Chris Mowles – författare

This book interprets insights from the complexity sciences to explore seven types of complexity better to understand the predictable unpredictability of social life. Drawing on the natural and social sciences, it describes how complexity models are helpful but insufficient for our understanding of complex reality. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the book develops a complex theory of action more consistent with our experience that our plans inevitably lead to unexpected outcomes, explains why we are both individuals and thoroughly social, and gives an account of why, no matter how clear our message, we may still be misunderstood. The book investigates what forms of knowledge are most helpful for thinking about complex experience, reflects on the way we exercise authority (leadership) and thinks through the ethical implications of trying to co-operate in a complex world. Taking complexity seriously poses a radical challenge to more orthodox theories of managing and leading, based as they are on assumptions of predictability, control and universality. The author argues that management is an improvisational practice which takes place in groups in a particular context at a particular time. Managers can influence but never control an uncontrollable world. To become more skilful in complex group dynamics involves taking into account multiple points of view and acknowledging not knowing, ambivalence and doubt.This book will be of interest to researchers, professionals, academics and students in the fields of business and management, especially those interested in how taking complexity seriously can influence the functioning of businesses and organizations and how they manage and lead.

This book interprets insights from the complexity sciences to explore seven types of complexity better to understand the predictable unpredictability of social life. Drawing on the natural and social sciences, it describes how complexity models are helpful but insufficient for our understanding of complex reality. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the book develops a complex theory of action more consistent with our experience that our plans inevitably lead to unexpected outcomes, explains why we are both individuals and thoroughly social, and gives an account of why, no matter how clear our message, we may still be misunderstood. The book investigates what forms of knowledge are most helpful for thinking about complex experience, reflects on the way we exercise authority (leadership) and thinks through the ethical implications of trying to co-operate in a complex world. Taking complexity seriously poses a radical challenge to more orthodox theories of managing and leading, based as they are on assumptions of predictability, control and universality. The author argues that management is an improvisational practice which takes place in groups in a particular context at a particular time. Managers can influence but never control an uncontrollable world. To become more skilful in complex group dynamics involves taking into account multiple points of view and acknowledging not knowing, ambivalence and doubt.This book will be of interest to researchers, professionals, academics and students in the fields of business and management, especially those interested in how taking complexity seriously can influence the functioning of businesses and organizations and how they manage and lead.

Consultancy is a lucrative industry dependent on the production and use of tools and techniques which hold out the promise of success for the organisations it supports: transformation, or greater efficiency and effectiveness, perhaps even culture change. However, a critical and important question is whether these promises are fulfilled in everyday practice in organisations. Is it possible at all for consultants to predict and control the changes that their clients ask for? This volume reframes the role of consultants from detached observers wielding a stable body of knowledge useful in all contexts, to that of skilled participants in the conscious and unconscious processes of organisational life.In this book, one of three in a series looking at complexity and management, the expert authors bring together their experiences to provide vibrant accounts of how to lead in everyday organisational situations using practical judgement. The book includes a brief historical introduction to complexity and leadership, real-world narratives illustrating concrete dilemmas in the workplace, and a concluding chapter that draws together the practical and theoretical implications.With both theoretical grounding and practical insights from managers and consultants in leading firms, this is an ideal resource for executives and students on leadership development and talent management programmes, as well as those undertaking higher education courses in leadership and consulting.

Since the early 1990s, public sector organisations have been overwhelmed with what has come to be termed New Public Management (NPM) methods. NPM idealises performance, metrics, transparency and marketisation. This book explores some of the tensions which arise in institutions where NPM methods prevail, introduces different ways of thinking about the task of managing for public good and offers a radical challenge to the dominant assumptions regarding why and how professional communities of practice may (or may not) come to change their working practices. In this third book in the Complexity and Management series, the expert authors bring together their experiences to provide vibrant accounts of how to manage in everyday public sector organisational situations using practical judgement. The book includes a brief introduction to complexity and public sector management, real-world narratives illustrating concrete dilemmas in the workplace and a concluding chapter that draws together the practical and theoretical implications of a complexity perspective.With both theoretical grounding and practical insights from senior managers and consultants, the book provides an ideal resource for students on management or executive leadership programmes for the public sector, as well as managers in and consultants to the sector.

Leading organisations in our contemporary world means grappling with unpredictability, painful pressures and continual conflict, all in the context of an acceleration in the pace of change. We expect the impossible from heroic leaders and they rarely live up to expectations. With countless recommendations, self-help books and new concepts, scholars and management consultants often simplify and dream unrealistically. This book challenges the more orthodox discourse on leadership and presents a way of thinking about leadership that pays closer attention to experience.The contributors in this book, all senior managers or facilitators of leadership development, resist easy solutions, new typologies or unrealistic prescriptions. Writing about their experiences in Denmark, the UK, Israel, Ethiopia, South Africa and beyond, they are less concerned with traits that people can possess and learn, or magical promises of recipes for success, and more with the socio-political process of the interaction between people from which leadership emerges as a theme. We focus on understanding leadership as a practice within which communication, research, imagination and ethical judgements are continuously improvised. So rather than idealising leadership, or reducing it to soothing tools and techniques, we suggest how leaders might become more politically, emotionally and socially savvy. This book is written for academics and practitioners with an interest in the everyday challenges of both individual and group practices of formal and informal leaders in different types of organisations, and is an ideal resource for executives and students on leadership development programmes. We hope this volume will help readers to expand the wisdom found in their own experience and discover for themselves and for others, a greater sense of freedom.

