7
Understanding Organizations as Complex Responsive Processes of Relating
This chapter summarizes a theory of organizations that focuses attention on our actual, bodily, lived experience of working in organizations—that is, what we as human beings are actually doing as we go about our ordinary, everyday activities at work. In the late 1980s when I moved from a management role in industry to lecture at a university, I became very aware of just how abstract mainstream literature on organizations and their management was, and how little relationship it bore to my experience as a manager or consultant to organizations. Later, in the mid-1990s, I was joined by two colleagues who had the same misgivings. Over time we developed what we found to be a more useful way of focusing attention on organizational life than that of the dominant discourse and we described it as complex responsive processes (Fonseca, 2001; Griffin, 2002; Griffin and Stacey, 2005; Mowles, 2011; Shaw, 2002; Shaw and Stacey, 2006; Stacey, 2001, 2003, 2005, 2010, 2011, 2012; Stacey, Griffin, and Shaw, 2000; Streatfield, 2001) Before proceeding to outline what is meant by the term complex responsive processes, I want to describe what I mean by “mainstream literature” and “dominant discourse.”
The Dominant Discourse on Organizations and Their Management
The vast majority of textbooks, business school programs, and research projects around the world, most professional management and leadership development programs, management consultancies, and people in organizations, including executives, all talk about how organizations should be governed and in doing so they usually make the same taken-for-granted assumptions. There is a dominant discourse in which it is assumed without much questioning that small groups of powerful executives are able to choose the “direction” their organization will move in, realize a “vision” for it, create the conditions in which members will be innovative and entrepreneurial, change the culture as required, and select the “structures” and “conditions” that will enable them to be in control and so ensure success. The problem is that these activities rely to a significant extent on the ability of powerful executives to know enough about what has been, is now, and will be happening around them. Executives are supposed to make roughly rational decisions on the basis of the “facts.” However, in reality, executives of corporations and their management consultants, as well as politicians and their advisers, are far from sure about what has been happening and not all that certain about what is now happening, let alone what will happen in the future as a consequence of their actions. Despite not being able to know what the outcomes of their actions will be, executives and others doing their jobs in organizations are sustaining some kind of stability and bringing about some form of change, producing growth and decline while generating all manner of technological innovations with positive and sometimes negative effects. If none of them know enough to rationally choose outcomes as prescribed by the dominant discourse, then how are they doing all this? It is important to ask what it is that they, and the rest of us, are all actually doing in the ordinary, daily course of doing our work. In other words, we need to seriously explore the reality of organizational life in our experience and the way we might think about what we already do. Such an alternative way of thinking would need to take account of the aspects of our ordinary experience in organizations described in the next section.
Ordinary Experience in Organizations
We talk about organizations in the abstract as systems, as actually existing “things” subject to impersonal forces, for example, “drivers” of change. There is a tendency to do that even when we posit that they are social constructions. However, what we actually experience are not abstract things but ongoing patterns of interactions between people constituted in our responsive acts of communication with each other in which, among other things, we develop the imaginative constructs of ideological “wholes” such as “Citigroup” and the “market.”
We talk and write about independent, autonomous, rational individuals but what we experience is our interdependence and in this interdependence we constrain and enable each other. Since this is what power means, power is a central organizational reality that we usually cover over.
We talk about organizational outcomes being caused by the choices, intentions, and strategies made by people and groups of people, but in reality what happens is not simply determined by one group. What happens is determined by the interplay of all the choices, intentions, and strategies of all the groups and individuals both in an organization and in all other organizations.
We talk and write about leaders and managers being in control of organizations. In the reality of our experience, however, no one can control the interplay of intentions, because they cannot control what everyone else in every other organization is choosing and doing. Consequently, no one can choose or be in control of what happens. The interplay of intentions produces emergent patterns, such as the one we call “financial crisis,” which often are not what anyone intended or wanted. In our thinking about organizations we tend not to take account of how, in our experience, the interplay of intentions easily escalates small local changes across entire national and international populations, generating widespread patterns of change of an uncertain, unpredictable kind—for example, the patterns we call “globalization,” “recession,” “credit crunch,” and “technological innovation.”
Usually we acknowledge the uncertainty of organizational life but then proceed to think and talk in terms based on the assumption of certainty and predictability. However, in our experience, since no one can control the interplay of intentions and small changes can escalate, uncertainty and unpredictability are fundamental, irremovable aspects of organizational reality. Uncertainty and unpredictability mean that no one knows with any confidence what will happen; all we can rely on is the fact that we will be surprised. But it is even more complex than that because there is the paradox of the known-unknown; while we may not be able to predict and will be surprised at what happens, we can speculate in the knowledge that there is some repetition in human affairs and we can recognize with hindsight what has happened. We can expect evolving repetition and so can know some things, but never with certainty because they will always be open to change. It is, therefore, unhelpful and confusing to talk in terms of certainty in the belief that we can remove uncertainty.
Current thinking focuses attention on “wholes” and global changes. Our experience, however, is that of ongoing local interactions of communication, power relating, and ideologically based choosing that can be understood as the daily politics of organizational life.
In the dominant discourse great weight is placed on leaders and executives, ascribing “heroic” roles to them. However, although their intentions are very influential, they are frequently far from heroic as we notice in our experience how they, and most other people in an organization, cover things over, “game the system,” cheat, and act in their own interest as well as acting in the interest of others.
We talk publicly about the need for agreement, harmony, consensus, and alignment and nowadays there is much talk about the importance of interacting in positive, appreciative ways. However, despite such talk, in our ordinary, everyday experience we continue to disagree with each other and find it difficult to reach consensus. Conflict is a ubiquitous experience in organizations and we often display behavior that makes it very difficult to sustain positive, appreciative relations with each other. And it turns out that this irremovable conflict is a fundamental condition for the emergence of the new.
