘persona’. What is needed is a theory of leadership, rather than merely focusing on leaders, which encourages adaptive and emergent outcomes. The required leadership framework needs to distinguish between administrative leadership that serves to coordinate organizational activity, and adaptive leadership to refer to the leadership that occurs in emergent, informal adaptive dynamics throughout the organization. Finally, the authors claim that the framework needs to address adaptive challenges rather than technical problems, since the former and not amenable to authoritative fiat and involve managers trying to find their way out of problems they may not have encountered before. They adapt Ashby’s (1960) law of requisite variety to argue for a law of requisite complexity, i.e. that the degree of complexity inside an organization needs to match the degree of complexity outside the organization. So complex problems demand complex responses and it is the role of the leadership framework to:

…(seek) to foster CAS dynamics while at the same time enabling control structures appropriate for coordinating formal organizations and producing outcomes appropriate to the vision and mission of the system. It seeks to integrate complexity dynamics and bureaucracy, enabling and coordinating, exploration and exploitation, CAS and hierarchy, and informal emergence and top-down control.

Readers of this blog will probably be aware that one of the assumptions I would take issue with in this article is that it is helpful to think of organisation as CAS, or even that they are systems at all. Present, too, are the usual dualisms: that there is a clear distinction between leadership and management, that there is a difference between administrative and adaptive leadership for contingent conditions, and that there are bureaucratic structures and emergent processes. Nor would I consider emergence to be a special category of human activity which is the opposite of something planned or structured. Instead I would say that whatever emerges, emerges because of the activity of feeling human bodies acting locally, whether they are planning or undertaking some other kind of activity. Human beings are constantly responding and adapting to each other all the time. As with the consultancy site, so here in this article, there is an assumption that emergent processes are inevitably creative and innovative: but of course they may also be destructive and regressive. Only time will tell and the judgement depends on who is judging.

There appears to me to be something of a bitter contrast on this focus on what can only be described as Millennial thinking, where we are invited to prepare ourselves for the coming of a New Age of Enlightenment ushered in by new technology and widespread acceptance that we have to be nicer to each other, with the daily experience of many workers in the public sector in the UK for example. So in schools, hospitals, the NHS, Higher Education establishments, many INGOs and voluntary sector organsiations workers are increasingly scrutinised, set targets, admonished for not working harder, for not adding enough ‘value’. Organisations, even ones which are run along lines of use value as opposed to exchange value (to borrow from Marx) are now predicated on bottom line calculations using proxy metrics. In these organisations top down control is getting worse, not better.

Of course I accept that there are many, many organisations which are not run like this and where it is still possible to have humane working environments. Indeed, I was invited to work in one relatively recently, an engineering company, where workers and managers seemed to me to be struggling purposefully to organise themselves better and to make sense of what their difficulties were. But it is hard to reach the conclusion more generally that we are at the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius.

How might we explain the discrepancy and the persistence of this kind of utopian thinking despite the reality for many workers in many organisations? One explanation would be the deep vein of religious yearning that management literature has always tapped into with its language of visions, transformation, obedience (leadership/followership), and transcendent wholes. When organisational worlds have been flattened and emiserated,  an environment where people treat each other with respect, listen to each other and trust one another does sound especially appealing.

The second explanation has similar utopian/Christian roots in Henri Saint-Simon but passes through the positivism of Auguste Comte, that human knowledge develops through higher and stages (in Comte’s case he argued that knowledge has passed through a theological, metaphysical then a positive (scientific) stage). So the idea of a higher form of human interconnection, which bypasses the messiness of power and politics, rivalry and jealousy, competitiveness, and in the case of BHS in the UK, corporate looting, has an intrinsic appeal.

So although both the consultancy website and the academic article quoted above seem to offer something new and different, one could argue that they offer something very old and recognisable: a yearning for utopia and saintly ways of being with each other based on respect, tolerance and deep listening.

Wouldn’t that be great.

[1] Uhl-Bien, M., Marion. R. and McKelvey, B (2007) Complexity Leadership Theory: Shifting leadership from the industrial age to the knowledge era, Leadership Institute Faculty Publications, Nebraska University Digital Commons, 1/4/2007.

I watched some of the final debate over Britain’s referendum to Remain/Leave last night and wondered at the wild clapping and cheering that greeted references to Britain’s putative ‘independence’ if we vote leave. Boris Johnson referred to this coming Friday morning as potentially Britain’s ‘independence day’. The setting was bound to amplify dynamics in a crowd of 6,000 or so people, particularly with a  debate which swtiches between poles. There is no middle position here: Britain will either remain, or leave. A large, public televised space is not a forum which naturally lends itself to nuance or subtle argument. But in thinking about the intense nationalist emotion that this debate stirs up, particularly for Leavers, I was reminded of Norbert Elias’ digression on nationalism set out in the The Germans.

If The Civilising Process is a work which explores how we develop processes of social control along with self-control, how we become civilized, The Germans explores exactly the opposite process. How is it that the civilizing process can go into reverse and descend into barbarism? As a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, this was clearly a matter of direct personal concern for Elias. As for his compatriots Hannah Arendt and SH Foulkes, making sense of the dualisms of human behavior, processes promoting humane ways of coexistence or the opposite, tyranny and barbarism, became a life-time preoccupation.

