1 Introduction: leading in a complex world
Ralph Stacey and Douglas Griffin
- Mainstream perspectives on leadership
- The perspective of complex responsive processes
- The properties of complex responsive processes of relating
- The consequences of taking a complex responsive processes perspective
- The implications for leaders and leadership
- The chapters in this book
Over the period 2000 to 2002, a number of us at the Complexity and Management Centre at the Business School of the University of Hertfordshire published a series of books called Complexity and Emergence in Organizations (Stacey et al., 2000; Stacey, 2001; Fonseca, 2001; Griffin, 2002; Streatfield, 2001; Shaw, 2002). These books developed a perspective according to which organizations are understood to be ongoing, iterated processes of cooperative and competitive relating between people. We argued that organizations are not systems but 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 complex responsive processes of relating. One of the volumes (Griffin, 2002) explored what this perspective means when it comes to thinking about leaders and leadership, particularly the ethical implications.
Since 2000, some of the authors in the series, together with other Complexity and Management Centre colleagues in association with the Institute of Group Analysis, have been conducting a research program on organizational change leading to the degrees of Master of Arts by research or Doctor of Management. This is necessarily a part-time program because the core of the research method (see another volume in this series: 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 oneās own personal experience of participating with others in the co-creation of the patterns of interaction that are the organization. The studentsā 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 to create the patterns of interaction that are the organization. The research stance is, then, one of detached involvement.
For some of the students, the central theme in their work has to do with leading and leadership, and how they think about these matters in a way that is provoked by the theory of complex responsive processes. In exploring this theme they also show how thinking differently about what they are doing inevitably involves doing things differently. The purpose of this volume is to bring together some of the work of those who have been concerned with leading. Two chapters are by CEOs of hospitals in the USA, one is by the CEO of a large Further Education College in the UK, another is by the Human Resources Director of a commercial organization, also in the UK, and the final one is by an educator of leaders in Ireland. At the end of this introductory chapter, we give a brief indication of what each of these authors cover and what the central themes of the volume are. We will also be introducing each chapter with an editorial comment. Before doing that, however, we provide a short, and so necessarily compact, summary of what we mean by the theory of complex responsive processes, what it implies about leaders and leadership and how this differs from other traditions of thought about these matters. Further details of these arguments are also set out in Chapter 2, which focuses on the role of the leader emerging in social processes of mutual recognition, and in Chapter 5, which explores how values arise in human interaction and how one might think about the link with leading.
Mainstream perspectives on leadership
The most prevalent way of thinking about organizations today is one in which an organization is understood as a system consisting of individuals who interact with each other to produce it. The organizational system is then understood as interacting with other organizational systems, competing with some to supply goods and services to others as well as to individual consumers, taking in supplies from yet other organizations, and negotiating with regulatory and other government bodies, also understood as systems. In their interaction, these organizational systems create industrial, economic, social and global supra-systems, which then affect them. It is generally thought to be the role of the leaders of an organization to set its direction in the form of vision, purpose, objectives and targets, and then to apply monitoring forms of control to ensure that the vision and so on is realized. It is also generally thought to be the role of an organizationās leaders to shape its values or culture, understood to be the deep-seated assumptions governing the behavior of the individual members of an organization. In shaping these values, leaders are exerting a social form of control. One of the most influential writers on leadership and organizations, Schein (1985), says that āthe unique and essential function of leadership is the manipulation of cultureā (p. 317).
An equally influential writer, Senge (1990), talks about building a vision as one piece of the āgoverning ideasā of the organization, the other pieces being purpose and values, with the three elements together answering to the question of what we believe in. He provides examples of companies who have deliberately constructed values and taught their people in training sessions to act according to those values. The leader forms a personal vision and asks others to follow him or her so that they come to share commitment to that vision, which should flow naturally from genuine enthusiasm for the vision. Leaders must be skilled in building shared visions, and such sharing, which takes a long time to emerge, is the product of ongoing dialogue. Such dialogue is a facilitated conversation in which people suspend their assumptions and listen to each other, thus getting in touch with a common pool of meaning which is said to flow through them. Senge describes leaders as integrators of learning disciplines ā they design the governing ideas and the learning process, they act as stewards of the vision through their purpose story and they also assume the role of teachers.