The dominant discourse focuses our attention on rational, analytical ways of making decisions and on macro “system” design, but in our experience decisions emerge in ordinary, everyday politics as we try to interpret what designed “systems” mean in local contexts. Far from being purely rational, we are emotional and often unconsciously driven to take defensive action against the anxiety aroused by the uncertainty of organizational life. Unconsciously determined behavior is of major importance in organizational life.
We think and talk in ways that tend to cover over ambiguity. However, in our experience, activities in organizations are characterized by many paradoxes: novelty and continuity, knowing and not knowing, conflicting with each other but also valuing and appreciating each other, certainty and uncertainty at the same time, forming patterns of interaction while being formed by them at the same time.
We attach major importance to employing what are called the tools and techniques of management and leadership in the belief that they will improve organizations. We talk in terms of categories of situations, that is, in terms that reduce the particularities of situations to abstract generalizations. We then say that we can identify in advance what generalizations to apply to the next situation and recommend that we use these to provide the criteria for the appropriate tool or technique to use. In our experience, however, we find that the situations we must act into are so uncertain and the contingent particularities are so important that any categories we have are of very limited usefulness. Furthermore, we cannot simply employ the tools and techniques in highly uncertain, contingent situations, so we find ourselves having to fall back on practical judgment (intuition), which often does not feel like the right thing to do because it is not scientific and rational.
Basically, the theory of complex responsive processes focuses attention on the above aspects of what we actually experience in an ordinary, everyday way as we operate together in organizations. In doing so, the literature on complex responsive processes joins that of other strands of literature that also draw attention to the inadequacies of the dominant discourse; for example, the whole fields of critical management (Alvesson and Sveningsson, 2003a, 2003b; Willmott, 1993, 2003), narrative (Boje, 1991, 1994, 1995; Bruner, 1986, 1990), social constructionism (Gergen, 1999), Dialogic OD (Bushe, 2013), and process thinking (Van de Ven, 1992), as well as the turn to conversation (Shaw, 2002; Shotter, 1993) and generative images (Marshak, 2004; Marshak and Grant, 2011; Chapter 5). However, although there are many similarities, the theory of complex responsive processes differs from most of these alternative discourses in a number of ways. What the theory of complex responsive processes is trying to do is to develop an explanation of what we are already doing rather than what we think we ought to be doing. I want to emphasize that this theory is not about a new set of “shoulds”; it is about refocusing attention on ordinary, everyday life in organizations; if there is any prescription, it is a call for more reflection on what we are actually doing. Perhaps this reflection could lead us to do some things differently. What, then, is this theory of complex responsive processes?
Local Interactions and the Emergence of Coherent Population-Wide Patterns
An important foundation of the theory of complex responsive processes is the appeal to the natural complexity sciences (Gleick, 1987; Kauffman, 1995; Prigogine and Stengers, 1984; Waldrop, 1992) as a source domain for analogies with human interaction. The models drawn from the complexity sciences are not directly applied to human interaction because their central insights are expressed in abstract relationships between computer agents with digital attributes. It is these abstract relationships that constitute the analogies I am referring to, but the crucial step is to leave behind the digital attributes and replace them with the attributes of human agents. Human agents are conscious, self-conscious, emotional, sometimes rational, anxious, defensive, acting on unconscious motivations and often spontaneous and creative. Our understanding of these human attributes is found in sociology and psychology, and these disciplines provide the most important foundations of the theory of complex responsive processes.
There is no space in a short chapter to discuss what the complexity sciences are (see Chapter 6 for one description), so I will simply point to what I think are the most important insights provided by complexity scientists, in particular those that fall into the category of complex adaptive systems (Waldrop, 1992). Complex adaptive systems are computer models consisting of large numbers of digital agents interacting with each other according to local rules of interaction. The models are attempting to describe phenomena in nature, and also in the human world, which form coherent global patterns in the absence of any overall design or central direction for those patterns. So the central concepts in these and other models are those of self-organization and emergence. The fundamental argument is that overall, global coherence is emerging in the interaction of very large numbers of self-organizing agents. It is very easy to think that these models offer a prescription for replacing central control with free forms of association between independent agents and for replacing central planning with the design of a few simple rules. The assumption is that these replacements will lead to better outcomes because they are more natural. There is, however, no justification in terms of the models for this simplistic reduction. It is just as easy to misunderstand what self-organization and emergence mean.
Self-organization is frequently taken up by management writers (e.g., Carlisle and McMillan, 2006; Coleman, 1999; Haynes, 2003; Meek, De Ladurantey, and Newell, 2007) who see it as some kind of special force capable of being released and harnessed—they write about it as a new kind of organization in which people manage themselves. Others, mostly managers, dismiss the usefulness of the concept, claiming that in organizations it amounts to a loss of control that would result in a free-for-all anarchy. All of these interpretations completely miss the point. Self-organization simply means local interaction between agents. So there is no special force to unleash or harness and there is no free-for-all because all of the agents are constrained and enabled by the actions of the other agents. Instead of using this misunderstood term I will use the term local interaction. The other frequently misunderstood term is emergence. Some interpret it as a benign force that we can either block or allow and that it is bad to block it and good to allow it (e.g., Anderson, 1999; Cilliers, 1998; Robertson and Caldart, 2008). Others, mainly managers, interpret it to mean that everything just happens anyway, largely through chance, and emergence amounts to the complete opposite of the choices of agents. On this reading, agents become largely irrelevant. However, what emerges in the models is not just happening or arising by chance. On the contrary, what emerges is due entirely to what all the agents are doing and not doing. All “emergence” means is that global patterns arise from local interactions in the complete absence of a plan, design, or blueprint for that overall pattern across the whole population of agents. There is nothing intrinsically good or bad in what emerges—that is our judgment. When people talk about “allowing” emergence, they are using the notion of being outside “it” in some omnipotent position that enables us to allow “it” or not. Furthermore, when the agents in the model are all the same and all follow the same rules, then only one emergent pattern arises and it does not evolve. However, when the agents differ from each other the emergent patterns arising across their local interaction demonstrate evolution. Difference, and therefore conflict, is essential for evolution. The key point about this evolution is that it is unpredictable—the mathematical models produce unpredictable patterns. The complexity sciences can therefore be thought of as the sciences of uncertainty in contrast to traditional sciences, which are the sciences of certainty.
