Our environment has changed. It is more complex than ever before. But what does that mean? What is complexity, really? Let’s agree on the idea that complexity is the predictable AND the unpredictable AT THE SAME TIME. It isn’t predictable and it isn’t unpredictable. It is both/and. It is two polarities working at the same time.
This means that the skills needed for leadership have also changed. Leaders need to be responsive. They need to adapt. To pivot. But guess what? Many of the methods being used to develop leaders have not changed much.
This is our leadership challenge – it is no longer about “what” leaders should be like – we now have a “how” challenge; how leaders can act to develop a culture of collaboration and autonomy in their teams.
Complexity theory
Ralph Stacey was a Professor of Management and Director of the Complexity and Management Centre at the Business School of the University of Hertfordshire England. He has devoted many years to addressing how the complexity sciences could be used to understand stability and change in organisations. His work on complex responsive processes helps us see how agreement and certainty can demonstrate control and chaos or… both, at the same time!
Stacey notes that strategic management is understood as that kind of management which is concerned with the ‘big picture’ over the ‘long-term’ for the ‘whole organisation’.
So that definition is not other management activities like ‘day-to-day’, ‘short-term’, ‘tactical’ or ‘functional’’.
What does this mean? It means that these activities of strategic management are normally taken to be the primary function of an organisation’s ‘leader’, supported by his or her ‘top leadership team’, and it is widely thought that strategic purpose, direction and alignment should be expressed by the leader in an inspiring, easily understood statement of ‘vision and mission’. Top executives choose purpose and direction and what the organisation becomes depends upon the wisdom of those choices (Stacey, R., 2010).
But is that the case? Is that really a leader that is able to respond to the current reality? If leaders and managers are no longer in control nor have the possibility of choosing the long-term futures of their organisation, then we need to rethink how organisations evolve and what roles leaders and managers play in this.
Stacey suggests that the modern natural sciences of complexity could help us reframe and gain insight into the evolution of complexity to help us rethink organisations and their management. We need that. Disrupt or be disrupted.
Alternatively, the models of classical science assume that the laws of nature can be represented linearly, in other words cause and effect which suggest there is certainty. And if we can be certain about one thing, it is that people, by nature, are predictable and unpredictable at the same time. And in the presence of diversity, stability is questionable. One scientist, Prigogine (1997), sees evolution at all levels in terms of instabilities, with humans and their creativity as a part of it. If we were to think of human organisations and societies in these terms it would mean that diverse interdependent individuals are forming patterns of organisations in the interplay of their intentional acts while, at the same time those individuals are being formed by the patterns they are creating, where what is being formed is personal identity.
In other words, global weather patterns are formed by local weather patterns and local weather patterns form global weather patterns.
Not one or the other but both/and.
For Stacey the resonance with the experience of organisational reality is very powerful. The consequence of taking this view is profound because instead of being determined by a prior plan, organisational change will be emerging in the local interactions of many, many people. The change can only happen in many, many local interactions between diverse agents.
The term ‘complex responsive processes of relating’ (Stacey, R., 2010) encompasses communicative interaction, power relating and ideologically based choices and it is in such responsive processes of relating, including deliberate intention and design, that human beings create meaning and accomplish sophisticated joint action of any kind.
Joint action? The key feature of all human groups, organisations, institutions and societies is this joint action. Joint action is possible only because complex responsive processes of relating produce emergent, coherent, meaningful patterns of interaction both locally and population-wide at the same time and because human beings are capable of articulating these patterns which they take up in their local interactions.
So what is the definition of strategy in complexity?What is your role as a leader? If we want to understand strategy, then we need to understand the evolving complex responsive processes of relating between people. Because in their local interaction, people constitute an organisation (Stacey, R., 2010).