Elias argues that the ascendancy of the middle class to positions of national leadership from the 18^th Century onwards deemphasized the role of the king or prince in people’s allegiances. The practice of politics and power required other ways of uniting citizens in large collectivities where people could not know each other directly, nor could they simply identify with a symbolic figurehead alone . What is needed then, is a way of talking about the collectivity, the nation, which revolves around certain words and symbols, which foster emotional collective bonds between large numbers of people who are strangers to one another in the same country:

“So, the emotional bonds of individuals with the collectivity which they form with each other crystallize and organize themselves around common symbols which do not require any factual explanations, which can and must be regarded as absolute values which are not to be questioned and which form focal points of a common belief system. To call them into question – to cast doubt on the common belief in own’s own sovereign collectivity as a high, if not the highest possible, value – means deviancy, a breach of trust; it can lead one to become an ostracized outsider, if nothing worse.” (1997: 146)

Adducing the symbols of the collective, which in Britain often revolves around the flag, the Queen, appeals to ‘British values’,  it is noticeable that the Sun newspaper still thinks it necessary to recruit the Queen to the Brexit cause) is likely to provoke very strong feelings in people. There is much to be gained by doing so if there are no obvious rational reasons for calling on the collectivity: it is very difficult to explain in factual terms why and how one nation is morally superior to any other. The appeal to Britishness is a kind of short-hand, then, a way of bypassing a reasoned argument.

Of course, these social processes producing nationalism, a heroic national ‘we identity’, do not just occur in Britain, but in any country of a certain size and stage of development, according to Elias. Nationalist belief is usually backward-looking, and is used as a way of preserving the established order even if the social movement rallied in the name of the national heritage claims to overthrow the existing order. This too, we notice in the UK, with the Outers claiming that a vote for Leave is a blow against the establishment, even though they are the establishment. According to Elias: ‘In a latent or manifest form, nationalism constitutes one of the most powerful, perhaps the most powerful, social beliefs of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.’ (op. cit.: 149) Once unleashed, these feelings can be self-amplifying and are no longer under the control of individuals or groups who seek to recruit them to their cause. They elicit a kind of love of the collective, but also a form of self-love: anyone who feels intensely British is at the same time revering themselves for being part of the heroic group. The creation of an in-group also produces an out-group through exclusionary processes which involve scapegoat-seeking, and may even cause violent behavior to protect the sanctity of the heroic group, which we experienced in Britain last week with the murder of a British politician.

Elias notes that nationalist feelings are not the only set of beliefs that form us as late modern citizens and which become our internalized habitus. In the West we are also brought up in a humanist, egalitarian moral code which values the individual human being as such, and encourages us to treat other individuals as we would expect to be treated according to a strict moral code. Both become facets of our characters which can call out feelings of guilt and bad conscience if breached. In this sense social norms can be contradictory and potentially set us at war with ourselves and with each other.

“People in societies whose ruling elites stand in the traditions of the industrial middle and working classes are generally brought up to believe in a moral code of norms according to which it is under all circumstances wrong to kill, maim or attack human beings physically, or to defraud, lie, steal or cheat. They are at the same time taught to believe that it is right to do all of these things, and to sacrifice their own lives, if that is found necessary in the interests of the sovereign society they form with each other.” (op. cit.: 161)

Elias draws attention to the difference between the British and the German way of resolving potential clashes of values. Traditionally Germans thought that it had to be either/or, while Britons have been taught to make what appear to Germans as muddled compromises. These pragmatic and negotiated ways of thinking about and resolving our individual and social dilemmas are increasingly under pressure, particularly when set in the context of longer term polarizing processes in UK society.

Both humanist and nationalist values are clearly visible in the daily back and forth of political debate, with perhaps nationalist arguments more visible in the Leave camp. But both tendencies show up on both sides. The forthcoming referendum provokes very strong emotions and differing interpretations of what it means to be British as people struggle over the ‘cult value’ of Britishness. For Leavers, often draping themselves in the Union Jack (literally in some photos of Leave rallies), claiming Britishness calls into play the paradox that Elias noted about nationalist feelings: that strongly identifying with a particular kind of British ‘we identity’ immediately produces an excluded group, people who do not share it, in this case immigrants to the UK, or perhaps EU ‘bureaucrats’.

There are lots of reasons that could be given for leaving the EU, many of them progressive. But I would argue that making a strong nationalist case for Britain leaving has automatically produced an out-group, or groups (migrants, EU bureaucrats, the ‘establishment’), in order to sustain it. It has led to self-amplifying and uncontrollable feelings, particularly towards those who are thought not to believe in a specific formulation of Britishness. It has also led to quasi-narcissistic fantasies, particularly in the Leave group, about the unique ability of the British people to make their way ‘on their own’ in the world, because of our inherent moral superiority. To an extent, these social processes are inevitable, but this is not to say that we can’t recognize what is happening to us and find ways of thinking and talking about them.

References

Elias, N. (1997) The Germans, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Complexity and Management Conference 2017 –

2^nd– 4^th June: Roffey Park Management Centre

Human beings are born into groups and spend most of their working lives participating in them. Groups can be creative and improvisational, transforming who we think we are, and they may also be destructive and undermining. They hold the potential for both tendencies.

Many employers emphasise the importance of teamwork, yet employees in organizations are often managed, developed and assessed as though they were autonomous individuals.  And although many organisational mission statements include aspirations to be creative and innovative, it is a rare to attend a  meeting without a particular end in view, where participants feel able to explore the differences and difficulties that arise when they work together.

