Complexity and organisations
Ralph Stacey
1942 – 2021
Complex responsive processes describe organisations as continuously formed in local interaction, with no equilibrium to return to. The nearest academic statement of the book's premise.
Read alongside: Shape
- Start with
- Complexity and Organizational Reality (2010)
- Where they resist the book
- Stacey grew hostile to the idea that leaders can shape anything deliberately. The book's third movement, Shape, is exactly what he came to doubt.
Works worth the time
Complexity and Organizational Reality · 2010
The nearest academic statement of the book's premise, and its sharpest objection to the third movement.
Publisher: Routledge ↗Read further
- Wikipedia: Ralph D. Stacey ↗
Wikipedia
Where Stacey appears
Equilibrium models describe conditions that rarely hold.
Most planning inherits an equilibrium assumption: disturbance, response, return. Stacey's complex responsive processes describe organisations as continuously formed in local interaction, with no equilibrium to return to. Simon's bounded rationality makes the modest version of the same point — the information required by the plan is not available to the planner.
Strategy is a pattern in a stream of behaviour.
Mintzberg's emergent strategy is nearly a definition of the Current: what an organisation does repeatedly becomes what it is doing strategically, whatever the deck says. Heifetz's regulation of distress describes shaping as pacing — enough disturbance to provoke work, not enough to trigger flight.