Complexity and the Experience of Values, Conflict and Compromise in Organizations

Ralph Stacey, Douglas Griffin, Ralph Stacey, Douglas Griffin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN:
  9781138011427
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134049103
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

What role do values play in organizational life? How do they shape the efficiency and effectiveness of organizational change? This volume examines what we actually mean when we use the term values and what it means to act according to values in ordinary everyday life. The contributors to this volume provide an exposition of the circular relationshi

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Introduction

Ralph Stacey and Douglas Griffin

The most prevalent ways of making sense of intricate and confusing organizational situations concentrate mainly on the rational and predictable aspects of human experience, leading to attempts at programmatic, large-scale management of change applied to the organization which is understood as a system. However, there is some research evidence that most of the large scale change programs do not achieve the successful outcomes, financial and otherwise, anticipated at their outset. Such lack of success is usually attributed to failure to take sufficient account of the “human factor”. Despite these findings most managers and many researchers continue to focus on the same rational, large scale change programs, adding large scale motivational and culture change programs to hopefully take more account of the “human factor”. The lack of success, however, continues. We hold that what is called for in this situation is a radical re-examination of currently dominant ways of making sense of organizational life, one which questions the foundational assumption that organizations can be understood as systems.

Members of the Complexity and Management Centre at the Business School of the University of Hertfordshire have been developing an alternative perspective according to which organizations are understood as population-wide patterns of relating which emerge in complex responsive processes of daily local interaction between people. The focus of attention here is on how wide-spread change emerges as people interact locally in everyday situations. Organizations are understood to be ongoing, iterated processes of cooperative and competitive relating between people. They are not systems but rather the ongoing patterning of interactions between people. Patterns of human interaction produce further patterns of interaction, not some thing outside of the interaction. We called this perspective the theory of complex responsive processes of relating. This theory draws on analogies from the complexity sciences, bringing in the essential characteristics of human agents, namely consciousness and self consciousness, understood to emerge in social processes of communicative interaction, power relating and evaluative choice. The result is a way of thinking about life in organizations that focuses attention on how organizational members cope with the unknown as they perpetually create organizational futures together. The theory of complex responsive processes was initially developed in a series of books called Complexity and Emergence in Organizations edited by some members of the Complexity and Management Centre (Stacey et al., 2000; Stacey, 2001; Streatfield, 2001; Fonseca, 2001; Griffin, 2002; Shaw, 2002) (see also Stacey, 2007).

Since 2000, some of the authors in the series, together with other Complexity and Management Centre colleagues have been conducting a research degree program on organizational change leading to the degrees of Master of Arts by research or Doctor of Management. The program is for experienced leaders and managers, as well as internal and external consultants, who are interested in questioning, reflecting upon and developing the effectiveness of their current work, particularly how they think about what they are doing. The theory of complex responsive processes provides a provocative perspective for stimulating participants’ reflections. This is necessarily a part time program because the core of the research method (Stacey and Griffin, 2005) involves students taking their own experience seriously. If patterns of human interaction produce nothing but further patterns of human interaction, in the creation of which we are all participating, then there is no detached way of understanding organizations from the position of the objective observer. Instead, organizations have to be understood in terms of one’s own personal experience of participating with others in the co-creation of the patterns of interaction that are the organization. The students’ research is, therefore, their narration of current events they are involved in together with their reflections on themes of particular importance emerging in the stories of their own experience of participation with others. The research stance is, then, one of detached involvement and it is essentially reflexive in that it requires “locating” one’s thinking not only in relation to one’s own life experience but importantly in relation to the history and current context of one’s society, especially the history of its thought as expressed in relevant literature. This kind of “location” helps one to identify the assumptions upon which a particular way of thinking is built.

The Doctor of Management program attracts practising leaders and managers from a range of organizations in many countries. Graduates and current participants come from the USA, Canada, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Netherlands, Israel, New Zealand, South Africa, Ireland and the UK and they work in public and private sector organizations as well as nonprofit organizations. They are employees of public and private sector organizations and are also self employed consultants to organizations. A number of them are Chief Executives, directors and university professors. The research community of the program is therefore well placed to generate material and insight into the daily practices of actual organizational life and it is building up a body of knowledge about what managers and leaders actually do at the micro level. Some of this research has been published in a series of edited volumes called Complexity and Emergence in Organizations, published in London by Routledge. The books in the series are addressed to organizational practitioners and academics who are looking for a different way of making sense of their own experience in a rapidly changing world and present reflective accounts of ordinary everyday life in organizations, rather than idealized accounts or further idealized prescriptions. There are five volumes in this series (Stacey and Griffin, 2005, 2006; Griffin and Stacey, 2005; Stacey, 2005; Shaw and Stacey, 2006).

This volume has the same purpose as those in the above series, and like the volumes in that series its contributors are members of the Doctor of Management program. It focuses attention on an issue which for some years now has attracted the attention of a great many leaders and managers in organizations of all kinds, ranging from major international banks, oil companies, public sector services and international nongovernmental organizations to small local charities. That issue has to do with the role that values play in organizational life generally and in the quality, efficiency and effectiveness of organizational change and improvement. There has been a growing awareness of the powerful motivating effects of the values people are inspired by and the importance of the self control which belief in values instills. This interest has been most visibly expressed in various prescriptions for designing values, usually seen as the role of leaders, and converting organizational members to believe in, and act upon, the shared values expressed in value statements, missions and visions. The result of this effort has been highly generalized and idealized propositional statements, which are supposed to lead to unquestioning harmony but instead often provoke cynicism on the part of organizational members, with little evidence that it all achieves much. What is lacking is exploration of what we actually mean by human values and what it means to act according to values in ordinary, everyday life in organizations. This is what the chapters in this volume seek to address through the reflections of organizational practitioners on their ordinary work in organizations.

