The Reading Room - Ralph Stacey

Profile and Personal Reflections
Comments by Chris Rodgers

Ralph Stacey is Professor of Management and Director of the Complexity and Management Centre at the Business School of the University of Hertfordshire. He is also a member of the Institute of Group Analysis. He consults at many levels across a range or organisations and is the author of a number of books and articles on strategy and complexity theory in management. His work has had a significant impact on my approach to change management consultancy, leadership and organisational development.

I first came across some of Ralph Stacey's work on dynamic strategic management in the early 1990's; but I was particularly interested in his notion of "extraordinary management," which I first read in a booklet entitled Chaos, Management and Economics, that he had co-authored with David Parker in 1995. Ralph Stacey's extraordinary management highlighted many of the same shadow-side aspects of organisations that had been outlined in books I had earlier read by Gerard Egan on this subject. Ralph Stacey's comments reinforced my long-held view that single-minded pursuit of so-called "rational" approaches to management were seriously flawed - even though traditional management practices and education still seem to take rational, goal-directed behaviour for granted.

At a session of the Independent Change Management Forum during 1998, Ralph Stacey spoke at length about his latest thoughts on organisations as self-organising systems. In particular, he was interested in the patterning nature of the brain and how this, too behaved as a self-organising system, in which memories were not stored but recreated each time they were triggered by particular inputs. He admitted that, at that time, he was in the early stages of his understanding but that he was excited enough by his research to share his emerging thoughts and theories. These drew on experiences of his own, as leader of some self-organising therapy sessions, and the recent work of a number of writers on the working of the mind. One important corollary of his developing views was his suggestion that the aim of leadership was to detect the themes that were emerging from the ongoing conversations and to articulate these in a way which would find resonance with those being 'led'.

In April 1999, we invited Ralph Stacey to run a full-day session for the MSc in Managing Change course of which I was a member. On that occasion, he dealt in particular with the shadow side of organisations. By that time, the various strands of his thinking were coming together in a way which is now captured in his notion of Complex Responsive Processes. He underpinned his thinking with insights from the sciences of complexity; at that stage seeing organisations as examples of complex adaptive systems. He now uses complexity science as a source of analogy for human action and interaction in organisations, rather than as a description of organisational behaviour. And he sees language and self-organising conversations as being the main currency of organisational dynamics. He also distinguishes between the "legitimate (conversational) themes," which an organisation openly acknowledges and ostensibly pursues, and the "shadow themes" which exist within the shadow side of the organisation and which organise the shadow-side conversations. As change management consultants and business coaches we also view organisations as dynamic networks of self-organising conversations.

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