Meanwhile organizational development (OD) literature tends to idealize, and assumes that the best kind of organizations are those where staff ‘align’ with each other and learn to communicate in ways which bypass power and politics. They are offered step-wise tools and techniques to help them communicate with ‘openness and transparency’, so they can speak the truth and understand each other harmoniously. Conflict and power struggles are then topics that are avoided or ignored. The danger of the individualizing and idealizing tendencies in organisations is that they may leave employees feeling deskilled and unconfident about how to work creatively in groups.

At the 2017 Complexity and Management Conference we will discuss practical ways of working in groups, which assume that human interaction is necessarily imperfect, ambiguous and conflictual, and this contributes to the complex evolution of organizational life.

Keynote speakers this year: Dr Martin Weegmann, Dr Karina Solsø Iversen and Professor Nick Sarra

Martin Weegmann is a Consultant Clinical Psychologist and Group Analyst, who has specialised in substance misuse and personality disorders and is a well-known trainer. His latest books are: The World within the Group: Developing Theory for Group Analysis (Karnac, 2014) and Permission to Narrate: Explorations in Group Analysis, Psychoanalysis & Culture (Karnac 2016). He is currently working on a new edited book, Psychodynamics of Writing.

Karina Solsø Iversen is graduate of the Doctor of Management programme and an experienced consultant working in Denmark. Karina’s consultancy work is based on the practice of taking experience seriously as a way of working with leadership and organizational development. She has co-authored a Danish introductory book to the theory of complex responsive processes of relating, which has gained a lot of attention in Danish communities interested in complexity. Karina is also an external lecturer at Copenhagen Business School.

Nick Sarra is a Consultant Psychotherapist working in the NHS and a group analyst specialising in organisational consultancy,debriefing and mediation within the workforce. He works on three post graduate programmes  at the School of Psychology, Exeter University and is a Visiting Professor at the University of Hertfordshire.

Further details from c.mowles@herts.ac.uk. Booking begins early 2017.

Chris Mowles is visiting Australia the week beginning 12th December and will be running a two day intense workshop and a breakfast meeting with 10000hours .

The two day workshop is entitled:

LEADING IN UNCERTAINTY – 13/14th December

The workshop is suitable for experienced leaders, managers and consultants from all kinds of organizations. It includes a mixture of seminars, break-out discussions, and real time exploration of examples from participants’ own organizations.

Chris will draw on insights from the complexity sciences developed by Ralph Stacey in the perspective known as complex responsive processes, which informs this blog.

Participants can expect to gain basic insights into the complexity sciences understood in social terms, and to experience the importance of reflection and reflexivity in relation to their particular organizational contexts.

To find out more follow this link: http://10000hours.com/chrismowles/

Breakfast meeting Thursday 15th December

10,000 Hours will host a breakfast meeting for experienced leaders, managers and consultants wishing to hear about the what difference understanding organisational life as complex responsive processes of relating can make to the task of leading of managing.

Evening seminar UTS Thursday 15th December

Chris will give a seminar hosted by UTS to interested academic colleagues about some of the difficulties of sustaining critical management education in the UK. He will talk in particular about the  contribution of the Doctor of Management programme at the university of Hertfordshire.

Lunchtime seminar RMIT Melbourne 16th December

Chris will give a similar seminar to interested academic colleagues in Melbourne at lunchtime in RMIT.

Working in groups: what practical difference does it make to take complexity seriously?

One day introductory workshop on complexity and management Friday 2^nd June.

2017Complexity and Management Conference 2-4^th June 2017.

The booking page is now live and can be found by clicking this link. There is a £50 discount for booking before April 30^th 2017.

‘The present historical situation shows clearly that human problems cannot be solved in isolation but only through concerted effort of the whole of humanity. The future of the human species may well be made or marred according to whether or not it is able to grasp this fact and act upon it while there is still time. Anything we can learn as to the relationships of persons towards each other, and of groups towards each other, is therefore, or great therapeutic significance.’ (Foulkes, 1947/2002)

Foulkes encouraged us to think about the importance of groups and ways of relating 80 years ago in the wake of the WWII – I wonder what he would have thought of our current predicaments. With increased social division, the rise of the far Right and demagoguery, we would be naïve to think that recent political upheavals in Europe and America do not also show up in different forms in organisational life.

Foulkes invited us to be more scientific about groups, seeing them  as a resource, as a means to liberate ourselves from unhelpful, repetitive behaviour, which may be informed by our primitive responses to each other. He thought it possible that we could learn better to adjust to each other and gain insight into our often stuck and unhelpful behaviour.  But by ‘adjustment’ he did not mean that we simply conform mindlessly. Rather, adjustment is made possible from our insight that we are interdependent and through the development of more helpful, negotiated ways of going on together.

The 2017 Complexity and Management Conference takes inspiration from Foulkes, but broadens his thinking by drawing on perspectives from organizational theory, sociology and philosophy. Our intention is to explore the complex responsive processes of relating in groups and to think about their relevance for our everyday experience of organising.

This year we are also offering an additional one day introductory workshop on Friday 2^nd June. This workshop is suitable to anyone who would like to attend the conference but has had little exposure to the ideas informing the perspective of complex responsive processes. It is an opportunity to learn some of the basic concepts and to think about them in relation to your experience at work. The workshop is freestanding, and there is no requirement to attend the conference afterwards.

