This is a shot at an overview of the complex responsive processes of relating.

Complex responsive processes is a theory, an evolving set of ideas, coming from a collaboration between some professors at the University of Hertfordshire - Ralph Stacey, Doug Griffin, Patricia Shaw and Chris Mowles.

It offers a compelling alternative to accepted ways of thinking about organisations as systems. For me it's as important as grasping complexity in the first place.

Complex responsive processes is a development of the natural sciences theory of complex adaptive systems.

The key thing is that it questions the lifting and shifting of complexity ideas directly to human interaction. And also, for example, the increasingly popular metaphor of organisations as living biological systems.

The difference is that humans have volition. We can reason with each other whereas flocking starlings, ants and anticyclones just can't. We respond to each other in complex and varying ways - we don't interact according to simple rules.

Complex responsive processes specifically eschews the concept of the system and with it systems thinking. So ooh er blimey.

It views systems thinking, including all the great stuff like Peter Senge's systems dynamics that I personally have relied on for years, as an abstraction of what's actually going on.

It presents what we think of as organisational systems as social phenomena - repeating global patterns emerging from local human interaction. These patterns are paradoxically stable and unstable at the same time. To envisage this imagine a river estuary. And imagine a stationary standing wave created by the interference of tide and current. The wave looks stable but it is actually formed of billions of fast-moving, interacting water molecules and can change instantly with even slight changes in conditions.

The molecule of human interaction is the conversation, or more generically the exchange of gestures. Gestures including talking, body language, sending emails, drawing pictures or yodelling across a Swiss valley. For example.

Crucially it views conversations not as two-way exchanges of information but as a mutual creation of meaning. There are books and books on this stuff. But in essence each pairing of gesture and response creates new experience for those involved that affects their subsequent gestures.

It sees humans as fundamentally social and interdependent. It challenges the view that we are autonomous rational beings. And even (get this) the singular nature of the mind. It focuses on how local processes of creating meaning interfere to create emergent global patterns of behaviour. And on how those global patterns in turn affect the local processes.

No one can control these processes. It says for example that whilst managers have considerable power to affect things, they don't control local interactions or their myriad repercussions. Obviously this has consequences for how strategy works and the theory has a good deal to say about this.

Complex responsive processes is not a new management method. And it's absolutely not a new slant on systems thinking.

Because everything is in constant flux and seemingly-fixed things are not as predictable as they look, it encourages us to be pragmatic; to see through the abstractions that pervade management thinking; to be doubting and curious; and to rely much more on conversation and our own local experience.

So: we aren’t as independent as we think; organisations are more patterns than things; managers aren’t in as much control of them as they think; and systems thinking isn’t a panacea.

Appreciating this, and having a better understanding of what's really happening, might affect how we participate in conversations; this might promote the emergence of more useful meaning and ultimately lead us to better outcomes.

In much the same way that the deep understanding of nature at the atomic level has allowed humankind to engineer real world things better, understanding of complex responsive processes may help us manage things better.

More information

This overview was part of the Not systems thinking episode of my Clock and the Cat podcast in January 2020.

For chapter and verse on complex responsive processes see...

• Complex responsive processes – 4 pillars of thought, 5 key insights by Chris Mowles
• Strategic Management and Organisational Dynamics by Ralph Stacey and Chris Mowles
• Complexity and Management Conference - 5-7th June 2020 - University of Hertfordshire