“Complexity Management: Fad or Radical Challenge to Systems Thinking?”
Ralph D. Stacey, Douglas Griffin & Patricia Shaw. 2000. Complexity Management: Fad or Radical Challenge to Systems Thinking?. Routledge: New York, NY. (Part of the Complexity and Emergence in Organization Series.)
I’ve had this book for a long time (~2003), having scored it from Powell’s near the U of Chicago and I’ve yet to be able to plow through it. But I spent four months working intensively with Warren Kinston, a highly accomplished Systems thinker. Maybe I just needed more exposure to systems theory in order to understand the argument.
Not that the writing has helped. It’s a thick book, written in dense text. But the topic itself is dense. I missed out on Philosophy 301 at Trinity of Texas (maybe because I slept through my classes for a semester) but I really didn’t have the background to get the teleological arguments. After getting through Kinston’s Working With Values I’m more prepared for these types of density and philosophical arguments.
Philosophy matters, of course, especially in management theory since so many managers are Pragmatists in their decision-making approach.
A sample of the discussion:
Furthermore, there is a powerful tendency to think of the model, even a model with a life of its own, as an aid to human choice in relation to the objectified phenomenon of interacting entities. Human choice is then located in the model builder, and by analogy in the managers of organizations who stand outside the system of interactions and make choices about it, as if this phenomenon did not itself consist of human choices. In other words, thinking in terms of macro models, of an industry or organization, implicitly produces a split between the system and the human chooser, just as it dos in systems thinking…. The system is assumed to behave according to one kind of causal framework, usually Formative Teleology, but sometimes, as in [P.M.] Allen’s work, something like Transformative Teleology. The model designer, or manager using the model, is implicitly assumed to be behaving according to another causal framework and this is, as far as we can see, almost always Rationalist Teleology. That is surely the problem.[133]
The sad truth is that this is giving me shivers just reading it.
It’s really a rather remarkable argument. If you can plow through their test, you will be heavily rewarded with some jewels. Unless you are a Pragmatist or Rationalist or Systemicist (in Kinston’s taxonomy). But if you’re an Imaginist / Contemplative, you’re having a ball.
My current project gets validated, too. I’m not trying to control anything. I’m trying to introduce variance and novelty through human choice. I have no idea where it’s going to go but I figure that it won’t be worse than where the world’s going today. Milner was an idiot. I say that only because I know that you can’t control the future. You can only introduce new elements that change the strange attractors. It’s not noise but outside energy, a disruptive force. I’ve always enjoyed being a disruption.
