Mark Foden

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Episode 8 - Not systems thinking

Mark Foden

Mark: Do you ever think in systems terms?
Eric: No

This episode is a conversation with Eric Wenzel about his experience of the theory of complex responsive processes of relating.

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Not systems thinking Mark Foden in conversation with Eric Wenzel

Selected quotes

"And it took me the three years of the [Doctor of Mangement] programme to try and understand what it was that I was contributing" - 3:52

"Complex responsive process... [theory is] ...important because it offers a compelling alternative to accepted ways of thinking about organisations as systems" - 8:52

"In complex responsive processes thinking there is this insight that humans are not like birds and not like fish ... because they have capacity to react creatively, and to react spontaneously" - 19:58

"it's very difficult to sustain the notion of ... systems when you think about human interaction" - 21:48

"I have to engage with people ... and not appear like a high-spirited cowboy who talks about things that nobody knows about and that sound very crazy" - 22:43

"I felt a kind of loneliness" - 31:34

References

Eric Wenzel - Bio

Eric is a management consultant working in a big international consultancy.

He's in involved in assessing, training and coaching senior executives and specialises in supporting change in complex environments. He's been at this for 20 years or so.

He is a Doctor of Management from the University of Hertfordshire. His first degree is in Psychology.

At the moment he's writing a book about paradox in management.

Transcript

Mark: 00:00 - Hello, I'm Mark Foden and welcome once more to The Clock and the Cat, a podcast of conversations about complexity in organisations. The Clock and the Cat explores the emerging science of complexity ultimately to help you be more effective whatever you're involved with. This is episode eight and today I'm going to be chatting with Dr. Eric Wenzel. If this is your first experience of the podcast, it might help if you jump back to episode one for seven minute introduction by me, we'll wait for you.

Mark: 00:37 - If you went away, welcome back. Here I am with Eric, not exactly with him as he's in Hamburg and I'm not far from London, but with luck you won't notice. Eric is a management consultant working in a big international consultancy. He's involved in assessing training and coaching senior executives and he specialises in supporting change in complex environments and he's been doing this for 20 years or so now. He's a doctor of management and he has a first degree in psychology. At the moment, he's writing a book about paradox in management. Eric and I first met in May last year, that's 2019, at the complexity and management conference that's put on by the University of Hertfordshire. These are the same folks who run the doctorate of management course that Eric did. We've had some fascinating discussions and Eric recently asked me for some feedback on the first chapter of his book, which is fascinating. His appearance in this episode is my fee for the work. So Eric, welcome. How's the book going?

Eric: 01:30 - Hi Mark, and thanks for having me on your programme here.

Mark: 01:35 - It's an absolute pleasure thank you very much. Tell us about the book.

Eric: 01:38 - The book's coming along well, but I think as any author I thought it would come a lot more quickly than it does in the end, but I'm certainly enjoying it, but obviously it's more complex of an end than I thought about when I started it.

Mark: 01:57 - So this is your first attempt at a book, is it?

Eric: 01:59 - Yes it is.

Mark: 02:00 - Yeah. I've had to go too, mine's still work in progress but hey. So Eric, obviously everybody here is interested in complexity. How did you first get interested in complexity? How did you hear about it?

Eric: 02:13 - As you said in the introduction, I have been working on change projects for a while now and it occurred to me at some point at around 10 or so years ago that what I was doing - basically prescribing plans for change and implementing them. When I worked on my plans and tried to implement them, something very different usually happened. So we set out for example some milestones for the next 18 or so months and at some point when I was honest with myself, I had to find that often we wouldn't even reach milestone one. So that was not the most precarious insight, the more precarious insight then for me was that clients re-invited me to doing work with them and I couldn't understand why that was because I was obviously not delivering on the contract. So it must be something different that I was doing and I couldn't get my head around what that was.

And that was what led me into exploring literature of a different kind than I was consuming at the time. And ultimately finding me ending up with trying to understand complexity a little bit better and what it could mean for me to understand what I'm doing at my work actually.

Mark: 03:27 - So can I ask you, your clients were inviting you back because they were getting value from you, but it wasn't the value you thought you were giving, is that right or?

Eric: 03:38 - Yes, that was quite an insight for me, but that's what it seemed to be like.

Mark: 03:43 - So what did you think they were getting from you?

Eric: 03:46 - With that question we are jumping right to the end of my doctoral thesis because that's what happened.

Mark: 03:51 - Alright.

