At a recent ‘lunchtime talk’ session, , Eliat Aram, the Institute’s CEO attempted a second ‘bite’ into Complexity theory, this time introducing Staff and Guests to the ‘complex responsive processes of relating’ perspective developed by Prof. Stacey, Prof. Shaw and Prof. Griffin and its implications to intervention design and organisational development work.

2. Recap:
Organisms can be understood as complex
adaptive systems made up of many interacting
agents. For example, a living cell is made up of
huge numbers of interacting proteins, lipids, and
nucleic acids and the human brain is a network of
billions of interconnected neurones.
Organisations too can be thought of as complex
adaptive systems consisting of many interacting
individuals with their ideas and beliefs (Waldrop,
1992; Stacey, 1996 a&b; Zimmerman, 1992;
Kaufmann, 1995).

3. Complex adaptive systems are nonlinear and
self organising with emergent futures. This
means that their evolution cannot be traced
back to simple explanations of cause and
effect. ‘The genes in a developing embryo
organise themselves in one way to make a
liver cell, and in another way to make a
muscle cell’ (Waldrop, 1992:12).

4. Self organisation means:
that agents interact locally and that it is in this
local interaction that global patterns emerge
without any global blueprint, design or
programme. The systems evolve in an intrinsically
unpredictable manner into an undetermined
future. They are interdependent, with local action
at one scale having unpredictable consequences
at all scales through complex relationships over
time. They co-create their future.

5. Interactions, taking the form of both positive
and negative feedback, can, broadly
speaking, display three dynamics: stable to
the point of rigidity; unstable to the point of
disintegration; and, paradoxically, patterns
that are both stable and unstable
simultaneously.

6. The paradoxical dynamic has become known as the
“edge of chaos”, a dynamic where order and disorder
co-exist.
(Waldrop, 1992: 12).

7. When the agents in a complex adaptive
system differ from each other, the system
displays the capacity to transform itself. It is
only at a critical level of diversity that a
system can produce novelty (Allen, 1998 a &
b).

8. Such systems are adaptive in that they do not simply
respond to events, but evolve or learn. Each agent is guided
by its own schema, or rules of behaviour, and also by
schema shared with other agents. Interpreted in the
organisation literature, single-loop learning occurs when
schema remain unchanged, while double-loop learning
involves changes in current schema, so producing more
fundamental changes of kind (Argyris & Schon, 1978).
Through double-loop learning 'species evolve for better
survival in a changing environment - and so do corporations
and industries' (Waldrop, 1992: 11). 'Competition and
conflict emerge and the evolution of the system is driven by
agents who are trying to exploit each other, but the game
can go on only if neither side succeeds completely or for
long in that exploitation' (Stacey, 1996b: 340).

9. From Complex Adaptive Systems to
Complex Responsive Processes of Relating
• A process view of organisations
• Informed by transformative teleology
• Complexity sciences as a source domain for
analogies with organisations
• The analogies are translated in organisational
terms using the work of Mead and Elias

10. The basic question explored about
organisations is:
what are the sources of both the stability and
the change, of both the continuity and the
novelty, of both the decay and the generation,
of both the identity and the difference?

11. Understanding organisations from a
complex responsive process of relating
perspective:
“intrinsic properties of connection, interaction
and relationship between people would be
the cause of emergent coherence and that
emergent coherence would be unpredictable”
(p. 8)

12. And further:
• “people would still be understood to be
choosing and acting intentionally, but this
would apply to particular, local response to
others in ordinary, everyday organisational
life. It would be the interaction itself that
causes the emergent pattern, and plans and
procedures would feature in these
interactions without determining their
pattern” (p. 8)

13. And in terms of Identity:
• “in this paradigm, an organisation comes to be what
it is because of the intrinsic capacity of human
beings, individually and collectively, to express their
identities and thereby their differences. Identity and
difference emerge through self organisation; that is,
relationships of a cooperative and competitive kind”
(p. 8).

14. Complex Responsive Processes of
Relating
• Transformative teleology
• Paradoxical
• No split between the individual and the social
• Mead’s I-me dialectic and the conversation of
gestures
• The ‘living present’ (Hegel)

15. Self consciousness: The I- Me dialectic
• Me: the identity involved in the silent
conversation, what we experience as
inside our heads, the attitude of one’s
group to one’s self
• I: the individual’s response to Me, the
action one takes in response to the
perceived community view of oneself

16. The process of ‘Organising’:
• The ongoing joint action of communication in
the living present as
• Continual interaction between humans who
are all forming intentions, choosing and acting
in relation to one another as they go about
their daily life, but no one can step outside an
interaction to arrange it or design it.
• There is no objectifiable ‘it’. There is only the
responsive process of relating itself

17. • The organisation is not understood as a tool for
humans to design and control, but as experience
in the living present
• A complex responsive process of relating
perspective focuses attention on communication
in all its forms and seeks to understand how
people accomplish the joint action of
organisation
• Imagine then organisations as webs of
communication or as Patricia Shaw later suggests
patterns of conversation

18. • Take this perspective as a gesture, what
meaning might arise out of those insights and
this language?
• How might we understand our own work
using this thinking?