Download or read book Complex Responsive Processes in Organizations written by Ralph Stacey and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-09-02 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The past decade has seen increasing focus on the importance of information and knowledge in economic and social processes, the so-called 'knowledge economy'. This is reflected in the popularity amongst practicing managers and organizational theorists of notions of learning, sense-making, knowledge creation, knowledge management and intellectual capital in organizations and more recently, of emotional intelligence as an important management skill. This insightful book: argues that the information processing view of knowledge creation held by systems thinkers is no longer tenable develops the alternative perspective of Complex Responsive Processes of relating, drawing on the complexity sciences as a source for analogies with human action places self-organizing interaction at the centre of the knowledge creating process in organizations. Learning and knowledge creation are seen as qualitative processes of power relating that are emotional as well as intellectual, creative as well as destructive, enabling as well as constraining, and the result is a radical questioning of the belief that organizational knowledge is essentially codified and centralized. Instead, organizational knowledge is understood to be in the relationships between people in an organization and has to do with the qualities of those relationships.

Download or read book Complexity and Management written by Ralph D. Stacey and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Providing a critique of the ways that complexity theory has been applied to understanding organizations, and outining a new direction, this book calls for a radical re-examination of management thinking.

Download or read book Complexity and Organizational Reality written by Ralph D. Stacey and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-12-18 with total page 695 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Approaches to leadership and management are still dominated by prescriptions – usually claimed as scientific – for top executives to choose the future direction of their organization. The global financial recession and the collapse of investment capitalism (surely not planned by anyone) make it quite clear that top executives are simply not able to choose future directions. Despite this, current management literature mostly continues to avoid the obvious – management’s inability to predict or control what will happen in the future. The key question now must be how we are to think about management if we take the uncertainty of organizational life seriously. Ralph Stacey has turned to the sciences of uncertainty and complexity to develop an understanding of leadership and management as the ordinary politics of daily organizational life. In presenting organizations as a series of complex responsive processes, Stacey’s new book helps us to see organizational reality for what it actually is – human beings engaged in many, many local conversational interactions and power relations in which they negotiate their ideologically based choices. Organizational continuity and change emerge unpredictably, rather than as a result of any overall plan. This is a radically different picture from the one painted by most of the management literature, which explains "organizational continuity and change" as the realization of the global plans and choices of a few powerful executives within an organization. Providing a new foundation for understanding complexity and management, this important book is required reading for managers and leaders wanting to understand the reality of complexity in organizations, including those engaged in postgraduate studies in leadership, organizational behaviour and change management.

Download or read book Complexity and the Experience of Managing in Public Sector Organizations written by Ralph Stacey and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-05-07 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fundamental problem of public sector governance relates to the very way of thinking it reflects; where organization is thought of as a ‘thing’, a system designed to deliver what its designers choose. This volume questions that way of thinking and takes a perspective in which organizations are complex responsive processes of relating between people. Bringing together the work of participants on the Doctor of Management program at Hertfordshire University, this book focuses on the move to marketization and managerialism, paying particular attention to human relationships and group dynamics. The contributors provide narrative accounts of their work addressing questions of management, pressures, accountability, responsiveness and traditional systems perspectives. In considering such questions in terms of their daily experience, they explore how the perspective of complex responsive processes assists them in making sense of experience and developing practice. Including an editors’ commentary which introduces and contextualizes these experiences as well as drawing out key themes for further research, this book will be of value to academics, students and practitioners looking for reflective accounts of real life experiences rather than further prescriptions of what organizational life ought to be.

Download or read book The Paradox of Control in Organizations written by Philip Streatfield and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-09-02 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Business leaders are expected to be 'in control' of the situation in which their businesses find themselves. But how can organizational leaders and managers control matters entirely out of their hands; such as the next action a competitor takes, or the next law a government may pass? In this book, Philip Streatfield reflects on his own experience as a manager to explore the question: who, or what is 'in control' in an organization? Adopting the perspective of complex responsive processes developed in the first two volumes of this series, the author takes self-organization and emergence as central themes in thinking about life in organizations. He focuses on the tension between spontaneously forming patterns of conversation and intentional actions arguing that the order of organizations emerges through a combination of collective interaction and individual intentions. The argument is developed by considering the day-to-day experiences of life in a large pharmaceutical organization, SmithKline Beecham. In today's organization, managers find that they have to live with the paradox of being 'in control' and 'not in control' simultaneously. It is this capacity to live with paradox, and to continue to participate creatively in spite of 'not being in control', that constitutes effective management.

