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Today's business environment is characterized
by faster technology development and information flow, increasing
interconnectedness between organizations, and the much greater
diversity among people that this brings. These changes make
it increasingly difficult for us to foresee the consequences
of our actions and stay "in control." Traditional
organization theory, however, mandates that we design organizations
and predict outcomes, conditioning us to assume that there
is no alternative. According to this traditional framework,
we simply must foresee and stay in control, for without
this there can be no order, only anarchy. Ralph Stacey disagrees.
Combining insights from the new science
of complexity with insights from psychoanalysis, Stacey
posits that repressing the anxiety caused by the unstable,
ever-changing nature of today's business world also represses
the creative impulses -- the "spaces for novelty"
-- that allow members of a workforce to produce their best
work. Using the science of complexity as a starting point,
he pulls together many insights into behavior and organizational
functioning that currently lie at the edges of research
and practice. This book invites people to explore what the
new science might mean for understanding life in organizations,
and shows how it can be used as a framework for understanding
the processes that produce emergence rather than intentional
strategies. Stacey presents an entirely new perspective
on what it means for an organization to learn.
Ralph Stacey is a professor of management
and director of the Complexity and Management Center at
the Business School of the University Hertfordshire. He
is also a visiting lecturer at universities in Sweden and
the Netherlands, and a visiting professor at the University
of Malta. He is an active consultant to top management teams
in major companies and the author of several books on management
and organization, including Dynamic Strategic Management,
Chaos Frontier, Managing Chaos, Managing
the Unknowable, and Strategic Management and Organizational
Dynamics.
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