These, then, are the central insights we take from the domain of complexity models into the human sphere. The argument here is that ongoing change in organizations is not caused in any straightforward way by the administrative and control systems installed by top managers, by the strategic plans they formulate and implement, by the interventions they make to design organizational change, or by their attempts to install new cultures and determine values. These are all highly generalized intentions on the part of leaders and managers but they do not cause what happens in any simple way. What actually happens emerges in the interplay of the intentions of all in an organization and in other organizations as well. Organizations change in an evolutionary way and the patterns of that evolution emerge in the many, many local interactions of all involved, in the many interplays of intentions. Just what will emerge is uncertain and will continually produce surprises, some of which will not be wanted by anyone. We only have to think about the financial crises of the past few years and the surprises and setbacks in recovering from them to see that the predictions of the theory of complex responsive processes concerning uncertainty and unanticipated and unwanted outcomes provide a more accurate account of our experience than those of the dominant discourse. The complex responsive processes perspective provides an account of Organization Development that turns the dominant discourse on its head. Organizational change is not the result of planned OD interventions, although they do play some part; instead, it is the result of many, many local interactions. OD practitioners, therefore, are effective to the degree that they participate helpfully in the local interactions from which change is emerging (see Chapters 9 and 17 for descriptions of OD practice informed by this perspective). The complex responsive processes perspective draws attention to conversational processes, as do discursive, dialogic forms of OD practitioner participation in organizational life.
The central focus, then, is on local interactions and how they reflect the interplay of choices, intentions, and strategies producing emergent population-wide patterns that are paradoxically predictable and unpredictable at the same time. The theory, therefore, focuses attention on local interactions and these take the following forms:
responsive acts of communication between people in organizations
power relations between people in which they include and exclude each other as they practice the arts of domination and resistance and employ the techniques of disciplinary power in the ordinary everyday politics of organizations
choices people make, which always reflect their ideologies.
The following sections give brief summaries of the above processes, all of which are complex responsive processes of relating between people.
Responsive Acts of Communication
Human beings fundamentally depend on each other and that interdependence is continuously expressed in the form of communication. It is in this communication that we accomplish everything we accomplish. The basic structure of this communication takes the form of a gesture by one person that evokes a response from another person in what we might think of as the conversation of gestures. We interact with each other in a responsive manner in which gesture and response together constitute the social act in which meaning arises for all participants—so that knowing, which is consciousness, is the social processes of interacting and relating (Mead, 1934). For example, one person may gesture by shouting and clenching his fists, which may call forth a response from another who also shouts and shakes his fist—or the response evoked in the other might be one of trembling and crying. The meaning of the social act of shout and countershout to both people is aggression, while that of shout and crying is a social act of domination and submission. This makes it clear that meaning does not lie in the gesture alone but in the social act as a whole; meaning arises in the responsive social interaction between actors. Meaning does not arise first in each individual and then in the action of transmitting, as in the dominant discourse, but in the interaction between the communicating individuals. Clearly, there are immediately important implications for communication in organizations. For example, when a CEO communicates with members of an organization, the meaning does not lie simply in the communication but in the responses to it. No matter how clearly worded the communication is, it will be interpreted in many different ways in local situations and therefore mean different things for different people in different places at different times in a way that the CEO cannot control. Meaning is context dependent and no one can control every detail of every context all of the time. Effective communication, therefore, cannot be regarded as a one-off event because it is an ongoing process of negotiation. Effective communication requires staying in the conversation and organizations are fundamentally ongoing patterns of conversation. Organizational change is the same as shifts in organizational conversation.
As individuals interact with each other in this responsive, conversational way, the possibility arises of a pause before making a gesture. In a kind of private role-play, emerging in the repeated experience of public interaction, one individual learns to take the attitude, the tendency to act, of the others, enabling a kind of trial run in advance of actually completing or even starting the gesture. Will it call forth aggression, fright, flight, or submission? What will be the consequences in each case? In this way, rudimentary forms of thinking develop, taking the form of private role-playing, that is, gestures made by a body to itself, calling forth responses in itself. However, the gesture that is particularly useful in calling forth the same attitude in oneself as in the other is the vocal gesture, because we can hear the sounds we make in much the same way as others hear them, whereas we cannot, for example, see the facial gestures we make as others see them. Mind (that is, the private role-plays and silent conversations with oneself) and society (that is, the public conversation of gestures between people) emerge together in the medium of bodily action, particularly the vocal act of language. However, since speaking and listening are actions of bodies, and since bodies are never without feelings, the medium of language is also always the medium of feelings. There is no question of separating mind and society as different hierarchical levels; both mind and society are understood as responsive temporal processes of communication between human bodies producing thematic patterns of experience which are in no way abstract systems.
The Generalized Other
As more and more interactions are experienced with others, increasingly more roles and wider ranges of possible responses enter into the private role-playing/silent conversation activities that are continuously intertwined with public vocal gesturing and responding. In this way, the capacity to take the attitude of many others evolves and becomes generalized. Each person engaged in the conversation of gestures can now take the attitude of the generalized other. In childhood most of us are warned by our parents to take account of how “others” will respond to what we are doing or saying. Those “others” and what “they” think of you are not actual individuals but generalizations across a particular society. Eventually, individuals develop the capacity to take the attitude of the whole group, or what a number of writers call the game (Bourdieu, 1998; Elias, 1997; Mead, 1934). In other words, they are capable of taking the social attitude as they gesture and respond to each other; this makes sophisticated processes of cooperative interaction possible because there is mindful, social behavior. In what I have been describing above it is evident that the conversation of gestures, the complex responsive processes of interaction between agents, creates history while that history is forming them. The history referred to here is both the history of the society any person is born into and the life history of the person in that society. It is through ongoing history that people develop some capacity to predict the potential consequences of their gestures to others and it is through history that people learn to take the attitude of the generalized other, the group, and the game.