Such reflection reveals that values are indeed important in the motivation to act in organizational life but that they cannot be “used” in the instrumental manner suggested by mainstream literature and they certainly do not lead simply to harmony. Indeed, the essence of acting according to value commitments is inevitably conflict. Values are idealizations which necessarily have to be interpreted in contingent situations and this inevitably leads to conflict. The question becomes how people negotiate this conflict in their ordinary everyday organizational lives. Such negotiation brings with it the need to compromise. However, on other occasions a “no compromise” response seems to be called for, and when and how such a response is to be made depends upon one’s values. The chapters in this volume seek to raise awareness of the issues involved in this endlessly circular relationship between values, conflict and compromise. The aim is to contribute to a more robust articulation of these issues in organizations.

This chapter provides a brief summary of the theory of complex responsive processes since all the chapters in this volume make reference to it and further develop it in a number of ways. This chapter concludes with short summaries of the chapters in the rest of the book.

The theory of complex responsive processes

The theory of complex responsive processes is a theory of human action which draws on analogies from the complexity sciences, particularly the theory of complex adaptive systems.

Complex adaptive systems consist of large numbers of agents, each of which interacts with some other agents. The interaction between the agents can thus be said to be local in that each agent is interacting, according to their own rules of interaction, with only a small proportion of the total population of agents. In other words, each agent is a set of rules specifying how it must interact with others and the interaction between agents is self organizing in that the agents are not being instructed by any other agent – each is following its own instructions – not any centrally determined rules. This does not amount to anarchy because each agent cannot do whatever it likes – it must follow its rules of interaction and cannot do other than this. In this way each agent constrains and is constrained by other agents and these constraints often conflict with each other. The properties of complex adaptive systems are explored through computer simulations (for example, Kauffman, 1995; Ray, 1992) in which each agent is a computer program, a set of rules (digital symbols) specifying interaction with some other agents. The simulation is the iterative interaction of these agents. Large numbers of such simulations repeatedly demonstrate that such iterative, local interaction produces global patterns of order or coherence, which emerge, paradoxically predictable and unpredictable at the same time, in the absence of any global program or plan. The conflicting constraints that the agents place on each other are essential to this emergent order. Furthermore, when these agents are different to each other, then both they and the global patterns emerging in their interaction evolve, so producing novelty (Allen, 1998a, 1998b).

Instead of thinking that local interaction is producing a global whole, or system, we could think of patterns of local interaction as producing further patterns of both local interaction and global patterns at the same time. There is then no need to think in terms of systems or wholes. Global patterns are changing not because of some global plan but because of local interaction. If this were to apply to human interaction it would indicate a rather profound shift in how we think about organizations. We usually think that global organizational order is the result of global plans and programs but from the perspective just outlined we would have to think of global organizational order as continually emerging in myriad local interactions and it would become necessary to understand the nature of such local interaction. Is there any basis for such a shift in thinking?

The simulations just referred to are highly abstract, showing the properties of certain kinds of abstract interaction between abstract agents in the domain of digital symbols. To be useful in any other domain, say biology, it is necessary to bring to these abstract relationships the attributes of that particular domain. In other words, the simulations can only ever be a source domain for analogies that might be useful in some other domain when interpreted in terms of the attributes of that other domain. In thinking about the implications of complex adaptive system simulations for human action it is essential, therefore, to take account of the nature of human agents. First, it is highly simplistic to think of humans as rule following beings. In our acting, we may take account of rules but can hardly be said to blindly follow them as the digital agents in computer simulations do. The essential and distinctive characteristic of human agents is that they are living bodies who are conscious and self conscious beings capable of emotion, spontaneity, improvisation, imagination, fantasy and creative action. Human agents are essentially reflexive and reflective. Furthermore, they are essentially social beings in a distinctive way in that they do not interact blindly according to mechanistic rules but engage in meaningful communicative interaction with each other in which they establish power relations between themselves. In addition, in interacting with each other humans exercise at least some degree of choice as to how they will respond to the actions of others and this involves the use of some form of evaluative criteria. In addition, human agents use both simple and more and more complicated tools and technologies to accomplish what they choose to do. It is these embodied attributes of consciousness, self consciousness, reflection and reflexivity, creativity, imagination and fantasy, communication, meaning, power, choice, evaluation, tool use and sociality that should be explicitly brought to any interpretation, as regards human beings, of the insights derived from complex adaptive system simulations.

As soon as one does explicitly take account of the above essential attributes of human agents then it becomes problematic to talk about human systems. Some 250 years ago, Kant introduced the notion of system as a useful way of understanding organisms in nature but cautioned against applying this notion to human action. A system is a whole produced by its parts and separated by a boundary from other wholes. A part is only a part insofar as it is doing what is required to produce the whole. If one thought of a human individual as a part then by definition that individual could not exercise his or her own local choices. If individuals did make their own choices then they could not be said to be parts of a system because they would be acting in their own interests instead of in the interest of the system. In addition to making choices, humans form figurations of power relations in which they act in the interests of their own group, often in conflict with other groups. They are then not acting in the interest of a wider, more global system, but in their own joint interests. Human agents cannot, therefore, be ...

Table of contents

• Routledge studies in complexity in management
• Contents
• Contributors
• 1 Introduction
• Editors’ introduction to Chapter 2
• 2 Finding room for values in required ways of working
• Editors’ introduction to Chapter 3
• 3 Working at the edge of polarized conflict in organizations
• Editors’ introduction to Chapter 4
• 4 Compromising as processes of moving forward in organizations
• Editors’ introduction to Chapter 5
• 5 Leadership and self-mastery
• Editors’ introduction to Chapter 6
• 6 The role of propaganda in managing organizational change
• Index