Eric: 03:52 - You have a question in mind, I was thinking how am I getting my head around that? And it took me the three years of the DMan programme to try and understand what it was that I was contributing when it was not delivering the plan. I think one of the main bits that I was adding was facilitating conversations in which people had followed the opportunity to explore what they were doing actually, as opposed to talking about highly abstract models or notions about what they should be doing. And it sounds like a simple thing, but once you're working as a consultant, it would be extremely difficult for you to say to people, "Look, this is what we contracted, but let's be honest, what we are doing is something very different." And then have a client saying, "Oh yeah, no, I see what you mean." And of course let's leave the contract aside and we do what we think is necessary. So we sought to facilitate that kind of conversation is difficult.

Mark: 04:48 - That's really interesting do you know I've got a remarkably similar experience. I mean I spent a lot of time, probably more than 20 years ago now doing a lot of process re-engineering type stuff. And I used to draw diagrams and diagrams and diagrams and people paid me money for it. And I was talking to one guy who was a sort of senior manager of the organisation I was working in. And he said to me, he said, "All these diagrams, you know, I'm not sure it's the diagrams that are adding that much value." And I sort of kind of paused and looked at him and he said, "It's an actually the value you're bringing is that you're creating a forum in which my people can come together and have sensible conversations about the things that they're doing." And that was quite an insight for me and it kind of changed the way that I looked at things and did things. And maybe we come to complexity in the same way Eric, I don't know.

5 minutes

Eric: 05:36 - Yeah it sounds like, yeah.

Mark: 05:38 - Yeah. So you mentioned that the DMan program and I've heard a lot about that over the last couple of years and obviously I went to the conference last May where we met. Can you just say a bit about why you did the DMan program and how you got into it and what it was like?

Eric: 05:55 - Once I heard that question in my mind, what is it that I'm doing here actually in my work? I couldn't resist from talking to people about it. And at the time there was this one chap who was also quite interested in this topic of complexity, which I didn't know at the time, but we just had regular conversations. So I then said to him, "Look, this is what is exercising me at the moment." And he said, "You need to read this one book." And he pointed me to a book by Douglas Griffin, who as you note in the introduction, is one of the founding fathers of the ideas around complex responsive processes. And I bought that book and I'm quite an avid reader, but to be honest with you, I couldn't make sense half of it. But I understood enough of it to say, "I think this person is talking exactly to my experience."

And that was such a different experience from reading a management book than I had from other management books. It intrigued me so much so that I inquired about him, found out that he actually lives in Germany like I do, even though he's American and taught at a British university, he passed away a couple of years back. So he lived in Cologne and then I asked him if he could meet and he said, "Oh yes, of course we can." So we met at a hotel and that's how it got me started.

Mark: 07:20 - And he was a professor on the DMan... The DMan existed then and he was a professor on it, is that right?

Eric: 07:27 - Yes, exactly, exactly. The DMan came in existence when Ralph Stacey set up a first group of PhD students to explore matters around complexity at Hertford. And Ralph and Doug was one of the people who were on that PhD program that later on was then reformed into a Doctor of Management AKA a professional doctorate program. But at that time it was Doug participating in this PhD program and the book that I read was basically based on his PhD thesis.

Mark: 08:02 - Had the complex responsive processes idea emerged by then?

Eric: 08:06 - Yes, yes it had. And Ralph Stacey had undergone a major shift in his thinking by the time as well, which is important if we come to talk about that later.

Mark: 08:16 - I spoke to Eric, we knew this topic of complex responsive processes would come up, complex responsive processes is a thing and we decided it would be useful to do a short explanation of what this is and ended up with me having a go at it. Which was actually a huge pleasure and I enjoyed doing it. So what I've done is yesterday I recorded it's about four minutes long and what I'll do is I'll just play it now so that you get an injection of what complex responsive processes is all about.

Mark: 08:52 - This is about the complex responsive processes of relating. It's a theory an evolving body of thought coming from a collaboration between some professors at the University of Hertfordshire, Ralph Stacey, Doug Griffin, Patricia Shaw and latterly Chris Mowles. It's important because it offers a compelling alternative to accepted ways of thinking about organisations as systems. It's a development of the natural sciences theory of complex adaptive systems and 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 don't. We respond to each other in complex and varying ways: we don't interact according to simple rules.

