Complexity, Management and the Dynamics of Change

Challenges for Practice

Elizabeth McMillan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134115112
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The insights of complexity science can allow today's managers to embrace the challenges and uncertainty of the twenty-first century, and successfully oversee organizational change and development. Elizabeth McMillan's book brings these ideas into perspective by:

• outlining the historical relationship between science and organizations
• reviewing current perspectives on organizational change and best practice
• citing real-life examples of the use of complexity science ideas
• discussing issues which may arise when using ideas from complexity.

Written in an accessible style to bridge the gap from scientific theory to commercial applicability, this text shows how organizations can become more effective, democratic and sustainable through complexity science.

1
Introduction

Key points

• Why I am writing this book

• What this book is about

• The structure of this book and how to use it

• Time to adapt and become up to date

Ostensibly this book is about management and the management of change in all its rich complexity. But it is not a book about the management of change. It is a book about managers and organizations seeking to exist in such a way that change is just part of the normal flow of process that should be organizational life. What I mean by these seemingly paradoxical statements should be explained and become apparent as you read through this book. It is no mystery. It is about taking organizations and their managers ‘out of the laboratory’ and into the real world. This is the complex world that has emerged from millennia of massive and sometimes cataclysmic upheavals and is today’s living planet. In order to better understand this world and what it implies for organizations and managers this book uses as its guide science: complexity science.

Why I am writing this book

There are many books out there in bookshops and university libraries that cover the topics of change and management. Many are excellently written and well researched. So why should I be adding to this collection? There are a number of answers to this question.

First of all, many of these books were written some time ago and base their conclusions and their recommendations on research and consultancy that was carried out before then. A considerable number are still relevant and useful in a wide range of contexts and situations. But, in my opinion, far too many are based on a way of thinking that does not reflect the way the world actually works. This is especially unhelpful in the fast-paced globalized world of the twenty-first century. Additionally, and most significantly, this way of thinking has its roots in a world view that developed over 300 years ago in the West and which emanated from the Scientific Revolution. It is a way of thinking that led to the ‘command and control’ ethos in organizations and management. Times have changed and it is an ethos which is more reminiscent of management in the 1950s and 1960s than in the 2000s. Yet there is still plenty of evidence to show that the controlling mindset lingers on and has yet to be completely replaced. This book offers a set of ideas which aim to contribute towards a replacement.

Most existing management books on organizational change draw their materials on current best practice – and so they are only able to reflect what is already out there and happening. This is useful for the manager keen to discover and emulate best practice wherever it may be found. But how much good practice is there? In 1995 the Harvard Business Review published an article by John Kotter on organizational transformations. Kotter had studied over 100 organizations of varying sizes in the USA and Europe. Some were highly successful, others less so, but they had all been endeavouring to transform themselves into more successful companies. They had used a range of approaches that will be familiar: total quality management, de-layering, down-sizing, process re-engineering, cultural change and so on. But Kotter discovered that very few of these efforts towards major change had been completely successful and some had been outright failures. He concluded that on a scale of successful change initiatives most organizations came somewhere between successful and failing but with ‘a distinct tilt to the lower end of the scale’ (Kotter 1995:59).

Clearly, in the 1990s a range of organizations, some with vast resources and all with capable and experienced managers, were not successfully implementing major organizational change. One possible reason for this, as Kotter pointed out, at the time, was that there was relatively little experience of introducing major transformatory change programmes. How much has changed since then? I suspect not a great deal. There are a number of factors that have contributed to this. One, I would suggest, is that the management literature on change and organization renewal continues to offer too many outdated and unrealistic models. For example, many of these models divorce planning from implementation and emphasize the importance of planning at the expense of making things happen. There are widespread assumptions made that if a strategic change intervention is carefully planned and resourced then the forecast outcomes will emerge as part of a predicted process – with perhaps the occasional but manageable hiccup. I would argue that this approach stems from a world view rooted in the past and a quasi-mechanistic mindset.

Also organizations still have a tendency to introduce major change initiatives as a response to some form of crisis or serious threat. Or sometimes it is the arrival of a new chief executive or senior manager with a powerful personal vision and a reputation to create or protect that forces changes upon an organization.