Coherence emerges in the vast complexity of communicative interactions across enormous numbers of local situations because of the intrinsic capacity of local interaction to form population-wide coherent patterns. However, the pattern of this coherence is not predictable in advance and it involves both destruction and creation, both stability and instability. Human interaction is imperfect communication between people, generating both understanding and misunderstanding at the same time. Diversity arises in misunderstanding and in the cross-fertilization of concepts through interaction between different patterns of conversation. This is where the tension between conformity and deviance becomes important. It is deviance that imparts the internal capacity to evolve new patterns of conversation spontaneously.
When it comes to understanding the generalized other, the models from the complexity sciences are no longer all that useful. Local interactions are now expressions and interpretations of generalizations across a whole population. Human agents are capable of this expressing and interpreting, whereas digital agents are not. Instead we need to turn to sociology and the various notions of the generalized other to be found there. Another term for the generalized other would be habitus, the world of habit in which we live. Yet another is the notion of culture and of being caught up in a game. Such phenomena are dynamically sustained and changed in our interactions with each other and no one can design or control this social background.
Power Relations and Ordinary Everyday Politics
In processes of communication, people establish, reproduce, sustain, and change particular patterns of power relations. Power is not a thing that a person carries around and gives to others or takes away from them (Elias and Scotson, 1994). Such a view of power is tied up with the notion that we are independent autonomous individuals, “closed” off from each other. However, there are no autonomous human beings; individuals are quite obviously dependent on each other in an essential and fundamental way—society is the society of interdependent individuals. We can accomplish nothing without each other; without cooperating and competing with each other. In other words, we need each other for many different reasons—we need others to need us; we need others to love and to hate; we need others to depend upon or rebel against; we need others to victimize or be victimized by; we need enemies for wars and friends and opponents for peace. It follows that to claim that humans are essentially interdependent is to claim a fundamental “fact” about life. This is not simply an ideological position that interdependence and relating are good, because our interdependence accounts for the horrific destructiveness of human action as well as its creative beauty. Any ideology arises in our judgment of what is beautifully creative and what is horrifically destructive about relating to each other. Interdependence explains how both the good and the bad arise; indeed, how particular judgments or ideologies arise. If individuals are interdependent in this way it follows that we need each other and it is this need that explains why power is an aspect of every act of human relating. Since I need others, I cannot do whatever I please and since they need me, neither can they. We constrain each other at the same time as we enable each other and it is this paradoxical activity that constitutes power. Furthermore, since need is rarely equal, the pattern of power relations will always be skewed more to one than to another. So if I need you more than you need me, then the power distribution is tilted toward you. If, however, as we relate to each other, we discover that now you need me more than I need you, then the pattern of power relations moves and is tilted toward me.
The Dynamics of Inclusion and Exclusion
“Power” refers to patterns of perceived need—usually fluid—and is expressed as figurations of relationships. These figurations are social patterns of grouping in which some are included and others excluded and it is in being included in this group and excluded from that group that we acquire identity. I am included in a group called academics and excluded from a group called footballers, so when asked who I am, I say that I am a teacher; collective “we” identity is inseparable from individual “I” identity so that individual identity is fundamentally social, a matter of power relations. I am claiming, as a fact of our experience, that humans need each other and that relative need will rarely be equal, meaning that power is always an aspect of every act of human relating and that it is always expressed in patterns of inclusion and exclusion that give identity. I am also claiming that it is in these very acts of power relating, as the ordinary politics of everyday life, that ideology arises as our negotiated judgment of what is good and what is right about our acts of power relating. At the same time these ideological judgments shape our acts of power relating. Figurations of power can come to have a kind of semipermanence in which they are expressed in institutional arrangements. Figurations of power are essentially membership categories reflecting ideologies of inclusion and exclusion. For example, particular ideologies of deference and the role of women may be reflected in a particular grouping that includes senior men while excluding junior men and all women. This pattern of inclusion and exclusion sustains the power positions of the senior men. This process of power relating, with its dynamic of inclusion and exclusion, is ubiquitous in all human interaction (Elias and Scotson, 1994).
The Techniques of Disciplinary Power
Forms of power evolve slowly over time. The French philosopher, Michel Foucault described how modern hospitals, prisons, schools, and workplaces evolved as institutions in which techniques of disciplinary power constitute the major form of governance (Foucault, 1977). He argues that discipline is a specific form of power that operates through the use of simple instruments of hierarchical observation, normalizing judgments, and examination. The aim of disciplinary power is controlling the bodies of people in a group, organization, or society, and the actions of those bodies. So while the tools and techniques of technical rationality cannot achieve their stated purpose because of uncertainty, namely, setting and controlling future outcomes, they do succeed in providing the means leaders and managers can use to control the bodies and bodily activities of others—even though this is not what they are claimed to be used for.