Mark: 09:41 - Complex responsive processes, specifically eschews the concept of the system and with it systems thinking - so, ooh er, blimey. If you use systems thinking, including all the great stuff like Peter Senge's systems dynamics that I've personally relied on for years as an abstraction of what's actually going on. It presents what we think of as organisational systems, as abstractions, as social phenomena, repeated global patterns emerging from local human interaction. These patterns are paradoxically stable and unstable at the same time and we'll ask Eric about that in a minute. 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's actually formed of billions of fast moving interacting water molecules.

Now 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 the Swiss valley for example. Crucially, it views conversations not as two way exchanges of information but as a mutual creation of meaning.

10 minutes

Mark: 10:52 - There are books and books on this stuff, but in essence, each pairing of gesture and response creates a new experience for those involved that affects their subsequent gestures. It see 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 and 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 got huge 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 our own local experience.

So concluding, we aren't as independent as we think. Organisations are more like patterns than things, managers aren't in as much control of them as they think and system 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.

Mark: 12:35 - So I hope that was useful. I did say in the recording that I'd ask Eric about this thing about paradox and whether I'd explained it the right way. So tell us all about the paradox thing, Eric.

Eric: 12:51 - So this notion of paradox is one of the hallmarks of complex responsive processes thinking. And it is very different from traditional management thinking and so far as you will usually find in traditional management thinking, linear kind of thinking about what is going to happen when there's a chronology to things. There is one step after the other and that is a mental framework that is given up in complex responsive processes, in favour of ideas to do with a paradox. And of the things that... There's different paradoxes that are being described in complex responsive processes thinking. And one of the most important ones has to do with how we think about what an organisation is. From complex adaptive systems thinking, the people who work in a complex responsive processes tradition, what they take from that is an analogy.

Eric: 13:57 - And an analogy that you would find in complex adaptive system thinking is to do with computer simulations, where you have many agents on a screen and they are doing something, they are moving around a little bit. And what you will find is that these agents only have interaction with other agents that are in their closer vicinity. Now the interesting thing is that without a plan or any kind of intention behind it from these many local interactions of these agents on a screen, suddenly a global pattern emerges. So a global regularity occurs from the many local interactions where none of the local agents or none of the single agents has had in mind this global pattern in the first place. And now that global pattern again evolves a lot, tends to have a life on its own in a way that it starts to have repercussions on how the agents at the local level are behaving.

15 minutes

Mark: 15:02 - Sorry, so what you're saying is that the local agents in this sort of idealised computer model of complex adaptive systems continue to obey a simple set of rules, whereas you're saying that complex responsive processes says something different, is that right?

Eric: 15:18 - Yes.

Mark: 15:18 - Right. Sorry, I interrupted you but carry on I just wanted to make sure absolutely sure I was clear.

Eric: 15:23 - Yeah, no, that's right. And there is a difference, but it begins with this notion of the paradox is that paradoxically from many local interactions there emerges a global pattern, a global regularity that nobody planned for. And that is a very different understanding as opposed to what you find in classical management theory where of course there are people who think about what the global pattern should look like. They devise strategies that can be cascaded down to the organisation and then things will happen accordingly. That's at least the idea behind it. Now, what drove me onto the DMan was the experience that that is not working in that way. So I was looking for a different way of making sense of what is actually going on. And when I came onto the DMan, one of the things that I started to understand was you have to understand what an organisation is very differently namely as a global regularity that emerges from any local interactions.

Eric: 16:17 - And then you asked a very good question, but then local agents on a computer screen are something different from human beings, isn't it? And of course the answer is yes. So what is different, the main difference between human beings and local computer agents is that human beings have the capacity to act creatively and to spontaneously behave in a very different way than they did the second before. And though that insight is not reflected in the idea of complex adaptive systems where you stay in this mechanistic metaphor. Whereas in complex responsive processes thinking, you say the driving force behind the ongoing dynamic of what fuels the movement between the different agents/human beings is their constant potential for reiterating what they've done before and at the same time the potential for doing something very different.

Eric: 17:15 - And that is a very important insight that you stick with the notion of there is many local interactions from which a global pattern emerges, which in complex responsive processes means and organisation as a phenomenon emerges from the many local interactions of different people. But these different people are understood to interact with each other. And they interact with each other with their human capacities and one of the human capacities that they have is the ability for interacting in a creative manner if you will. That is what distinguishes them from computer agents.