The conference itself runs as usual from 7pm Friday 2^nd June till after lunch on Sunday 4^th June. The conference fee includes all board and lodging and will have its usual mix of key note speeches, break-out discussions and informal socialising.

Key note speakers this year are:

Dr Martin Weegmann, who is a Consultant Clinical Psychologist and Group Analyst, and has specialised in substance misuse and personality disorders and is a well-known trainer. His latest books are: The World within the Group: Developing Theory for Group Analysis (Karnac, 2014) and Permission to Narrate: Explorations in Group Analysis, Psychoanalysis & Culture (Karnac 2016).

Dr Karina Iversen is a graduate of the Doctor of Management programme and an experienced consultant working in Denmark. She has co-authored a Danish introductory book on complex responsive processes of relating, which has gained a lot of attention in Danish communities interested in complexity. Karina is also an external lecturer at the Copenhagen Business School.

Professor Nick Sarra is a Consultant Psychotherapist working in the NHS and a group analyst specialising in organisational consultancy, debriefing and mediation within the workforce. He works on three post graduate programmes at the School of Psychology, Exeter University and is a Visiting Professor at the University of Hertfordshire.

If there are any queries then please contact Prof Chris Mowles: c.mowles@herts.ac.uk

The participants who attend the annual Complexity and Management conference experience the same dynamics as members of any other group, even if it’s a temporary group. For example, one repeating theme at the conference is the established/outsider dynamic of those who have been through the Doctor of Management programme, or are currently on it, and those who haven’t. Participants who have been exposed to the programme because they are graduates, or because they are regular conference attenders are likely to talk in a way which may feel exclusionary to those who are new. Almost every year, new attendees at the conference raise the question as to whether we could have done more to make them feel welcome. There is always the ghost of the DMan-demon at the conference.

For this reason we are holding a one day introductory workshop on Friday 2^nd June, to present some of the key ideas which inform the perspective of complex responsive processes of relating. It is a public workshop open to all, not just those who will go on to attend the conference For those who do, it may, or may not, make a difference to the quality of their participation. The conference begins the same evening with supper at 7pm.

You can book for the one day workshop, for the workshop and conference, or just for the conference here. There is a discount for early-bird booking before April 30^th. For more details on the workshop, continue reading below:

The one day workshop will be run by Professor Ralph Stacey, and Professor Chris Mowles. Ralph Stacey founded the DMan programme along with Doug Griffin and Patricia Shaw. He started publishing on complexity and management in the early 90s and his substantial body of work continues to shape and inform the evolving perspective which combines insights from the natural and social sciences. You can see his list of publications on this blog. Chris is currently director of the DMan programme, having taken over from Ralph in 2011 and has added to the oeuvre – the list of his publications is also on this blog.

The day will be organized along these lines, and will require participants to bring examples of some of the dilemmas they are facing at work. The workshop will start at 9.30am.

Session 1         Some key insights from the complexity sciences for thinking about    managing organizations. Ralph Stacey

Session 2         Participants discuss these ideas in relation to their practical experience at work.                        Plenary.

Session 3         Some key theories from the social sciences: power, process and communication.  Chris Mowles          

                        Q and A.

 Session 4         Experiencing uncertainty live: reflective group to consider the dynamics of this particular group in relation to the theories which have been explored during the day.

Finish at 5pm.

Details of the conference itself to follow.

Most Saturday mornings when I’m here I go to the farmers’ market in the local primary school which my kids attended. I was intrigued to see this appended to the door.

The first thing that struck me about it is how confusing it is: who, exactly is the audience? Is it the children, the staff, both?  What would a child of five or six make of it (given that this 50-something adult finds it difficult enough to comprehend)? Mostly the poster encourages us to live in the present – this is a new day, and we can make a new start on what happened yesterday. But surely today isn’t just a blank page for us to make an impression on because we are so bound up with others: there are all kinds of things unresolved from yesterday which may trip us up today. There are responsibilities and demands beyond learning in school to which we will need to respond. The poster invites us to learn from yesterday, although it’s not exactly clear what we might learn, and how we might do so if we’re exclusively focused on today. We’re encouraged to stop stressing about tomorrow, but we are supposed to stress about today. There are precisely 1440 minutes from which to extract the maximum, as if we were milking a cow. This creates what we might think of as the Extractor’s Paradox: that the more focused we are on getting the maximum out of our time, the less likely we are to do so. It’s just like the pursuit of the butterfly of happiness – the more you chase it, the more it eludes you. And 1440 minutes make 24 hours – shouldn’t we sleep? How anxiety-provoking to lie awake at night worrying about making the best of lying awake not sleeping. Today we’re going to be the best version of us, but how will we know? What happens if we’re not? Who decides? Will we find ourselves endless repeating the day over and over again, like Groundhog Day, until we reach enlightenment?

I realise that this is supposed to be harmless encouragement to everyone in a school to do their best. Unfortunately I find in it the conventional anxiety narrative of the neoliberal society: motivational, slight sinsiter platitudes as a veneer over relentless striving. Don’t rest; maximise; extract; be the best you can be; never stop remaking yourself; yesterday’s achievements count for nothing, because you have to prove yourself all over again today; the world’s your oyster; you can achieve anything.