In this way of thinking an organization is treated as a thing, a system, which actually exists outside of the individuals who form it. The leaders play a significant role in designing this system, specifying its purpose and inspiring others to act according to values that will achieve this purpose. The organizational system so created unfolds the purpose and vision ascribed to it by leaders, and for this to happen its individual members must share a commitment to act in a way that does unfold the ascribed vision and purpose. In thinking in this way, we argue, we are covering over the complexity and uncertainty we actually experience in our ordinary everyday experience of life in organizations, and we are positing capacities of foresight in leaders which they do not actually possess. It is for this reason that we have been developing an alternative way of thinking about organizations which has come to be known as a complex responsive processes perspective (Stacey et al., 2000; Stacey, 2001, 2003; Griffin, 2002; Shaw, 2002).
The perspective of complex responsive processes
From the perspective of complex responsive processes, organizations are viewed as patterns of interaction between people that are iterated as the present. Instead of abstracting from the experience of human bodily interaction, which is what we do when we posit that individuals create a system in their interaction, the perspective of complex responsive processes stays with the experience of interaction which produces nothing but further interaction. In other words, one moves from thinking in terms of a spatial metaphor, as one does when one thinks that individuals interact to produce a system outside them at a higher level, to a temporal processes way of thinking, where the temporal processes are those of human relating. Organizations are then understood as processes of human relating, because it is in the simultaneously cooperativeāconsensual and conflictualācompetitive relating between people that everything organizational happens. It is through these ordinary, everyday processes of relating that people in organizations cope with the complexity and uncertainty of organizational life. As they do so, they perpetually construct their future together as the present.
Complex responsive processes of relating may be understood as acts of communication, relations of power, and the interplay between peopleās choices arising in acts of evaluation.
Acts of communication
It is because human agents are conscious and self-conscious that they are able to cooperate and reach consensus, while at the same time conflicting and competing with each other in the highly sophisticated ways in which they do. Drawing on the work of the American pragmatist George Herbert Mead (1934), one can understand consciousness (that is, mind) as arising in the communicative interaction between human bodies. Humans have evolved central nervous systems such that when one gestures to another, particularly in the form of vocal gesture or language, one evokes in oneās own body responses to oneās gesture that are similar to those evoked in other bodies. In other words, in their acting, humans take the attitude, the tendency to act, of the other, and it is because they have this capacity that humans can know what they are doing. It immediately follows that consciousness (knowing, mind) is a social process in which meaning emerges in the social act of gestureāresponse, where the gesture can never be separated from the response. Meaning does not lie in the gesture, the word, alone, but in the gesture taken together with the response to it as one social act.
Furthermore, in communicating with each other as the basis of everything they do, people do not simply take the attitude of the specific others with whom they are relating. Humans have the capacity for generalizing so that when they act they always take up the attitude of what Mead called āthe generalized otherā. In other words, they always take the attitude of the group or society to their actions ā they are concerned about what others might think of what they do or say. This is often unconscious and it is, of course, a powerful form of social control. According to Mead, self-consciousness is also a social process involving the capacity humans have to take themselves as an object of subjective reflection. This is a social process because the subject, āIā, can only ever contemplate itself as an object, āmeā, which is oneās perception of the attitude of society towards oneself. The āIā is the often spontaneous and imaginative response of the socially formed individual to the āmeā as the gestures of society to oneself. Self is this emergent āIāmeā dialectic so that each self is socially formed while at the same time interacting selves are forming the social. The social may be understood as a social object. A social object is not an object in the normal sense of a thing that exists in nature but is a tendency on the part of large numbers of people to act in a similar manner in similar situations. The social object is a generalization that exists only when it is made particular in the ordinary local interaction between people. Communication, then, is not simply the sending of a signal to be received by another, but rather complex social, that is, responsive, processes of self-formation in which meaning and the society-wide pattern of the social object emerge.
Relations of power
Drawing on the work of Elias (1939), one understands how the processes of communicative interacting constitute relations of power. For Elias, power is not something which one possesses but is rather a characteristic of all human relating. In order to form, and stay in, a relationship with someone else, one cannot do whatever one wants. As soon as we enter into relationships we constrain and are constrained by others and, of course, we also enable and are enabled by others. Power is this enablingāconstraining relationship where the power balance is tilted in favor of some and against others depending on the relative need they have for each other. Elias showed how such power relationships form figurations, or groupings, in which some are included and others are excluded, and where the power balance is tilted in favor of some groupings and against others. These groupings establish powerful feelings of belonging which constitute each individualās āweā identity. These āweā identities, derived from the groups to which we belong, are inseparable from each of our āIā identities. As with Mead, then, we can see that processes of human relating form and are formed by individual and collective identities, which inevitably reflect complex patterns of power relating.