Leading organisations in our contemporary world means grappling with unpredictability, painful pressures and continual conflict, all in the context of an acceleration in the pace of change. We expect the impossible from heroic leaders and they rarely live up to expectations. With countless recommendations, self-help books and new concepts, scholars and management consultants often simplify and dream unrealistically. This book challenges the more orthodox discourse on leadership and presents a way of thinking about leadership that pays closer attention to experience.The contributors in this book, all senior managers or facilitators of leadership development, resist easy solutions, new typologies or unrealistic prescriptions. Writing about their experiences in Denmark, the UK, Israel, Ethiopia, South Africa and beyond, they are less concerned with traits that people can possess and learn, or magical promises of recipes for success, and more with the socio-political process of the interaction between people from which leadership emerges as a theme. We focus on understanding leadership as a practice within which communication, research, imagination and ethical judgements are continuously improvised. So rather than idealising leadership, or reducing it to soothing tools and techniques, we suggest how leaders might become more politically, emotionally and socially savvy. This book is written for academics and practitioners with an interest in the everyday challenges of both individual and group practices of formal and informal leaders in different types of organisations, and is an ideal resource for executives and students on leadership development programmes. We hope this volume will help readers to expand the wisdom found in their own experience and discover for themselves and for others, a greater sense of freedom.

Consultancy is a lucrative industry dependent on the production and use of tools and techniques which hold out the promise of success for the organisations it supports: transformation, or greater efficiency and effectiveness, perhaps even culture change. However, a critical and important question is whether these promises are fulfilled in everyday practice in organisations. Is it possible at all for consultants to predict and control the changes that their clients ask for? This volume reframes the role of consultants from detached observers wielding a stable body of knowledge useful in all contexts, to that of skilled participants in the conscious and unconscious processes of organisational life.In this book, one of three in a series looking at complexity and management, the expert authors bring together their experiences to provide vibrant accounts of how to lead in everyday organisational situations using practical judgement. The book includes a brief historical introduction to complexity and leadership, real-world narratives illustrating concrete dilemmas in the workplace, and a concluding chapter that draws together the practical and theoretical implications.With both theoretical grounding and practical insights from managers and consultants in leading firms, this is an ideal resource for executives and students on leadership development and talent management programmes, as well as those undertaking higher education courses in leadership and consulting.

Since the early 1990s, public sector organisations have been overwhelmed with what has come to be termed New Public Management (NPM) methods. NPM idealises performance, metrics, transparency and marketisation. This book explores some of the tensions which arise in institutions where NPM methods prevail, introduces different ways of thinking about the task of managing for public good and offers a radical challenge to the dominant assumptions regarding why and how professional communities of practice may (or may not) come to change their working practices. In this third book in the Complexity and Management series, the expert authors bring together their experiences to provide vibrant accounts of how to manage in everyday public sector organisational situations using practical judgement. The book includes a brief introduction to complexity and public sector management, real-world narratives illustrating concrete dilemmas in the workplace and a concluding chapter that draws together the practical and theoretical implications of a complexity perspective.With both theoretical grounding and practical insights from senior managers and consultants, the book provides an ideal resource for students on management or executive leadership programmes for the public sector, as well as managers in and consultants to the sector.

Virtually everyone accepts that workplaces are complex, but there is little insight into how we might engage with complexity more skilfully. If complexity isn’t something that managers can control and leaders cannot harness, then what does a complexity perspective offer?This fourth book in the complexity series describes how taking complexity seriously can inform approaches to understanding organisations. It focuses on the ways that managers and researchers can engage with their own histories to better understand their working lives, how they may be participating in maintaining the very processes they are trying to change and how research methods can shed light on politics of working together. The chapter authors work in a wide variety of sectors and draw on their experience to produce vibrant writing which will resonate with managers and leaders who want to explore how they might understand their working lives differently, and to students who are using first-person reflexive research methodologies.Drawn from contemporary research in a wide variety of organisations, this book makes a valuable contribution to manager-researchers wanting to think differently about their intractable and enduring everyday dilemmas.

