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Why Managers Haven’t Embraced Complexity

May 19, 2013 By Chris Corrigan Emergence, Leadership, Organization 2 Comments

Richard Straub writes in the Harvard Business Review, on a great piece about what stops managers from adopting complexity views:

Complexity wasnt a convenient reality given managers desire for control. The promise of applying complexity science to business has undoubtedly been held up by managers reluctance to see the world as it is. Where complexity exists, managers have always created models and mechanisms that wish it away. It is much easier to make decisions with fewer variables and a straightforward understanding of cause-and-effect. Here, the shareholder value philosophy, which determines so much of how our corporations operate these days, is the perfect example. Placing a rigid priority on maximizing shareholder returns makes things clear for decision-makers and relieves them of considering difficult tradeoffs. Of course we know that constantly dialing down expenses and investments to boost short-term margins inevitably damages the long-term health of the company. It takes a complexity approach to keep competing values and priorities and the effects of decisions on all of them in view – and not just for management, but equally for investors, analysts, and regulators.

In the short term, a reductionist mindset is most useful for winnowing away externalities so that you can show that what YOU did had real results in the real world, thus justifying your value to the accountability chain and the shareholders.

via Why Managers Havent Embraced Complexity – Richard Straub – Harvard Business Review.

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Inappropriate action planning makes me sad

May 17, 2013 By Chris Corrigan Conversation, Facilitation, Learning 4 Comments

Last year in Slovenia, a group of Art of Hosting practitioners gatherd for a week at a well loved 17th century manor to be together.  I suppose you could call it a “conference” but we all called it a “Learning Village.”  And it was a learning village.  The agenda we set was for a five day Open Space gathering.  there was music and local wine drinking and a learning journey on the land, and the teenagers cleaned out an old stone chapel that hadn’t been dusted for 300 years.  We talked about our work, did tai chi and aikido, played football and made art.  Our kids fell in love and broke up!

It was a village, and there was tons of learning.  And no action plans, no next steps, no commitments, no necessary reports.  A few months later there was a harvest document lovingly stewarded by a few people.  This is all appropriate and good.

And sometimes, there are gatherings where next steps and action plans are important and necessary and are the reason why we are gathering.  But always?  No.

I have begun to notice that when I see conference agendas with “next steps and action plans” attached to them (and especially attached to the end of the last day when everyone is tired and most people have left), I become sad.  Actually and emotionally a little sad.  i think it is because doing this unconsciously reduces the pure experience of being together and intenstly learning into something “productive” in order to justify doing it.

So please, think really carefully about whether or not you gathering needs action steps, especially if you are planning a conference where the purpose is for people to simply be together learning and connecting.  That alone is significant action.  Do we really need to justify it any further?

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Rain showers on a May afternoon

May 13, 2013 By Chris Corrigan Uncategorized


Spring in full flight in Howe Sound. Blossoms and sun and birdsong and light and a warm shower or two on a grey afternoon.

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Working with complexity using Cynefin

May 2, 2013 By Chris Corrigan Design, Emergence, Facilitation

A couple of days ago I was invited by Transition US to discuss the Cynefin framework and what it means to work with complexity in a one hour teleconference.  The recording of that call is now available if you’d like to listen in.

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Bombs and killing and the responsibility or terror.

April 17, 2013 By Chris Corrigan Being, Leadership

I hate bombs.

In my 45 years I have had six friends and colleagues killed by bombs both on the Air India bombing in 1985 and in the London bombings in 2005.  As a 10 year old kid living in England during the IRA letter bombing campaigns of Christmas 1978 I remember being completely terrified whenever letter came through our mail slot.

I hate bombs.

And this afternnon I am sitting at a Starbucks in West Vancouver, BC and the man sitting nthree tables over from me is proclaiming in one of those know it all not quite stage whispers about what should be done about the Boston marathon bomber.   He declares that this is what the death penalty is for.  The man should be killed and his ilk should be eliminated, he just said.

And my experience of hearing that just now was literally chilling.  To hear the hate in his voice, a man sitting here absolutely materially unaffected by the bombings in Boston, declaring in public a vaguely murderous intent as a way of expressing outrage was chilling.

When I heard about the bombings in Boston I treated them as news.  Sad of course, but nothing I could do about it.  They seemed just as distant as all of the other bombing stories we hear on a daily basis expect that of course I’ve been to Boston and American cities don’t get bombed like that a lot, so it’s unusual and disconcerting.  But I never felt an iota of fear, until just now, sitting in a peaceful distant Starbucks in West Vancouver.  I am warily watching this man, although by now he seems to have calmed down.

How we talk matters.  How we choose to model a response to events in the world can contribute to make us more resilient or more fearful.  Bombs go off every day, literally and figuratively.  They don’t scare me anymore.  People responding to that news with a powerful need to make a public declaration about killing someone worry me more.  This is exactly what bombers are trying to do, to create violent and chaotic responses to their actions and to spread fear far beyond their immediate sphere of influence.

Interesting how we help them do that.

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