In the theory of complex responsive processes, global organizational change emerges in local interaction and any overall global design can only find meaning in local interaction between individuals and groups of individuals. Modern leaders are not autonomous leaders who can design cultures, because they are themselves subjected to the techniques of disciplinary power. They are, however, prime agents administering the techniques of discipline. As they use these techniques to supervise others, they are themselves perpetually supervised in globally cocreated, interactive processes. Powerful individuals can only design and control if they employ “techniques of terror” that suppress diversity of responses. Designing incentives and seeking to promote shared values are simply gestures by the powerful that will evoke a wide diversity of responses and so can only amount to a type of control if they take the form of a cult. It should be borne in mind that disciplinary power and its techniques are not simply negative aspects of organizational life—modern organizations and societies could not exist without them. Sophisticated modern organizations and societies need the techniques of discipline to sustain sufficient order for the carrying out of complex tasks. However, covering over the nature of disciplinary power with some fantasy of leadership, and covering over the use of the tools and techniques of instrumental rationality as techniques of discipline by claiming that their function is to improve outcomes, means that we lose awareness of the ethical dimension of what we are doing and do not notice when disciplinary techniques are taken to extremes of domination. We lose sight of the significant constraints on every leader’s freedom to choose the future of their organizations. We also cover over the practice of the arts of resistance (Scott, 1990) to forms of domination and so have only a partial understanding of our own experience of organizational life.
Ideological Basis of Choices
I have said that ideologies emerge in ongoing shifts in patterns of power relations. Ideology may be thought of as the combination of norms and values. Norms restrict opportunities for action, are experienced as obligatory and constraining, and provide criteria for what ought to be done, what is right. Norms provide a basis for evaluating and choosing between desires and actions: they emerge and evolve as people in a society become more and more interdependent and as the use of violence is monopolized by the state (Elias, [1939] 2000). Desires are taken more and more behind the scenes of daily life as more detailed norms emerge about what can and cannot be done in public, and these norms become part of individual personality structures, adherence to which is sustained by the social process of shame. Norms, therefore, are constraints arising in social evolution that act to restrain the actions and even desires of interdependent individuals, so much so that the constraints become thematic patterns of individual identities. Norms are inseparable, although different, from values.
Values and ideals, unlike norms, are attractive and compelling in a voluntary, committed sense that motivates and opens up opportunities for action. Values attract us, giving life meaning and purpose, and so are experienced not as restrictive but as the highest expression of our free will, presenting a paradox of compulsion and voluntary commitment at the same time. Values, as inspiring, attractively compelling motivations to act toward the good, are continually arising in social interaction—that is, in our ongoing negotiation with each other and ourselves as we go on together. It follows that values are contingent upon the particular action situations in which we find ourselves, and although they have general and durable qualities their motivational impact on action must be negotiated afresh, must be particularized, in each action situation. Imagination idealizes contingent possibilities and creates an imaginary relation to a wholeness, a unity of experience, that does not exist but seems real because we have experienced it so intensely (Dewey, 1934; Joas, 2000). This is not a solitary but a social process and it is not necessarily good—the same process produces values that others may judge to be evil. Values may be good or bad or both, depending on who is doing the judging. Values do not arise either from conscious intentions or through justification and discussion, although such intentions, justification, and discussion may be applied later. Values cannot be produced rationally. A purpose in life cannot be prescribed. Instead, the subjective experience of values arises in specific action contexts and types of intense experience. To claim that someone could choose values for others would be to claim that this someone could form the identity, or self, of others.
Local Interaction and Global Patterns: Practical Judgment
The central proposition of the theory of complex responsive processes, then, is that coherent patterns of relationship emerge across different populations in the many, many local interactions of the people in those populations. We talk about these patterns in general using terms such as society, culture, ideology, the social background, social objects, habitus, and the game. Whatever term we use, we are pointing to the same phenomenon, elements of which are articulated in the form of broad generalizations such as partnership, transparency, consideration for others, corruption, competition. Organizations are understood as ongoing temporal patterns of relationships between people who are articulating, reflecting upon, and interpreting in their local interactions, in which organizational habitus or the organizational game is emerging. The people who constitute the organization and those they relate to in other organizations are forming the game, while at the same time it is forming them, that is, their very identities. The important point to note is that in their relating to each other, people are not creating a “thing” outside of their own interactions. All they are doing is forming further patterns of relating between themselves. There are no levels and there is no external position outside of ongoing interaction. We come to understand that interaction from within that ongoing interaction. The patterns we call “society,” “organization,” “the game” are generalizations that have no external life but that have emerged in a history and continue to be sustained and changed in local interaction as people particularize the general—that is, as they interpret what the generalizations mean in specific, contingent, local situations.
A theory of emergence is, of course, a theory of evolution but a dialectical theory rather than a Darwinian one. This means that evolving patterns emerge in the transformation of opposed ideas; without the tension of opposites there is no social evolution. Insights from the complexity sciences make it clear that patterns evolve only when agents are different from each other—without difference and conflict, therefore, there can be no change. The theory of complex responsive processes focuses attention on the consensual-conflictual processes of local interaction. Local interaction between people takes the form of conversation, figurations of power, the formation of intentions, creating plans, and the making of choices reflecting ideologies; all together creating the game in the activities of ordinary, everyday politics. It is in the interplay of all these intentions, plans, and choices that organizations are sustained and changed in the paradoxical dynamics of unpredictable predictability.
It is important to emphasize that this theory focuses our attention on what we are already doing. It provides a way of explaining what we are already doing, and as such it does not directly yield prescriptions. A highly centralized organization run by dictatorial managers in a command-and-control manner is formed by people in conversation expressing patterns of power relations and making choices reflecting particular ideologies—they are involved in a specific kind of game. Exactly the same can be said for a highly participative, democratic form of organization. The theory, then, does not prescribe an ideal form of organization or specific management tools and techniques. Rather its concern is with how such tools and techniques have arisen and how they are currently employed in local interactions. There are implications, however, that could be taken up in a normative way. Traditional tools and techniques of management take the form of rules, procedures, and models. While following rules, procedures, and models may produce competent performance, proficient, expert performance requires moving beyond them (Stacey, 2012). Experts are unable to articulate the rules governing their performance because they simply do not follow rules; instead, as a consequence of long experience, they exercise practical judgment (intuition) in the unique situations they find themselves in (Dreyfus and Dreyfus, 1986). Through experience, experts are able to recognize patterns, distinguishing between similarities with other situations and unique differences (Flyvbjerg, 2001). The patterns they recognize are the emerging patterns of interaction that they and other people are creating. In other words, they are recognizing the emerging themes in conversation, power relations, and ideology-reflecting choices. The key resource any organization must rely on is surely this expert capacity to recognize the patterns in social activities; the exercise of practical judgment by leaders and managers as they interact with others. Even though we cannot identify rules, procedures, and models as “drivers” of expert practical judgment, there is nothing mysterious about its exercise.