Mark: 17:51 - That makes absolute sense to me which is why I was interested in this in the first place cause it resonates with my experience. But my experience I suppose has been started with process modelling, that kind of thing but developed into systems thinking and I mentioned Peter Senge earlier. But Ralph would say that the understanding in complex responsive processes is quite different to that understanding that people who typically described themselves as systems thinkers would think. And I'm really interested in that, about how that's different. There are a lot of systems thinking people who say, "Yeah, I get the complex adaptive system thing we've taken it into account and this is how we cope with it in our model." But Ralph I think would say they haven't and I'm interested in understanding what your thinking is on that.

Eric: 18:44 - Yeah. So let's take a route via a metaphor that systems thinkers will typically employ once they come from a complex adaptive systems perspective. One of the metaphors that is much more interesting to look at than local computer agents is phenomena in nature. And some of the phenomena that you will find in nature are for example, flocking birds or a school of fish which perform their beautiful movements. And like when you think about starlings and an evening sky, you would think, "Wow, that looks so beautiful." And that is also like a system if you will and it is something that looks like what is happening also in human interaction. That is the analogy that is drawn or basically a metaphor that is drawn from a complex adaptive systems thinking. That you can use these flocking birds or fish in a way to think about what is going on in human interaction or in organisations.

Eric: 19:58 - And that is then what systems thinking you would think of as a biological system, for example. And that is a metaphor that is used very often when you talk to systemically trained people, when they talk about organisations. Now in complex responsive processes thinking there is this insight that humans are not like birds and not like fish to start with because they have capacity to react creatively, and to react spontaneously and there's many other things. But that's where it starts, that's one very important difference between the two perspectives.

20 minutes

Mark: 20:32 - Presumably though complex responsive processes theory wouldn't say that we should abandon systems thinking cause I guess in some sense it's a reasonable approximation to what's going on and good enough for some situations. Is that right or would you say no, no, we don't want to think that way at all?

Eric: 20:51 - Yeah, I think what you could say is that systems thinking it can be applied but it can usually be applied in settings which are not characterised by human spontaneity, by human interaction. So as soon as it comes to understanding what is going on in nature, for example, thinking of what is going on in an anthill. It might make sense to think about it as a bounded system that exists there that we can look at and observe and make this theory or theorise about. Now the problem with doing that is when that arises, when you think about human organisations or human interaction more broadly, is when we as humans look at other human beings, then we inevitably have an effective response to what is going on.

Eric: 21:48 - So it is actually impossible for us to look at others in a totally objective way. And that makes it very difficult to sustain the notion of thinking about systems when you think about human interaction or human organisations.

Mark: 22:04 - So do you ever think in systems terms?

Eric: 22:07 - No.

Mark: 22:08 - Do you notice yourself thinking that way?

Eric: 22:10 - No. I've abandoned that entirely.

Mark: 22:14 - That's really interesting. So the 64,000 Euro question is what do you think about and how do you engage with people who have systems thinking locked within them and they cannot escape from? How do you engage with them? What do you do?

Eric: 22:34 - So I think you have to recognise first of all that I am working in a globally operating organisational consulting firm and many people will not even recognise that those who are working here that they are actually working from a systems perspective. But that's what we basically do. So when we come to make proposals to clients, we of course say that we know what we are doing and that we can predict the outcomes of the interventions that we are facilitating - after all, why would we receive all the money that we are receiving if we wouldn't know what we were doing? So nobody asked the question, wait a minute, is that actually what we are doing there? Like the question that I asked when I came onto the DMan program. So I have to engage with people first of all, colleagues and peers and not appear like a high-spirited cowboy who talks about things that nobody knows about and that sound very crazy anyway.

So I have to strike a very fine balance when I talk with people about what we are supposed to be doing when for example, we put together a proposal. And on the other hand, of course I have to recognise that clients are very much trained in thinking about predicting and controlling the outcomes of, for example, larger change initiatives of coaching or transformation initiatives. And it wouldn't make much sense to go then say, "That's all bogus and we all know that's not how it's going to pan out three years down the line. So let's skip all that and try something totally different." So that's not how it works. What I have to do is, I have to be very careful, and actually politically skilful, in the way that I'm working. And normally what I'm doing is I will not let too much of my thinking go into proposal stages where we rather follow a very traditional approach. But where it would come through is once I start and work at the client's side.

Mark: 24:31 - So in those sessions, do you think you did anything special or did you just rock up as Eric and talk with them? What did you do?

