Leaders are not in control of outcomes
…despite what might be suggested by the formal trappings of organization, decisions arising wholly from rational analysis of ‘the facts’ and step-by-step decision-making are rare – if they exist at all. In practice, people tend to make progress through informal interactions, ad hoc sense-making conversations, ongoing political accommodations, and plain, common-or-garden ‘muddling through’.
Most significantly, perhaps, whilst leaders might be formally ‘in charge’, they are not – indeed cannot be – in control of the outcomes that emerge from the complex interplay of the myriad local interactions that constitute everyday organizational life.
This is not a matter of incompetence. Far from it. But it might be portrayed as such, were it not to be covered over by the superficial gloss of management speak and formal process rituals that maintain the illusion of rationality, predictability and control. Or if there was no post-hoc rationalization of actual outcomes that savvy political behaviour demands.
Despite being formally in charge of the organization (or a part of it), they are not ‘sitting in the stands’, dispassionately observing and controlling other peoples’ actions. They are ‘on the pitch, playing’. Power relationships might ordinarily be weighted in their favour – and often significantly so. But what they think, say and do, and how this plays out in terms of outcomes, is ultimately determined by everyone else’s thoughts, words and actions that comprise the complex social process of everyday interaction.
One of the major challenges to established management thinking that is posed by Stacey’s radical perspective on complexity, is the recognition that there is no outside agent (the manager) objectively observing what is going on and controlling the activities of others from an external vantage point.
Some advocates of a complexity approach see it as providing a new set of prescriptions for managers to use to control their organizations. Principal amongst these are those who see organizations as “living systems” and adopt a Complex Adaptive System view of organizational dynamics (calling on managers, say, to apply a set of simple rules to facilitate self-management).
Stacey’s complex responsive process view argues that these prescriptive approaches perpetuate the myth that managers can somehow stand outside the action and control it from a detached viewpoint. In human organizations, there is nobody outside the process of interaction. Managers are unavoidably involved in the give-and-take of local conversational exchanges through which outcomes emerge – even in their absence! At the same time, they cannot control these outcomes. Although managers can act with intent in terms of their own contribution to the dynamic network of interactions, they cannot be certain what outcomes will actually emerge.
…de Bono’s early writings on the brain provide some ‘lateral reinforcement’ for Stacey’s position. In describing “the mechanism of mind”, he argues that there is not a separate agent at work, picking ‘information’ out of the environment, storing it on the brain’s ‘memory-surface’ and then picking it off the surface to manipulate it. Instead, stimuli (such as those arising in conversation with others) organise themselves into patterns without the involvement of any other agency. What emerges from this process depends on the ‘in-the-moment’ coming together of these particular stimuli and the patterning that has gone before. The latter will tend to channel perceptions and interpretations down well-trodden ‘pathways of the mind’ whilst retaining the capacity for novelty to emerge.
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