"Approaches to leadership and management are still dominated by prescriptions – usually claimed as scientific – for top executives to choose the future direction of their organization. The global financial recession and the collapse of investment capitalism (surely not planned by anyone) make it quite clear that top executives are simply not able to choose future directions. Despite this, current management literature mostly continues to avoid the obvious – management’s inability to predict or control what will happen in the future. The key question now must be how we are to think about management if we take the uncertainty of organizational life seriously" – Ralph Stacey
The above lines from Ralph highlight a major disconnect between management literature’s formulaic attempts to provide prescriptions and recipes for controlling the future, and the reality that this is actually an impossible and fruitless pursuit. This blog is an attempt to help us to understand how to act when the future is uncertain and unpredictable. Acknowledging the unpredictability of the future is not a signal to be depressed. Rather it is a provocation to become aware of how you are thinking about the tasks of management and leadership in organisations so that your approaches and ways of thinking are more congruent with this reality.
Recipe attempts to control the future prevent you from seeing clearly what is going on around you, and mean that your responses to the uncertain world in which you work and live will be less effective.
Footnote: The quote above is taken from the "blurb" for the paperback version of Ralph Stacey’s latest book which has just been released. The book is called Complexity and Organizational Reality: Uncertainty and the Need to Rethink Management after the Collapse of Investment Capitalism. It’s not available on Amazon yet but you can get more info or the book itself here (thanks to Chris Rodgers for alerting me to this).
The economic recession has been pretty hard on us. There is some good progress on the economy this year. I just hope that the economy will continue to recover in the following months and years.
Comment by | body detox — August 2, 2009 @ 3:08 pm
Stacey’s certainty-agreement matrix and ‘levels’ of complexity…
In a recent blog post, Stephen Billing looks forward to Ralph Stacey’s next book, Complexity and Organizational Reality. It is due to be published in December. Definitely one for the Christmas list! I had become aware of the book through……
Trackback by informal coalitions — August 4, 2009 @ 10:04 am
i am hoping that the global economy would recover from this economic recession. life has been very hard with these massive job cuts.
Comment by Jacee — August 15, 2009 @ 8:44 pm
I suspect that posts 1 and 3 are spam, but I’ve allowed them to stay until proven otherwise.
Body detox and Jacee, are you real people?
Comment by Stephen — September 3, 2009 @ 2:29 am
Very right Stephen!!
Recession marks the incapability of the top executives to forecast and decision making capabilities, though they use many best practices and proven methodologies, but they are not sufficient. I will recommend the executives to have decision making based on business Intelligence methodologies along with organizational opinion including key member of organization.
While I take this recession period as great learning opportunities more over time to test ourselves, time of ideation, to prove our self, to work hard to sustain, which has led us to become more cautious and stabilized, as we have redefined and redesign our system to handle similar economical and financial disasters.
It was great lesson learnt by all of us. I do agree that we are recovering, but still the game has excitement, who is recovering faster. Now the market is redefined, equations are set different. Here is the chance to prove ourselves.
Comment by Deepak Singh — November 4, 2009 @ 9:08 pm