Experiencing Emergence in Organizations

Local Interaction and the Emergence of Global Patterns

Ralph Stacey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134266104
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Examining the experiences of organizational practitioners, this informative book features contributions from experienced leaders, consultants and managers in various organizations, and narrative accounts of the contributors work address key topical questions.

Rather than offering descriptions of organizational life, this book provides reflective accounts of real life experiences of researching in organizations, and will be a valuable insight for academics and business school students and practitioners.

In considering several key questions in terms of daily experience, the contributors explore the perspective of complex responsive processes, investigate how this assists them to make sense of their experience and analyze how it leads to their development.

1 Introduction: emergence and organizations

Ralph Stacey

• Rational and magico-mythical ways of thinking
• 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 thinking about the global and the local
• 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.

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 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 to create the patterns of interaction that are the organization. The research stance is, then, one of detached involvement.

The purpose of this volume is to bring together the work of a number of program participants who have been concerned with what, in hindsight, has emerged as a common theme. The theme has to do with how widespread or global patterns, such as government policies and corporate ways of doing things, are iterated, and so repeatedly emerge and potentially evolve, in the local interactions between people. Usually, government and corporate policies, as well as national and organizational cultures, are felt and understood as forces arising outside of local interaction and acting on that local interaction, often in a constraining, even oppressive manner. These outside forces are taken as powerful, stable givens, arising outside of our own direct experience and beyond our influence, with which we must comply. The chapters in this volume present a different way of thinking about these matters, moving away from the taken-for-granted notion of outside forces to an exploration of just how people are affected in their local interactions with each other by the global patterns they may feel to be outside forces. What these chapters describe, it seems to me, is the experience of emergence in organizations, rather than the experience of outside forces.

At the end of this introductory chapter, I give a brief indication of what each of these authors cover and what the central themes of the volume are. I will also be introducing each chapter with an editorial comment.
Before doing that, however, there is a brief review of ways of thinking about organizations followed by a short, and so necessarily compact, summary of what I mean by the theory of complex responsive processes, what it implies about the relationship between the local and the global 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 complex responsive processes ways of thinking about what are usually regarded as outside forces.

Rational and magico-mythical ways of thinking

In his book on involvement and detachment, Elias (1987) distinguishes between two modes of thinking. As an example of the first mode, which he refers to as involved thinking, he refers to the way people in the West viewed nature in the pre-scientific age. People experienced nature as rather mysterious forces acting upon them, often with great violence, which they found very difficult to understand, let alone control. When people find themselves in such situations they become anxious, and this arouses high levels of emotion, creating a vicious circle in which it becomes harder and harder to formulate explanations of what is happening to them. They become deeply involved in the experience; that is, they think in highly emotive ways, finding it increasingly difficult to stand back and reflect in a ‘reality congruent’ fashion. The anxiety is dealt with, to some extent, by developing what Elias calls ‘magicomythic’ explanations according to which nature is understood either in terms of impersonal forces acting upon people in a way they cannot control or as personalized gods and spirits also beyond human control.
Such explanations call forth responses of acceptance, submission and conformity.

The second mode of thinking, which Elias calls detached thinking, is exemplified by the scientific method. By overcoming fears of the unknown, the scientific method enables people to stand back and reflect on nature in a way that is more ‘reality congruent’. By taking the position of the objective observer, they feel less involved in their experiences with nature, less emotional and more rational. The result is a virtuous circle in which levels of anxiety diminish so enabling a more detached attitude, leading to greater control over nature and so even further decline in levels of anxiety.

Even in relation to nature, however, Elias argues that humans never display pure forms of either detached or involved thinking. He says that it is only very young children or extremely mentally disturbed adults who come anywhere near the complete involvement of being totally submerged in their own experience. The neuroscientist, Damasio (1994, 2000), argues that a person is only completely rational, or detached, when particular areas of the brain are damaged. Such people show no emotion but also have no moral capacity or ability to select sensible action options from an array of options which they can still rationally formulate. This is because the same areas of the brain deal with both emotion and rational selection of action options. For normal people, then, thinking is always paradoxically involved and detached at the same time; thinking rationally always also involves emotion at the same time. However, the paradox of involvement and detachment is transformed as ways of thinking that differ from one situation to another. In some situations, the aspect of involvement is more apparent while in others it is the aspect of detachment that is more apparent. This leads to how we might characterize thinking in the social sciences. Here, Elias argues that it is much harder to think in ways that are more detached because in the social sciences the phenomena we are concerned with are ourselves. Elias appeals to us to face up to the fact that we do not have ‘reality congruent’ ways of thinking about social phenomena such as organizations. He ascribes this to a basic fact to be found in all human experience, namely that we depend upon each other. None of us can survive on our own; indeed, there is hardly anything that any of us can do on our own. Even more fundamentally, even our very selves/identities are formed in interaction with each other. What each of us does affects others and what they do affects each of us. We inevitably both constrain and enable each other. Thus each of us is continually forming intentions and making choices of our next action but because we are interdependent none of us can control the consequences of what we do. The consequences emerge in the interplay of all our intentions and those consequences prompt further action on the part of all of us, the consequences of which will also emerge, and so on, in a process that has no beginning or end. Elias uses a vivid metaphor to depict this situation. It is as if we are chained to others who are chained to yet others. Each time one moves, the others are tugged in the same direction by these invisible chains, and as they move the first is pulled as are yet others. We are moved hither and thither in ways we find difficult to comprehend and over which we have no control.