This notion of practical judgment is one of Aristotle’s forms of knowing. The first is episteme, or theoretical knowing. The second is techne, knowing how to do something like a craft. The third is phronesis, or practical judgment (Flyvbjerg, 2001). The capacity for practical judgment in relation to some activity is gradually developed through actually performing the activity in question, ideally under the supervision of another who is already an expert. For thousands of years, in most cultures, pupils or apprentices lived and worked with masters or craftsmen to acquire, for example, the expertise of cloth maker, weaver, butcher, scribe, or teacher. In fact, it is part of the role of a manager in every organization to supervise the work of those reporting to him or her. In many organizations today, relatively inexperienced managers are formally allocated a mentor and even if this does not happen, inexperienced managers may informally find one. Supervisors and mentors must themselves be experts if they are to guide others on the route to expertise, and supervision and mentoring are also the exercise of practical judgment. It follows that supervision and mentoring cannot be reduced to rules, procedures, and models. It may be that supervision and mentoring are at their most effective in sustaining and enhancing capacities for practical judgment when they take the form of reflexive inquiry into what they and those they are supervising and mentoring are doing together and why they are doing it in the way that they are. Interdependent individuals can only develop and sustain the skills of practical judgment through participation with each other. Practical judgment calls for a wider awareness, an intuitive understanding, of the thematic, narrative patterning of conversation. It is important to keep opening the conversation up, although of course there are also often situations where it is important to close down. Practical judgment is knowing when to close down and when to open up.
Implications for OD
Since the theory of complex responsive processes is offering an explanation of what we are already doing, it is not prescriptive and so does not offer much in the way of tools and techniques of OD practice. It does not deal with what we should be doing as OD practitioners. Instead it refocuses attention to reflect upon and think about what we are actually doing together now, rather than focusing attention on idealized futures and so-called tools and techniques, the success of which is mostly assumed rather than supported by evidence. I believe that this refocusing of attention will yield greater understanding of what is going on and that this greater understanding might be expressed in changes of practice for the better, but this is my belief and I too cannot claim that there is anything like scientific evidence to support it. Such changes cannot be predicted in advance, nor is there any guarantee that the changes will yield any improvement. I believe, however, that on the whole it must be better to approach organizational life in a more rather than a less thoughtful way. So what the theory of complex responsive processes may offer is an invitation to take a more reflexive position in thinking about what we are doing and the practical judgment we must rely on in conditions of uncertainty. By reflexivity I mean processes that amount to more than reflection. We may think of this reflexivity-in-action as a fundamental way of developing practical judgment.
To reflect means to think deeply about a subject and some synonyms are to “ponder,” “ruminate,” “contemplate,” or “speculate.” Reflection is the intellectual and emotional exercise of the mind to reason, give careful consideration to something, make inferences, decisions, and find solutions. Reflection can be directed at one’s own experience, as in introspection, which is the activity of reflecting on one’s own thoughts and feelings and forming beliefs about one’s own mental states. What, then, does it mean to practice reflexivity? A reflexive pronoun is the object in a sentence indicating that the object is the same as the subject in that sentence. The subject and the object are then not separate but are simultaneously present. For example I might say “I was washing myself,” so that the reflexive pronoun “myself” bends back to the “I.” This reflexivity should not be understood as introspection, since reflexivity involves much more than introspection. The form of reflexivity that I want to point to in this chapter needs to be distinguished from both reflection and from introspection. Reflexivity points to the impossibility of standing outside of our experience and observing it, simply because it is we who are participating in and creating the experience, always with others. Reflexivity is the activity of noticing and thinking about the nature of our involvement in our participation with each other as we do something together. So I am using a notion of reflexivity that can only be social. Since we are interdependent individuals, reflexivity must involve thinking about how we and others involved with us are interacting, and this will involve noticing and thinking about our history together and more broadly about the history of the wider communities we are part of.
The ability to take a reflexive stance is the basis of practical judgment—most fundamentally, an understanding of group interaction. The expert manager is one who has developed the ability to notice more aspects of group dynamics than others do and a greater ability to make sense of those aspects. The reflexive stance I am referring to requires narrative forms of inquiry because the detail of the narrative of our experience expresses the details of context and clarifies the themes emerging in our experience. It is the context and the themes that enable us to form judgments about what is going on and what we might do as the next step. The “technique” of narrative inquiry involves leaders, managers, and members of an organization exploring together the history of the situation they find themselves in, trying to identify how they have together created this situation. Here “technique” requires engaging in a mode of inquiry that cannot be “controlled.” The “technique” involves scrapping the bullet points and turning instead to narratives that provoke further reflection. What I am proposing, therefore, is that the capacity for practical judgment in organizations can be sustained and developed by reflexive inquiry into the narrative of what we are doing together in ambiguous and uncertain situations. For leaders and managers, in practical terms, this means consciously creating opportunities for groups of colleagues and others to engage in the kind of inquiry that I have been describing. I would call this reflexive OD practice. Let me give an account of some work I am currently engaged in.
Working with a National Health Service Trust
I was recently invited to do some work by a manager in one of the United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS) Trusts who is familiar with the approach my colleagues and I take. He invited me to take the role of convener of a meeting of the senior management team of the largest division in this Trust. All those working in the NHS have the repeated experience of being reorganized by one politician after another, always with the proclaimed aim of bringing about improvement in healthcare. After at least two decades of wave after wave of reorganization, reports are still coming out stating that there has been no improvement and calling for yet further reform. The latest reorganization commenced at the beginning of April 2013. The first meeting of the senior management team that I participated in took place some eight months after this reorganization was implemented. The team of managers I had been invited to work with were not only sick of one reorganization after another, they were also totally disillusioned with the OD and leadership initiatives that succeeded each other even more rapidly than the reorganizations. They did not want any more of these initiatives but still did want some way of supporting each other in the very difficult situation they found themselves in.