Virtually everyone accepts that workplaces are complex, but there is little insight into how we might engage with complexity more skilfully. If complexity isn’t something that managers can control and leaders cannot harness, then what does a complexity perspective offer?This fourth book in the complexity series describes how taking complexity seriously can inform approaches to understanding organisations. It focuses on the ways that managers and researchers can engage with their own histories to better understand their working lives, how they may be participating in maintaining the very processes they are trying to change and how research methods can shed light on politics of working together. The chapter authors work in a wide variety of sectors and draw on their experience to produce vibrant writing which will resonate with managers and leaders who want to explore how they might understand their working lives differently, and to students who are using first-person reflexive research methodologies.Drawn from contemporary research in a wide variety of organisations, this book makes a valuable contribution to manager-researchers wanting to think differently about their intractable and enduring everyday dilemmas.

What do business school graduates learn, and how helpful is it for managing in the everyday, messy reality of organisations? What does it mean to apply 'best practice', or to take up 'evidence-based management' and what kind of thinking does this imply? In Rethinking Management, Chris Mowles argues that many management courses still largely assume a linear and predictable world, when experience tells us that the opposite is the case. He questions some of the more orthodox conceptual assumptions that underpin much management education and instead, encourages leaders and managers to take their everyday experience of working with others seriously. People in organisations co-operate and compete to get things done, and constrain and enable each other in relationships of power. Because of this there are always unintended consequences of our actions - uncertainty is inherent in the everyday. Chris Mowles draws on the complexity sciences, the sciences of uncertainty rather than certainty, and the social sciences to explore more helpful ways to think and talk about our lived reality. He takes concrete examples from contemporary organisations, to argue that understanding the radical implications of uncertainty is central to the task of leading. Rethinking Management explores narrative alternatives to the ubiquitous grids and frameworks that are routinely taught in business schools, and encourages management professionals and educators to recognise the importance of judgement, improvisation and the everyday politics of organisational life.

The reality of everyday organizational life is that it is filled with uncertainty, contradictions and paradoxes. Yet leaders and managers are expected to act as though they can predict the future and bring about the impossible: that they can transform themselves and their colleagues, design different cultures, choose the values for their organization, be innovative, control conflict and have inspiring visions. Whilst managers will have had lots of experiences of being in charge, they probably realise that they are not always in control. So how might we frame a much more realistic account of what’s possible for managers to achieve?Many managers are implicitly aware of their messy reality, but they rarely spend much time reflecting on what it is that they are actually doing. Drawing on insights from the complexity sciences, process sociology and pragmatic philosophy, Chris Mowles engages directly with some principal contradictions of organizational life concerning innovation, culture change, conflict and leadership. Mowles argues that if managers proceed from the expectation that organizational life as inherently uncertain, and interactions between people are complex and often paradoxical, they start noticing different things and create possibilities for acting in different ways.Managing in Uncertainty will be of interest to practitioners, advanced students and researchers looking at management and organizational studies from a critical perspective.

The reality of everyday organizational life is that it is filled with uncertainty, contradictions and paradoxes. Yet leaders and managers are expected to act as though they can predict the future and bring about the impossible: that they can transform themselves and their colleagues, design different cultures, choose the values for their organization, be innovative, control conflict and have inspiring visions. Whilst managers will have had lots of experiences of being in charge, they probably realise that they are not always in control. So how might we frame a much more realistic account of what’s possible for managers to achieve?Many managers are implicitly aware of their messy reality, but they rarely spend much time reflecting on what it is that they are actually doing. Drawing on insights from the complexity sciences, process sociology and pragmatic philosophy, Chris Mowles engages directly with some principal contradictions of organizational life concerning innovation, culture change, conflict and leadership. Mowles argues that if managers proceed from the expectation that organizational life as inherently uncertain, and interactions between people are complex and often paradoxical, they start noticing different things and create possibilities for acting in different ways.Managing in Uncertainty will be of interest to practitioners, advanced students and researchers looking at management and organizational studies from a critical perspective.

Strategic Management and Organisational Dynamics remains unique amongst strategic management textbooks by taking a refreshingly alternative look at the subject. Drawing on the sciences of complexity as well as a broad range of social scientific literature, Stacey and Mowles challenge the conceptual orthodoxy of planned strategy, focusing instead on emergence and the predictable unpredictability of organisational life.

 

Ideal for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate study, this critically detailed account deals with current issues, raising the challenge of complexity within practice and theory.  

 

New to this edition:

The literature from past editions is refreshed and updated. More examples are given from contemporary organisational life and social life more generally. The canon of thinkers who inform complex responsive processes of relating is broadened and deepened. There is engagement with new developments in organisational theory such as process organisation studies and practice schools. There are updated sections on rhetoric, paradox and recognition. A focus on what strategic management might mean from the perspective of complex responsive processes.

Ralph Stacey is Professor of Management at the Business School, University of Hertfordshire. He is a supervisor on the innovative Doctor of Management programme at the University of Hertfordshire and the author of a number of books and papers on complexity and organisation.

 

Chris Mowles is Professor of Complexity and Management at the Business School, University of Hertfordshire. He is director of, and supervisor on, the innovative Doctor of Management programme at the University of Hertfordshire and the author of two books and a number of papers on complexity and organisation.