I know that good schools, particularly ones with very young kids such as primary schools, accept kids however they turn up, ‘best self’, average self or even worst self, partly because they know kids bring with them all kinds of invisible baggage that has been packed for them, unconsciously at home. The school will cope with the cornucopia of selves who present. They acknowledge that school life can sometimes be tedious, that sometimes kids will be bored and will find themselves staring out of the window, and that they won’t be 100% motivated everyday. Kids are likely to enjoy playing and hanging out with their mates in the playground as much as learning in a committed way. They’ll be happy when they are completely absorbed in what they are doing, with no particular end in view. Learning will sometimes be deliberate, and sometimes accidental. And one of the most important lessons will be about learning to rub along with others, being in the mess of life with other people, noticing oneself in relation to others. We bring out the best in each other, we bring out the worst in each other: that’s what we have to learn to live with in school.

What are the pressures in contemporary life which make it difficult to be in groups?

A couple of weeks ago I worked with a group of senior managers from a British university. They told me about the changes they had noticed in the undergraduate student population over the last decade or so, which point to greater alienation and distress amongst students. Undergraduates seem to have much more difficulty in getting to university on time, in organising themselves, in handing in their work complete and in order. The new student accommodation, which this particular university has recently built, has communal spaces which are largely unused. Mental distress seems much more prevalent, and a higher proportion of students seems to lack the ability to communicate with their peers or with teaching staff. And when students are asked to work in groups they struggle to do so; one lecturer had asked his students to work in teams on a task and found some students trying to evict weaker members of their group so that that they could get better marks. Students were rather nonplussed that they were required to co-operate together.

Is this just a tale of inter-generational misunderstanding, a middle-aged lament about the decline in standards? Or are we witnessing the effects of longer term individualising processes, amplified by technology, which leaves us less skilled in groups and less confident in the art of conversation?

The Complexity and Management Conference 2017 will explore some of these themes in relation to the everyday activity of organising together: we discuss in groups as a way of thinking about being in groups.

There are only ten days to go before the end of the early bird discount, which ceases at 5pm on Friday 28^th April .  You can find the booking page clicking this link.

Conference Agenda

The conference begins at 7pm with a drinks reception and dinner on Friday 2^nd June, following the one day workshop on complexity and management.

Our first keynote speaker, Dr Martin Weegmann, has written extensively about the potential of groups and group therapy in addressing what he terms ‘modern dilemmas…as new forms of anxiety replace older forms.’ (2014). He will be speaking at 9.00am on Saturday 3^rd June. Thereafter we will divide into smaller discussion groups to think about what Martin has said.

After lunch on Saturday, Dr Karina Solsø Iversen will present some of the consultancy dilemmas she faces in her work in collaboration with Professor Nick Sarra. Again, in the later afternoon session we will divide into smaller groups to think and discuss.

The work of the Saturday conference will finish at 5pm and dinner will be at 8pm.

On Sunday morning at 9am Prof Chris Mowles will draw together some of the themes of the preceding day, and participants will once again divide into smaller groups.

The conference ends with a final plenary between 12pm and 1pm on Sunday followed by lunch.

All board and lodging is covered by the conference fee. Any conference delegate wishing to convene a sub-group to present a paper or talk about their work can do so by writing to me and putting forward a suggestion.

Look forward to meeting you there.

References

Weegmann, M. (2014) The World Within the Group, London: Karnac Books.

This is to give  early notification that next year’s Complexity and Management Conference will take place at Roffey Park between 8-10^th June 2018.

The conference will be held to mark the retirement of Ralph Stacey from the university and from the faculty of the Doctor of Management programme.

There will be more details in the autumn to give more details of the conference topic and the other key note speakers in addition to Ralph.

I listened to the eminent evolutionary biologist and New Atheist Richard Dawkins promoting his new book, Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist, on the radio. He discussed the role of scientific method and evidence, particularly in relation to the Brexit vote. He began by saying that nothing so important as staying in, or leaving the EU should hinge on a binary yes/no vote. But he then went on to extol the virtues of scientific method, which in his radio interview, and in the introduction to the book, he argues should be the preeminent method for making decisions about the world, including Brexit. We should seek out the evidence, public and private, and make our decision according to that. For Dawkins, scientific method is predicated on removing prejudice and gut feeling, indeed all feelings, from rational decision-making and is as relevant to making political decision making as it is to discovering more about the natural world. The best example of a method which does this is the double blind randomised control trial, the gold standard of medical research. He declared that he didn’t want his politicians to be emotional, but rather he wanted them to make the best possible decision, rationally, and on the basis of the best possible evidence.

Further, in the introductory chapter to his book he praises scientific method and compares philosophy unfavourably with chemistry. It might be the case, he says, that a philosophy department will advertise for a professor of continental philosophy, but can you imagine a chemistry department advertising for a professor of continental chemistry? Science is everywhere the same, in Delhi or in London. In setting out his argument like this, Dawkins reveals himself to believe in a unified theory of science. Scientific method is equally applicable in social and natural settings: all biology is reducible to chemistry, and all chemistry to physics. He believes that comparing chemistry and philosophy, one way of theorising against many ways of theorising, casts philosophy in an unfavourable light, and in so doing he makes an ideological claim on his readers.

There is a different post to be written about whether scientists do indeed use just one method, whether there is only one way of finding out about what we take reality to be, and whether scientific experimentation isn’t also guided by chance, gut feeling and practical judgement. There is also an inquiry concerning how our affective, somatic experience is the basis of rational decision-making, as neurosurgeon Antonio Damasio has explored elsewhere.