Choices arising in acts of evaluation
In their communicative interacting and power relating, humans are always making choices between one action and another (see Chapter 6 in this volume for a fuller development of this aspect). The choices may be made on the basis of conscious desires and intentions, or unconscious desires and choices, for example, those that are habitual, impulsive, obsessive, compulsive, compelling or inspiring. In other words, human action is always evaluative, sometimes consciously and at other times unconsciously. The criteria for evaluating these choices are values and norms, together constituting ideology.
Norms (morals, the right, the āoughtā) are evaluative criteria taking the form of obligatory restrictions which have emerged as generalizations and become habitual in a history of social interaction. We are all socialized to take up the norms of the particular groups and the society to which we belong, and this restricts what we can do as we particularize the generalized norms in our moment-by-moment specific action situations. Eliasā work shows in detail how norms constitute major aspects of the personality structures, or identities, of interdependent people.
Values (ethics, the āgoodā) are individually felt voluntary compulsions to choose one desire, action or norm over another. Values arise in social processes of self-formation (Joas, 2000) ā they are fundamental aspects of self, giving meaning to life, opening up opportunities for action. They arise in intense interactive experiences which are seized by the imagination and idealized as some whole to which people then feel strongly committed. Mead (1938) describes these as cult values which need to be functionalized in particular contingent situations, and this inevitably involves conflict.
Together, the voluntary compulsion of value and the obligatory restriction of norms constitute ideology. Ideology is the basis on which people choose desires and actions, and it unconsciously sustains power relations by making a particular figuration of power feel natural. We can see, then, that complex responsive processes of human relating form and are formed by values, norms and ideologies as integral aspects of self/identity formation in its simultaneously individual and collective form.
In describing the fundamental aspects of the complex responsive processes of human relating, we have referred on a number of occasions to patterns of communicative interaction, figurations of power relations, and generalizations/idealizations that are particularized/functionalized in specific situations. These patterns, figurations, generalizations/ idealizations and particularizations/functionalizations may all be understood as themes, taking both propositional and narrative forms, which emerge and re-emerge in the iteration in each succeeding present of the interactive processes of communication, power and evaluation. These themes organize the experience of being together, and they can be understood, in Meadās terms, as social objects and the imagined wholes of cult values which are taken up by people in their local interaction with each other in specific situations of ordinary, everyday life.
The properties of complex responsive processes of relating
By analogy with complex adaptive systems (Waldrop, 1992; Goodwin, 1994; Kauffman, 1995), the thematic patterning of interaction is understood to be:
- Complex. Complexity here refers to a particular dynamic or movement in time that is paradoxically stable and unstable, predictable and unpredictable, known and unknown, certain and uncertain, all at the same time. Complexity and uncertainty are both often used to refer to the situation or environment in which humans must act and this is distinguished from simple or certain environments. Prescriptions for effective action are then related to, held to be contingent upon, the type of environment. However, from the complex responsive processes perspective it is human relating itself which is complex and uncertain in the sense described above. Healthy, creative, ordinarily effective human interaction is then always complex, no matter what the situation. Patterns of human relating that lose this complexity become highly repetitive and rapidly inappropriate for dealing with the fluidity of ordinary, everyday life, taking the form of neurotic and psychotic disorders, bizarre group processes and fascist power structures.
- Self-organizing and emergent. Self-organizing means that agents interact with each other on the basis of their own local organizing principles, and it is in such local interaction that widespread coherence emerges without any program, plan or blueprint for that widespread pattern itself. In complex responsive processes terms, then, it is in the myriad local interactions between people that the widespread generalizations such as social objects and cult values emerge. These are particularized in the local interactions between people.
- Evolving. The generalizations of social object and cult value are particularized in specific situations, and this inevitably involves choices as to how to particularize them in that specific situation, which inevitably means some form of conflict. The generalizations will never be particularized in exactly the same way and the nonlinear nature of human interaction means that these small differences could be amplified into completely different generalizations. In this way, social objects and cult values evolve.
The consequences of taking a complex responsive processes perspective
We are suggesting, then, that we think about organizations in a way that is close to our ordinary, everyday life in them. We understand organizations to be the widespread patterns of interaction between people, the widespread narrative and propositional themes, which emerge in the myriad local interactions between people, both those between members of an organization and between them and other people. Thinking in this way has two important consequences.
First, no one can step outside of their interaction with others. In mainstream thinking, an organization is viewed as a system at a level above the individuals who form it. It is recognized that this organizational system is affected by patterns of power and economic relations in the wider society and these are normally thought of as forces, over and above the organization and its individual members, which shape local forms of experience. Individuals and the social are posited at different levels and causal powers are ascribed to that social level. In the kinds of process terms we are trying to use, there are no forces over and above indi...