This experience of the social nowadays is thus similar to the experience people had long ago in their encounter with nature, and the same kind of anxiety is therefore aroused. This makes it very difficult to adopt detached thinking in relation to the social and so the paradox of detached involvement tends to be transformed as ‘magico-mythic’ thinking. People come to talk about social forces acting on them and organizations as ‘things’, systems, even living systems, that exist outside of their interaction. As an example of this ‘magico-mythic’ thinking, Elias refers to the way in which social scientists talk about societies, institutions and organizations as ‘wholes’ or ‘systems’, which he says is the creation of a mystery in order to solve a mystery. What he calls for to generate an alternative, more detached mode of thought is a focus on the actual processes of our interdependence and this is what the perspective of complex responsive processes seeks to do.

It seems to me that mainstream organizational and management literature, the business schools and the management and leadership development programs of major organizations are all, for the most part, promoting what Elias has called magico-mythic thinking. For example, we talk about culture as a system that someone can design and move about. However, the magico-mythic nature of our explanations of organizational life is covered over by the rational sounding language in which they are presented. They promote the illusion of control, so providing social defenses against anxiety, but in the process distancing us from our actual experience and making rationally invisible what we actually do in organizations. Increasingly I have come to the view that most of the explanations of, and prescriptions for, acting in organizations amount to a massive construction of a fantasy world so that we can preserve the illusion that someone is in control. Let me give an example.

There have been many occasions when I have taken sessions with highly intelligent, highly competent senior managers on, say, leadership development programs, when the response to my suggestion that they focus attention on their own experience has been that this is not practical. They want to know how to ‘apply’ what I am saying. They call for prescriptions, ‘tools’ and techniques in the belief that this is what is practical. I may then ask them whether they derived anything practical from the session prior to mine and, if so, what that was. I am then told that the previous session did provide them with a practical tool that they could apply when they returned to the office on Monday morning. The ‘tool’ they refer to takes the form of a list of actions or behaviors, for example, the seven habits of effective people, or even more frequently the ubiquitous two-by-two matrix. So, for example, they may point to the ‘tool’ for changing their organization’s culture. This diagram will have some variable measured on the vertical axis, say, solidarity. Another variable will be measured on the horizontal axis, say, open-mindedness. Four possible ways of combining these variables are depicted to yield four different categories of culture. Low solidarity and low open-mindedness leads to culture type A. Low solidarity and high open-mindedness leads to culture type B. High solidarity and low open-mindedness leads to culture type C. High solidarity and high open-mindedness leads to culture type D. The participants are then asked to locate their organization’s culture on the matrix and they often discover it is the least attractive type, A. They then decide that what they need in order to succeed is culture type D, which most people think is the ‘right’ culture to have. The prescription is then for them to return to the office on Monday morning and promote solidarity and open-mindedness in the belief that this will enable them to shift their corporation’s culture from type A to type D. What is truly astonishing is that anyone for a moment believes that this is remotely possible, let alone practical. I only have to ask them whether they actually believe they can do this for the whole fantasy to be punctured.

What is happening when people talk like this is a taken-for-granted process of reifying the organization. It feels natural to think that the organization actually exists as a thing which may be moved around. Not only do people tend to reify organizations, they quite easily slip into anthropomorphizing them. Not only is the organization a thing, it is also a kind of person with a purpose and a direction of its own, both of which may be chosen by its most powerful members. It is now not uncommon for people to talk about an organization as a living thing, a living system just like the systems in nature. It is then a short step to call for a return to ancient wisdom when thinking about organizations so as to find a simpler way that is more connected to nature. Calls are made for the re-sacralization of nature and of work. What we see here is a progressive move to highly involved, magico-mythical thinking about organizations, highly reminiscent of how people used to view nature. It is then quite natural to think of organizational life in terms of forces acting upon us to which we must submit.

What I believe the chapters in this book are doing is moving in the opposite direction to the one I have outlined above. They show how taking seriously one’s experience of what one is actually doing in local interactions with others, taking seriously our interdependence, leads to very different views of what is practical. Taking this route, we come to see that there are no mysterious social forces acting upon us. Instead, we see how we are taking up global patterns in our local interactions, so reproducing and potentially transforming those global patterns. This call to focus on experience should not be mistaken for a utopian ideal for a ‘return’ to some primal harmony. By experience, I mean the actual experience of interaction in which we express hatred, aggression and greed, as well as love, compassion and care.

I want to turn now to a brief review of the perspective of complex responsive processes, a somewhat expanded account of which may be found in Chapter 2 of this volume. The first series of books referred to at the start of this chapter provides a detailed development of the perspective.

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 cooperative–consensual and conflictual–competitive 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 people’s 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 one’s own body responses to one’s 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 gesture–response, 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 ‘the generalized other’. In other words, they always take the attitude of the group or society to their actions – 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, ‘I’, can only ever contemplate itself as an object, ‘me’, which is one’s perception of the attitude of socie...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• Series preface Complexity as the Experience of Organizing
• 1 Introduction: emergence and organizations
• 2 Local and global processes in organizational life
• Editor’s introduction to Chapter 3
• 3 The local experience of a global diversity initiative in a multinational pharmaceutical company
• Editor’s introduction to Chapter 4
• 4 The emergence of global stability in local interaction in a consulting practice
• Editor’s introduction to Chapter 5
• 5 Experiencing national education policies in local interaction
• 6 Technology as social object: a complex responsive processes perspective
• Editor’s introduction to Chapter 7
• 7 Writing in organizational life: how a technology simultaneously forms and is formed by human interaction