But in this post I want to examine Dawkins’ claim in the light of the topic in which he introduced it – the Brexit vote. In what way would it make sense to say that our approach to the decision to leave or to stay in the EU could be made scientifically, rationally, without emotion and according to the best evidence? This is particularly the case when the very reason we had the vote in the first place was driven by value and emotion-laden questions of identity, and what we take to be moral ways of organising our society, as well as for reasons of political strategy and competitive advantage? What kinds of evidence are available in such a political and contested context,  where everything is in flux? And if the answer to these questions is no, it is not possible to decide using the method Dawkins recommends, or only a partial yes, what other ways are available to us to make up our minds, given that not voting would also have had consequences? If it is not possible to be totally rational, is it then possible to be reasonable, in the sense of finding reasons for acting one way or another? Not to act rationally does not imply acting irrationally, and nor is the only response to emotion-laden questions to try to expunge emotion altogether. Rather than assuming that emotion is always unhelpful, it might be more productive to think systematically about what all the emotion might be about.

I think this is an important area of inquiry given that, on a smaller scale, this is the kind of dilemma which faces managers in organisations on a daily basis, particularly in human services, where sometimes none of the options are good ones, the evidence is partial or non-existent, every aspect of the problem is contested, but a decision is needed anyway.

Firstly, no country has ever left the EU before: there are no prior examples to assess. And if there had been examples, would the specific circumstances of the UK and its history make them irrelevant? We are in new and uncertain territory. Secondly, there are an infinite number of variables, political, social, economic which make it impossible to isolate any single process and argue that if X then Y. A number of economic institutions model possible outcomes, but all are limited and based on assumptions which need further exploration; they are likely to be based on extrapolations of what we currently know. As I mentioned in a previous post, there are too many variables to build into a predictive model of what is likely to happen in such a complex situation. And with such a wealth of possibilities, and so much data to choose from, it is difficult to develop a neutral model which is free of ideological assumptions.

In situations where we are trying to make up our minds about something both complex and unknown, where the evidence, such as it is, is partial, and to present it involves making choices which inevitably reveal value positions, how might we proceed?

Taking a pragmatic perspective on a situation like the Brexit vote assumes that there is no value-neutral position, no God’s-eye view, but rather that every position in a politically contested situation is a value position. What is important, then, is not to claim objectivity but to try and make as many of one’s value positions and assumptions clear. In terms of method, sometimes it is only possible to do this in relation to other people’s value positions and through inquiry. In other words, by asking questions of one’s ‘opponents’, not as a way of defeating their argument, but rather making it clearer both to you and to them, it might be possible to develop a deeper understanding of claims and clarify one’s own position in relation to the arguments made. The movement is dialectical: making your position clearer to you helps me make my position clearer to me. This would also involve investigating each other’s evidential claims as to whether, say, immigration does or does not undercut wages, as far as the data can support this investigation.

What of the situation where different sides in the discussion claim that the others are telling lies, that everyone else’s arguments and reasons are not to be trusted, as is the case in the Brexit vote? In this context, then, it might be helpful to think both historically and sociologically. Who belongs to this particular thought collective, how did they come to be, what are their principal arguments? Who are their friends and what other groups are they associated with? On what assumptions do their arguments rest? And as we would  in a court of law, to what degree do we consider them reliable witnesses? In other words, to trust someone’s argument also involves making judgements about character, asking questions about how a particular respondent’s history of relating with me, or with others, calls out trust or otherwise. If someone has one position on an important matter one day, and the opposite position tomorrow, and gives no reason for the change, to what degree can I trust today’s position?

Lastly and pragmatically, rather than denying emotions as being helpful in this situation it might be interesting instead to consider my own emotional response to the claims being made about what it means to be British, to take back control, to be independent, and to evaluate whether I experience resonance or not. To what degree do I identify with the ‘we’ identity which is being evoked? In other words, my emotional response is further ‘data’ to consider in knowing how to vote for what I consider to be best for ‘us’. This is not necessarily an isolated activity but could be a further theme to explore with my own particular thought collective or community of inquiry.

Dawkins argues that there is only one scientific method based on rationality, objectivity and squeezing out emotions, and that this method helps us in all situations, even the Brexit vote. In contrast I have made a case for dialectical engagement, historical and sociological investigation, judgements of character and taking emotions seriously, both mine and other people’s. A pragmatic approach to complex decision-making invovles systematic thinking using whatever thinking tools might be useful in the circumstances. There is no one best way. In other words, events like the Brexit vote, or everyday complex situations faced by managers in organisations require a variety of methods to know how to go on. There is no position which offers a privileged perspective on the messy situation I find myself in with others, ‘objective’ or others. Instead the best that can be achieved is a reflexive engagement with what we think we are doing and who we think we are becoming, and a greater wisdom about and insight into what we feel about who we are becoming.

After the interview with Dawkins on BBC Radio 4 covered in the last post, the argument about evidence and political decision-making took further bizarre turns. The next day John Humphreys interviewed the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, who was asked to comment on Dawkins’ views. Latterly, two researchers were asked to comment further on the discussion. One worked at a religious research institute and the other for an organisation promoting the dissemination of science. As listeners to the BBC we were  led inexorably to think that the only alternative to a scientific perspective on Brexit and evidence, and this a reductive view of science, was to take a faith position. We believe in God or we believe in science. Both are metaphysical positions in the sense that you have to declare your faith in one or the other before engaging with a way forward.