Download or read book Complexity and Innovation in Organizations written by José Fonseca and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking a critical look at major perspectives on innovation, this book suggests that innovation is not a designed functional activity of a firm or an intentional process through which firms anticipate changes in conditions. Jose Fonseca proposes that the concepts behind the innovation experiences cannot be traced to any particular time, space or individual, even if one person has figured prominently. The innovative ideas in the examples considered did not occur as a direct product of a purposeful search triggered by the perception of some problem to solve, nor did they result from a sequential process that was laid out in advance. Instead, innovative ideas were a product of streams of conversations that extended over long periods of time and were characterized by critical degrees of misunderstanding and redundancy. Fonseca's book presents innovation as new meaning potentially emerging in ongoing, every-day conversations. Drawing on the theory of complex responsive process, developed in the first two volumes of this series, Fonseca presents a particular way of understanding innovation. The experiences of innovation studied in this book suggest that innovations do not start with a match between a need to be satisfied and a set of competencies and tools purposefully brought together to meet the need. On the contrary, identification of need is a consequence of success, rather than a pre-condition. The innovations studied in this book (a selection of innovation experiences from Portugal are considered) were subject to constant and never ending redefinition.

Download or read book Changing Conversations in Organizations written by Patricia Shaw and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on the essential uncertainty of participating in evolving events as they happen, this book considers the creative possibilities of such participation from a complexity perspective.

Download or read book Tools and Techniques of Leadership and Management written by Ralph Stacey and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-06-25 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many of today’s books on the tools and techniques of leadership and management provide descriptions of long lists for use in decision-making, leading, coaching and project management. This book takes a completely different approach. It contests the claims that the tools and techniques are based on evidence and explains why human activities of leading and managing are simply not amenable to scientific proof and consequently, why long-term futures of organizations are unpredictable. The book undertakes a critical exploration of just what these tools and techniques are about; showing that while they may lead to competent performance they cannot go further to expert performance because expertise involves going beyond rules and procedures. Ralph Stacey investigates the many questions that are thrown up as a result of this new approach. Questions such as: How do we apply this new way of thinking? What are the practical tools and techniques it gives us? What is the role of leaders in an unpredictable world? How does complexity affect the way organizations are structured and function? This book will be relevant to students on courses and modules that deal with leadership, decision-making and organizational development and behaviour as well as professional leaders and managers who want to develop their own understanding and techniques.

Download or read book Complexity and Group Processes written by Ralph D. Stacey and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-03-06 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book suggests an alternative way of understanding human relating. Highly relevant not only for therapeutic groups but also those who are managing, leading and working in organizations.

Download or read book Strategic Responsiveness and Adaptive Organizations written by Torben Juul Andersen and published by Emerald Group Publishing. This book was released on 2019-02-11 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume of the Emerald Studies in Global Strategic Responsiveness presents a selection of articles from the EURAM 2018 conference. They offer a range of new promising approaches about how to deal with the strategic challenges associated with contemporary market turbulence and the increasingly unpredictable business conditions.

Download or read book Systems Intelligence Discovering a Hidden Competence in Human Action and Organizational Life written by and published by SAL ,Helsinki Univ. of Technology. This book was released on 2004 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Complexity and Creativity in Organizations written by Ralph D. Stacey and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Combining insights from the new science of complexity with insights from psychoanalysis, Stacey posits that repressing the anxiety caused by the unstable, ever-changing nature of today's business world also represses the creative impulses - the "spaces for novelty" - that allow members of a workforce to produce their best work. Using the science of complexity as a starting point, he pulls together many insights into behavior and organizational functioning that currently lie at the edges of research and practice. This book invites people to explore what the new science might mean for understanding life in organizations, and shows how it can be used as a framework for understanding the processes that produce emergence rather than intentional strategies. Stacey presents an entirely new perspective on what it means for an organization to learn.