My response to the invitation was to suggest a meeting that had no formal, detailed agenda but that did have a clear purpose, namely, to explore together just what they were experiencing in their work and how they might think about it. We would try to have a different kind of conversation with each other, given my argument that organizations are flows of conversation that can get very stuck in jargon that has little to do with actual experience.
At the first meeting I introduced the members to key elements of how I think about organizations, along the lines set out in this chapter. This one-and-a-half-hour introduction was followed by two sessions of conversation inquiring into what they were experiencing. During the second meeting there was no hesitation in plunging into what most concerned them, and what emerged as a narrative theme to be explored was the conflict occurring between the management team and the unit responsible for monitoring their performance. As they came to understand more about the nature of this conflict they decided that instead of engaging in a slanging match with the managers in the other department they would invite them to a meeting so that they could reflect together on what they were doing together.
Since I had already given a broad introduction to the kind of thinking I believe is important, I did not provide any introduction on the second occasion. In fact I had not planned anything at all. I was simply ready to engage with whatever emerged as narrative themes organizing our experience of being together. I started the meeting by simply asking what had been happening since we last met. The director of the division said that before we moved on he just wanted to note the absence of three members of the team. This immediately became a theme that occupied us for the rest of the morning. Other members began to take up the absence of the three colleagues, expressing considerable frustration and even anger with the three. I took part in this conversation by interrupting and asking for clarification on matters such as who these three members were and what roles they performed.
It gradually emerged that there was a sharp subgrouping in the management team. The first subgroup consisted of those present at the meeting. What they had in common was that all occupied full-time roles as managers of organizational functions such as human resources, quality control, and so on. Furthermore they had worked together for some years in the predecessor organization which the new Trust had now replaced—often the names and some top structures change in the reorganizations while those lower down continue to work as before but now with different titles. The second subgroup consisted of the three absentee colleagues; when I inquired about their roles I was told that they were medical directors who took clinical responsibility for the treatment of patients. This took up two-thirds of their time, leaving only one-third for the performance of organizational management duties. They had not been part of the team in the old organization. When I pointed this subgrouping out, I asked if they experienced similar patterns during their daily work together. They said that the pattern was very familiar and very frustrating because the whole team needed to take responsibility for performance. It became clear that right at the start of this second meeting they had re-created the familiar pattern. Part of the way I work, therefore, is to point out what has been re-created in the present and invite members to work with understanding what they have just reproduced in the room.
As the picture began to get clearer I suggested that they might think about the pattern of power relations that had emerged and about the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. I provided a short input on Elias’s view of power and his analysis of inclusion-exclusion dynamics. I also suggested that they might see what was going on in the room and what was going on in their daily work as part of a wider national pattern of a significant shift in power relations. Two decades ago, there was no question of how the balance of power was tilted. It was the medical professionals who were much more powerful than the organizational managers. Over the course of the past two decades this pattern has shifted to the opposite pole, so that now it is the organizational managers who are more powerful than the medical professionals. Such shifts in power, due to changes by the government in health policies, generate strong feelings that can be expressed as hostility on the part of medical professionals to those in management positions. This led to a conversation inquiring more deeply into the nature of the conflict and why it was occurring. Those present at the meeting began to think about the matter from the perspective of the medical directors. Clearly they might think that their medical work, taking up two-thirds of their time, warranted much more attention than their other duties. There was a large difference between the management subgroup, who devoted 100 percent of their time to management and had no clinical responsibilities, and members of the other subgroup, who had only one-third of their time for management duties, the rest being taken up with considerable clinical duties. Those present at the meeting began to question their own expectations of their absent colleagues. They resolved to have the kind of conversation we had just had with their medical colleagues.
I think that at this meeting the conversation shifted from blame, which greatly affected their work, to a more complex pattern, and the shift was important because it held out the promise of more useful ways for all of them to work together. This shift in the pattern of conversation is organizational development and it emerges in intense reflexive engagement with conflict and patterns of power relations. However, we must take care not to idealize reflexive conversation. It can be misused to strengthen rather than change existing patterns of power. It is also a way of working with its own dangers. Care must sometimes be taken to restrain people from disclosing too much. Being too open could easily damage working relations rather than improve them and the problem is that we cannot know in advance which will be the case. Working reflexively, therefore, has ethical implications, for we must take responsibility for our actions even if they produce outcomes we do not know in advance. We may not be responsible for the outcome, which could be judged good or bad by us, but we must still take responsibility for what we did and respond to this where necessary with acts of reparation.
Dialogic OD
According to the dictionaries, dialogue is a conversation between two or more people. The word is derived from the Greek dialogos, consisting of “dia” meaning “through” (not two) and “logos” meaning “speech.” Its chief historical origins as narrative, philosophical, or didactic device are to be found in classical Greece, in particular in the ancient art of rhetoric. So it is referring to what people accomplish together though speech. What I have been calling reflexive OD is a particular form of dialogue, a form that focuses attention on how we are thinking about our conversational exchanges and opinions; thinking that pays attention to the wider social history of thought. This very general understanding of dialogue is to be distinguished from one that has become popular in organizational literature (e.g., Bohm, 1983; Bohm and Peat, 1989; de Mare, Piper, and Thompson, 1991; Issacs, 1999; Senge, 1990). In this form people are required to abandon their assumptions and work together as friends. This enables a flow of meaning through a group, somewhat like a group mind. Clearly, what I have been describing as reflexive OD is not dialogic in this special sense. Instead it is perfectly normal conversation that does not require special rules for its conduct and does not idealize reflexive conversation. It makes no mystical appeal to group minds. It does not have the same emphasis on collaboration, pointing instead to the paradox of collaboration and competition.