In the last post I began to sketch out a method which depends not on one or other type of belief, in science or in God, but systematic inquiry which draws on a variety of methods to reach temporary conclusions to enable ‘us’ to take the next step. I termed this a pragmatic perspective in the sense of drawing on pragmatic philosophy. Pragmatism assumes that we are already and always caught up in the problem at hand, and if it’s a social problem then there is nowhere to stand which is somehow outside of the set of circumstances we need to act into. It assumes that there is no obvious way to find our way through the thicket except through systematic reflection on trial and error, past experience, the opinions of a trusted community putting forward convincing and perhaps contradictory arguments. This is partial, messy and unsatisfactory, but to rely on one approach alone is even more inadequate.

A variety of thinkers have pointed out the limitations of philosophical thinking for dealing with lived reality, but not in the way that Dawkins does in the introduction to his new book. In his book Dawkins assumes that philosophy is a bit like religion, an outdated means of thinking which science has now replaced. Science has one approach to finding out about the world the way it really is: it finds out the truth. Philosophy has its own critics, and from within its own ranks. I deal with one of them in this post: Hannah Arendt. Arendt’s critique is not concerned that philosophy is an inadequate discipline to discover the truth, but that it is too preoccupied with it.  For her there are limitless ways to discover our humanity and a preoccupation with the truth tends towards  authoritarianism and isolationism. By being over-concerned with truth philosophy loses touch with the world, and at times with common sense. it is this kind of thinking that I detect in Dawkins.

Arendt, like the pragmatists, noted the way that acting has always come second to thinking since the philosophy of Plato. And for her this was because Plato experienced very directly how thinking, and encouraging thinking in others, led to the death of Socrates. Socrates moved among citizens of the polis inviting them to express their opinions and reflect upon them in a time when politics and philosophy were much more closely connected. Thinking led to action, and action to more thinking.  However, this exploratory philosophising conducted in public led to his downfall. The Platonic utopia, then, is made safe for the philosopher king who can withdraw into solitude and think about truth beyond the reach of politics. And it is this withdrawal into solitude post-Plato which most distinguishes philosophy from politics and most concerns Arendt, because it has a tendency towards authoritarianism. This is evident in Plato’s Republic and also in Dawkins’ views on how to make political decisions. They both have a tyrannical purity which fights shy of the messy reality of staying in relation with other human beings. Remember that for Dawkins no feelings are relevant to politics.

In an essay on Arendt’s political philosophy, Margaret Canovan[1] argues that Arendt continued to work at the distinctions between politics and philosophy for most of her life. For Arendt, politics is a public activity and is concerned with entertaining many points of view. It involves taking into account a plural view of human activity to achieve an ‘enlarged mentality’ for all those participating. Meanwhile, philosophy, traditionally conceived, and like science, has been concerned with truth, which involves the philosopher withdrawing to think by herself. It will often lead to the creation of a system of thought. For Arendt these systems of thought can be obfuscating and totalising.  They may  lead, as in the case of her ex-lover and teacher Martin Heidegger, to a withdrawal from the world and from common sense. The tendency to systematise arose, she argued, because:

‘Philosophers have always been tempted to accept the criterion of truth—so valid for science and everyday life—as applicable to their own rather extraordinary business as well.’[2]

Arendt was concerned how the single-minded search for truth can blind us to the reality with which we are trying to contend. Listening to Dawkins talking about the need to find an evidential base for politics evoked the same feeling in me: it was a search for truth which defies common sense.

An alternative way of undertaking philosophy for Arendt, exemplified by her friend and mentor Karl Jaspers, is that it is a method which is not aimed at finding truth, but in facilitating an endless conversation and a contemplation of the many ways in which human life manifests itself. Expressed simply, Arendt put it thus in the preface to her tribute to Heidegger[3]:

‘Thinking does not bring knowledge as do the sciences.

Thinking does not produce usable practical wisdom.

Thinking does not solve the riddles of the universe.

Thinking does not endow us directly with the power to act.’³

Thinking can be done on one’s own, but the process benefits from exchange with others: by communicating we can become aware of different perspectives on our shared social reality. In this sense philosophy is a process without end: thinking leads to talking and acting, which leads to more thinking. It facilitates continuous meaning-making.

According to Arendt, the quest for truth, whether it be expressed as scientific method, or a systemic form of philosophy, can obscure the plurality of what we need to contend with in any complex social reality. Paradoxically, the quest for truth when pursued reductively  gets in the way of finding a more truthful account of the difficulties we may find ourselves in, when what we might need to do instead is to keep thinking and talking.

References

[1] Canovan, B.Y.M., (1990) Socrates or Heidegger? Hannah Arendt’s Reflections on Philosophy, Social Research, Vol. 57, No. 1.

2 Arendt H., (1978)The Life of the Mind, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,  vol. I, Thinking: 62.

[3] Arendt, Life of the Mind 1: 1. In “Martin Heidegger at Eighty,” p. 296.