So if there are few organizations out there that are truly successful when it comes to managing change, authors and managers are not left with many role models to consider and possibly emulate. Is there a danger that we may be endlessly repeating ourselves? This appears to me to be a distinct possibility, particularly when many institutions still adhere to tried and tested models which are based on attitudes and approaches intrinsically grounded on established practice.

Generally speaking, change is not perceived by managers as an ongoing process that should constantly flow through all parts of an organization to sustain it and keep it competitive. Managers are not taught to think about change in this way; nor are they taught enough about adaptation and the human dynamics of change and changing. I am writing this book because it will offer some fresh thinking based on the latest ideas about how living systems, such as organizations, really work (combined with current best practice) and some key notions on adaptation and the dynamics of change. I happen to believe that many experienced managers know that the ‘old ways’ are not all that effective and their instincts suggest other approaches. But who are they to argue with the mainstream of management teaching? It is to be hoped that this book will encourage them to stand their ground and continue to trust in their intuition and their intelligent and insightful observations of human nature.

Another key reason why I am writing this book is that there are a limited number of books on the market which consider the dynamics of change, particularly the human dynamics of change as the key feature of any major change initiative. Furthermore there are very few books written on the management of change from a complexity science perspective. There are, of course, excellent books by Ralph Stacey and his colleagues at the University of Hertford in the UK and US authors such as Margaret Wheatley, T. Irene Sanders, Roger Lewin and Birute Regine, Richard Pascale, Mark Millemann and Linda Gioja, who write directly for students or practitioners. But given the number of books that have been published and continue to be published on management and change, these are but a small stream contributing to a huge river.

Complexity science is a new science that only emerged during the last half of the twentieth century and although it is now well accepted in the scientific community it has taken longer for it to make inroads into the thinking and practice of other non-scientific communities, including business and management. It is a complex science and the set of ideas it presents are not straightforward and easily reduced to neat catch phrases so that it has not readily been taken up by consultants eager for a quick new idea or by hectically busy managers looking for something simple to put into practice. It is dificult and time consuming to carry out research on large organizations and therefore to gather evidence from ‘big’ business on how these ideas are working. Thus examples and models have been slow to emerge in the management literature – but they are now appearing – and influencing others.

As this book will describe, there are organizations that have been trying out these ideas over a number of years. The managers in these companies have been true pioneers. They have been prepared to take risks and go into unknown territory. This book maps out some of the journeys they have taken in the hope that others will be encouraged to create their own trail.

Finally, I am writing this book because I am passionate about complexity science and the potential it offers not only organizations and managers, but society as a whole. Given that human beings are a socially organized species, then the way we organize ourselves and our societies has enormous implications for all of us. Complexity science-derived ideas can impact upon the way you work on a daily basis and the way that organizations function and survive, and expect to function and survive.

I write not as someone who is remote from the hurly-burly of organizational life, or as someone with very little experience of what it is to be managing in the modern world. I write as someone who has been a practising manager for many years and who has worked in a fast-moving retail environment and in local government and higher education administration – all rapidly transforming and transformed environments. I came across complexity science after struggling for many years to reconcile many aspects of modern management theory and recommended practice with my own experiences and my own practice. There always seemed to be a mismatch between much of the theory I found in textbooks and in taught environments. It was as if the things I was being recommended and taught came from another planet. This planet was an orderly place where it was possible to predict what would happen next. All things organizational were made possible if one managed carefully and put certain planning and implementation procedures into place. This was not the world I knew and it was a world where human dynamics appeared to have reduced relevance. Yet in conversations with managers about the really dificult challenges they encountered, I almost always found that human interactions were involved in one way or another.

I have been researching in the field of complexity science for over ten years now and involved in practically applying these concepts for even longer. Currently I am a full-time researcher so I keep up to date with developments in complexity and management studies through my own research undertakings and the work of other academics in institutions all over the world. I also carry out consultancy on a regular basis and have acted as an adviser on introducing complexity-based ideas to a number of organizations – this work keeps me on my toes – and I am constantly learning from these experiences. In this book I draw on all these activities and experiences in order to write a textbook that is informative, up to date and hopefully imaginative and inspiring!

What this book is about

This book is about complexity scienc...