In Chapter 1 of this book, Bushe and Marshak also present a specific understanding of dialogue in the very first paragraph. They argue that every form of OD practice is “a product of the mindset of the practitioner; the combination of theories, beliefs, assumptions, and values that shape how one sees and engages the world … the practice of Dialogic OD involves a way of thinking that is significantly different from Diagnostic OD.”
They identify the Dialogic OD Mindset with two major developments in the social sciences, namely, the complexity sciences (examples of which are Open Space Technology, emergence, and complex responsive processes of relating) and interpretivist social sciences (examples of which are Coordinated Management of Meaning, Organizational Discourse, and Appreciative Inquiry) (Bushe and Marshak, 2014). They argue that this mindset differs significantly from the Diagnostic Mindset, which is the basis of older forms of OD, but do not claim that the former replaces the latter, envisaging, rather, practices that mix and match them. They provide a list of forty theories or practices that reflect a Dialogic OD Mindset (see Table 1.2). Dialogic OD is intended to generate participative, inquiring conversations about the nature of organizational change and leadership within OD values of democracy, collaboration, empowerment, and equality. The aim is to increase awareness and circumvent the power of entrenched interests. Dialogic OD may take the form of a structured approach to engage stakeholders in change in the form of specific projects, or that of process consulting, which is less structured and engages in multiple, ongoing interactions.
Bushe and Marshak identify the theory of complex responsive processes of relating as one of the forty key theories or practices of Dialogic OD. Such a classification is understandable given the way in which the theory directs attention to the conversational nature of organizational stability and change, and it does therefore provide a way of understanding what the processes of Dialogic OD might be. However, the whole purpose of the theory as outlined in this chapter is to focus attention on what we are actually doing in our work in organization. The processes it identifies provide as much of an explanation of the actual activities of Diagnostic OD as they do of Dialogic OD. Diagnostic OD practitioners are also engaged in local interactions of conversation, albeit different patterns of conversation, power relating, and ideology-reflecting choices. The theory claims that all organizational practices can be understood as emerging from the same processes of local interaction. The theory of complex responsive processes is intended to provide a way of understanding how values, norms, and ideologies emerge in local interactions of conversation and power relating. It therefore aims to explain the emergence of all values, including those that are the diametric opposite of the OD values listed above. Finally, since the theory aims to provide deeper insights into what we are all already actually doing, it does not in itself produce any tools, techniques, procedures, or recommended practices.
If one accepts the theory’s claims about the conversational nature of organizational life it would be reasonable to conclude that it may be useful to attend to the patterns of conversation between members of a conversation, and one may form a practical judgment about which of these patterns is more beneficial than others. There is nothing in the theory itself, however, to justify such a judgment, which must arise from our own practical experience. My colleagues and I also make a practical judgment, rather than a deduction from the theory, that it is useful and beneficial to focus attention in our work with organizational members on what they are actually doing and how they are thinking about it—the judgment is that such reflexivity will lead to changes in practice, hopefully of a beneficial kind. In the way we practice we have a preference for very unstructured approaches that seek to avoid specific tools, techniques, and agendas, but once again this is not a deduction from the theory.
The contribution of the theory of complex responsive processes to Dialogic OD would be the same as its potential contribution to any other practice. This potential contribution is the way it offers opportunities for OD consultants to inquire into their own practice, coming to focus on what they are actually doing in organizational conversation, power relating, and ideology-reflecting choices as they exercise practical judgment. The implication is that reflexive inquiry by Dialogic OD practitioners into their own practice is required, as well as encouraging their clients to undertake reflexive inquiry. Inquiry into Dialogic OD practice itself would seek to explore a number of questions about practice, some of which could be along the following lines. What is the nature of the power relation between us and our clients? In whose interests are we operating? Since our clients are usually among the most powerful in an organization, do we find ourselves acting to sustain existing patterns of power relations and so produce stability instead of the change we seek? If we claim to be acting to circumvent current entrenched interests, then how do we justify doing so? Are we to do this unilaterally, and if not then on whose behalf? Is trying to do this ethical? When we use techniques of Appreciative Inquiry are we covering over conflict despite any claims to the contrary? Is it possible that the techniques we employ are felt to be coercive by some even though this is far from our intention? Does success follow from positives, sharing, harmony, and consensus? What are the power implications of “conflict resolution”?
Conclusion
An OD practitioner who is an expert in working in reflexive ways may assist clients to greater awareness of their roles in the organization and help to widen and deepen communication in a group, and so produce greater meaning. This activity cannot be reduced to rules and procedures. The work in the development of more fluid and complex conversation involves curbing the widespread pattern in organizations whereby leaders and managers focus on the future and move immediately to planning and solving problems. This can be done by exploring narratives of what those in the group have done in the past in order to develop some insight into what they have been doing and why they have been doing it in a particular way. Such conversation grounds group members in the present as they make sense of the past in the present, and opens up more varied and grounded ways of taking account of the future in the present. A reflexive form focuses on narrative. It is very helpful for leaders and managers to write short narratives of troubling events they are currently experiencing and then inquire into these narratives in the group (see Chapter 16 for some approaches to this). Such activities develop thinking and lead to greater insight into what is going on.
It is important to remember that the OD consultant, like any other person in an organization, will have to work in conditions of uncertainty and unpredictability that make it impossible to be sure in advance of just what outcomes the work will bring. Facing the uncertainties of detailed contexts in which OD work has to take place makes it clear how difficult, if not impossible, it is to specify in advance just how work will be carried out. OD experts, like those they consult to, have no option but to rely on their own practical judgment in an uncertain world and may benefit from reflexive inquiry into their own practice.
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