Recently I have been involved with a team of researchers in researching so called ‘transformational change’ in a not-for-profit sector. I suspect the research has been commissioned on the understanding that transformational change is something which senior managers choose, and can, to a degree control. We are at the beginning of the research but the process itself has thrown up interesting insights into research methods , but also how the idea of transformation is framed and understood by our commissioners, and by the respondents. This helps us researchers understand the term anew too, but makes it no easier to think and write about.The experience of interviewing confirms the problematics of research. We transcribe all of our interviews, but there is no way of verifying, cross-checking or even really probing seriously what we were told in the time we are allocated to do the research, by the commissioners, and by the managers who have generously given up their time to see us. All we have time for is to try and make sense together of what they think is going on in the brief time we spend together. It would probably take a couple of weeks in the same place to find out what some of the claims mean in the wider organisational environment, and maybe a second and third interview with the same respondents to really unpick what they said. Our respondents were thoughtful, but were also aware that they were being taped. There were moments when people gave us a small peek at what some of the difficulties were, but mostly they presented a unified and positive front. The interviews were by no means glossy and superficial, but the profound difficulties and organisational cleavages, particularly those between colleagues, were only really hinted at. These are, of course, the most difficult to speak about but potentially the most interesting if we are to get under the skin of this.

The conversations did not unfold as our prepared checklist of questions would suggest it might if we had stuck to it as we conceived it. We still mostly covered the ground we had anticipated, but not in any linear way. We usually opened asking the respondent to locate themselves in the organisation: how long they had been there; what they understood their job to be; what they had been caught up in; how they understood the change processes they were party to; what the difficulties were; what they understood now that they didn’t understand at the beginning; how they were working, concretely, with others in trying to do what they are trying to do. How did they understand transformation?

This last question caused the most consternation, even if they had pre-identified their own projects as transformational: most of our respondents stuttered and stumbled. The more direct the question towards a huge nebulous concept, the weaker the response. This was particularly the case when respondents strayed into the domain of ‘culture change’. Transformational change means Big Change. Big positive change. Changes to the Culture. But interestingly, at other times in the conversation, and unprompted, they each gave often small micro-examples of changes taking place in the way people related to each other and understood themselves, and the community they were part of, differently. This, I think, is research gold dust, such as it is and is perhaps an indication that some of these big terms can get in the way of what our respondents knew about their practice.

Hannah Arendt wrote that the problem with thinking is that it makes things unravel. This was illustrated quite starkly when one of the respondents got so carried away with the part of the ‘change project’ he was responsible for that he argued in favour of it for the first part of the interview, then argued why the organisation couldn’t cope with the change if it happened in the second half. He found himself capable of saying both things in the course of the hour and half we spent with him, to notice the contradiction and still to press on with his unmediated idea for transforming the area of the business he was responsible for. One of the interesting things about the rhetoric of change is the way the respondents can entertain six impossible things before breakfast. This was an intelligent and serious man, who was very experienced, and yet at the same time was carried away with his own rhetoric. The idea of transformational change, and much of the vocabulary which accompanies it, is highly idealised, and is impervious to much probing. Thinking too much may destroy the ideal.

In this vein had to sit through an enormous amount of abstractions and what Andre Spicer, amongst others, terms management bullshit before we got an insight into what people thought was going on. This included all the tropes one might expect: ‘positive change for the good, buy-in, ownership, stakeholders, products, offer, brand, culture change’ etc etc. I would say that all the interviews only became really interesting in the last 20 minutes. I wonder if this was about familiarity, trust perhaps, but certainly all of us sitting in anticipation of the ending. No one wanted to ‘die’ without some last minute confession. Often, after sitting patiently through a gale of abstractions and pressing gently but firmly on how they talk about their work with their colleagues, how often they meet together, how much sense-making they do, what forms of resistance are there, how they understand the resistance, who the winners and losers in the change are, how they understand the symbolic importance of talking to others, presenting publicly to staff, persuading and doing everyday politics that we began to gain some insight into what was going on. A gentle move towards exploring the micro-interactions between people began to give us the best opportunity of writing a report where we can say something meaningful to the sector more generally.

The other thing to say about the research brief, which was relatively easy to anticipate but became  obvious in the course of the interviews, is that there is unlikely to be one discrete thing which any organisation is doing which is a ‘transformational change project’ discrete and with a clear beginning and end. As Churchill said about history, it is simply one damned thing after another. Our respondents were mostly dealing with 16 things all at the same time. Some of these are more obviously ‘transformational’ in the sense that if you sell a building and move into spanking new buildings elsewhere, then that is visibly transformational. But if at the same time you appoint a new CEO, who in turn appoints a whole new top team, some of whom start bringing in new senior managers from elsewhere, then all kinds of other dynamics are set in train. Then Brexit happens. Then the government changes its funding formula. So which is the transformational change project? And which is the one managers are ‘driving’ rather than in turn being driven?

When we were conducting the research I listened to Gordon Brown on the radio saying very directly that the phenomenon which dominated his time in government, as Chancellor and briefly as PM, was how to ameliorate the excesses of neoliberalism. It was interesting to hear him say this so directly, because there are scholars who argue that ‘neoliberalism’ is a meaningless term except in economics, and just becomes a catch-all for opposing every change you disagree with.  However, my expectation is that each of the organisations we visit are responding to neoliberalism, or at least the dramatic changes brought on the sector by extreme marketization. Transformational change is blasting through the whole sector to which our not-for-profit organisations belong, and this is something that absolutely no senior management team is in control of. The interesting question, then, becomes how they respond to it.