Download or read book Organizations as Complex Systems written by Maurice Yolles and published by IAP. This book was released on 2006-09-01 with total page 884 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Managing the Complex is an ambitious title - and it would be an audacious one if we were not to begin with a frank admission: to date few to none of us have a skill set which includes managing the complex. We try various things, we write about others, and we wonder about still others. When a tool, perspective, or technique comes along which seems to evoke success, we emulate it probe it and recoil at the all too often admission that it was situation and context which afforded success its opportunity, and not some quality intrinsic to the tool perspective or technique. Indeed, if the study of complexity has done anything for managers, and for those who espouse managerial theory, it is in providing a ‘scientific foundation’ for the notion that context matters. Those who preach abstract ideas have then to reconcile themselves to the notion that situation and embodiment matters. Those who believe in strong causality and determinism are left to wrestle with the role of chance, uncertainty, and chaos. Those who prefer to argue that men move history are confronted with the role of environment and affordances, while those who argue the reverse are left to contend with charisma, irrationality of crowds, and the strange qualities we know as emotions. A series on complex systems has less ambitious goals to contend with than this. Such a series can deal with classifications, and categories, and speak of ‘noise’ as if it were not the central focus of the problem. Managing the complex is about managing ‘noise’ or perhaps we should say it is about ‘dealing with’ ‘accepting’ ‘making room for’ and ‘learning from’ ‘noise’. The articles in this volume and in volumes to come will each be considered as ‘noise’ by some and as ‘gems’ by others, but we hope that practicing managers and academics alike will find plenty of fuel to drive their personal explorations into understanding, and perhaps even managing, the complex.

Download or read book Informal Coalitions written by C. Rodgers and published by Springer. This book was released on 2006-10-10 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book places everyday talk and role-modelling interactions at the forefront of an alternative change-leadership agenda, and introduces a number of practical approaches to help line managers and organizational specialists deliver this agenda more successfully. It is essential reading for organizational practitioners at all levels.

Download or read book Strategic Management and Organisational Dynamics written by Ralph D. Stacey and published by Pearson Education. This book was released on 2007 with total page 502 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This textbook challenges the view that organizations succeed when they operate in states of stability, harmony and consensus. The author argues that an understanding of organizational dynamics leads to a greater insight into strategic management.

Download or read book Brave New Work written by Aaron Dignan and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2019-02-19 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “This is the management book of the year. Clear, powerful and urgent, it's a must read for anyone who cares about where they work and how they work.” —Seth Godin, author of This is Marketing “This book is a breath of fresh air. Read it now, and make sure your boss does too.” —Adam Grant, New York Times bestselling author of Give and Take, Originals, and Option B with Sheryl Sandberg When fast-scaling startups and global organizations get stuck, they call Aaron Dignan. In this book, he reveals his proven approach for eliminating red tape, dissolving bureaucracy, and doing the best work of your life. He’s found that nearly everyone, from Wall Street to Silicon Valley, points to the same frustrations: lack of trust, bottlenecks in decision making, siloed functions and teams, meeting and email overload, tiresome budgeting, short-term thinking, and more. Is there any hope for a solution? Haven’t countless business gurus promised the answer, yet changed almost nothing about the way we work? That’s because we fail to recognize that organizations aren’t machines to be predicted and controlled. They’re complex human systems full of potential waiting to be released. Dignan says you can’t fix a team, department, or organization by tinkering around the edges. Over the years, he has helped his clients completely reinvent their operating systems—the fundamental principles and practices that shape their culture—with extraordinary success. Imagine a bank that abandoned traditional budgeting, only to outperform its competition for decades. An appliance manufacturer that divided itself into 2,000 autonomous teams, resulting not in chaos but rapid growth. A healthcare provider with an HQ of just 50 people supporting over 14,000 people in the field—that is named the “best place to work” year after year. And even a team that saved $3 million per year by cancelling one monthly meeting. Their stories may sound improbable, but in Brave New Work you’ll learn exactly how they and other organizations are inventing a smarter, healthier, and more effective way to work. Not through top down mandates, but through a groundswell of autonomy, trust, and transparency. Whether you lead a team of ten or ten thousand, improving your operating system is the single most powerful thing you can do. The only question is, are you ready?

Download or read book Managing Organizational Responsiveness written by Claus Jacobs and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Responsiveness - conceived of as an organization's ability to listen, understand and respond to demands put to it by its stakeholders - has become a crucial, yet underresearched concept in strategic change and organization development. Claus Jacobs develops a concept of enactive responsiveness that transcends the traditional stimulus-response metaphor by re-introducing the dialogical and relational dimensions of responsiveness.