Eric: 24:40 - Yeah, I think the thing and that has been one of the main insights for me in my thesis is it is not just talking but it is daring to explore a little bit longer than others normally would. The questions that are on people's minds. So instead of closing a conversation off prematurely and saying, "Oh yeah, this is going on so you need to do this and that." I carry on asking questions and it may feel uncomfortable for people at some point; but then sometimes, there's no guarantee for that, but sometimes there emerges a new insight when you just carry on exploring not hoping that somebody is saying something that is aligned with the tools that you are using, but that they are saying something that reveals something more that is sitting more deeply in them.

And that then gives rise to further questions and can even be quite an engaging exercise for those in the room even if it is a bunch of managers sitting there who just received feedback reports, most of which were not particularly promising for them. So it is quite a difficult situation anyway to talk about these matters. But to be able to facilitate a discussion in that forum and to see everybody seeing everyone as vulnerable, everyone has to deal with something and we now have time and space to talk about some of these things. I think is good enough.

25 minutes

Mark: 26:18 - Yeah. And you don't have to go into particularly sensitive territory I guess. If you just give folks a chance to talk about things that are bothering them, they will. I guess it's just having the time and the patience. So Eric, you've got a different way of looking at things and presumably not everybody in your organisation has done the DMan program. How do you feel about the way you think about things fits with an organisation that is dominated by systems thinking?

Eric: 26:52 - It is difficult of course and as I said, it requires me to be political in many ways. And by political I mean that I cannot openly talk about what I'm actually doing with clients for example. Or where I have to pretend at least for some while in the beginning of an assignment that I'm doing what the contract requires. But then to find ways to skilfully interact into a group situation, which may likely lead to a deviation from the plan that we set out in the first place. And that then can lead to some very interesting discussions. It doesn't have to, but daring to ask questions that others wouldn't. So for example, when you sit with a group of managers and you run a training course and you present a kind of model or something and then you look into the room and you will find that some people feel discomfort with that model.

Now the typical reaction would be to either gloss over it and carry on with it or to reiterate how meaningful the model is and that people just need a little time to adapt and then they will see the value it brings. What I would be doing is saying, "It seems like some people are feeling some discomfort with this model. If you want to could we explore that discomfort for a moment?" And that can invite people to then talk about things that otherwise would go unnoticed. And I think people recognise that.

Mark: 28:36 - Yeah, of course that's where the gold is, isn't it? Where people are feeling discomfort.

Eric: 28:41 - Yeah and at the same time there is also the discomfort on the side of the trainer, isn't it? Because if you ask that question, you will certainly not know what you will be getting back. In all likelihood it will not be, "Oh no, I just need a little time to understand your brilliant model and then I'll take it and use it in my daily work." That's not what you would be getting back. Instead you can be getting back anything and you need to be prepared to deal with that. And that is one of the things that I learned I think on the DMan to bear the uncertainty of not knowing what a conversation is going to yield and to stay in there and to help people reflect a little bit on what it is that is going on for them. And that is one of the key learnings from the DMan apart from the fact that you are doing work at doctoral level, which requires you to work in a very coherent manner and things.

30 minutes

But one of the specificities of the DMan is that you meet there for four residentials a year with a group of other doctoral students and all the supervisors engaged on the program, which are a couple. So you can easily end up in a group of 15 or so people and you sit in a circle of chairs and as a student you may be wondering what's going on there. But there is no agenda, there's nothing planned, nothing preplanned that one of the professors would pull out and then say, "This is what we are going to talk about today. Here's a little lecture and then you can break out into small groups and discuss that." Instead, you may be sitting there in silence for a while and feeling the internal discomfort of not knowing what's going to happen. And if you ask the question, what are we doing here? You may be getting back, well what do you think we are doing here? Then that can give rise to further discussions.

Mark: 30:40 - So coming full circle back to the conference that I went to that we met in may, there was on the Sunday I think there was a big meeting and it must've been 40 possibly even more people sitting around in a massive circle with Chris Mowles in the centre. And we talked about a few things and then there were quite long periods of silence where people were reflecting or whatever was going on. And I found that hugely refreshing that it so, so seldom happens in the sort of the cut and thrust of organisational life and just something like that happening feels important. So you went to the last conference, how long ago did you finish your DMan and how many conferences have you been to and why do you keep going?

Eric: 31:34 - I finished my DMan at the end of 2011 and then I didn't go to the conference for a couple of years, but then picked it up I think three or four years back. And the reason is that I felt a kind of loneliness in terms of, not having those people around me that I would like to talk to. Where the way that I'm thinking is seen to be normal as opposed to being some sort of eccentric kind of... whatever. And that is what I was missing. So then that's then where I began to come back regularly and ever since enjoying it immensely.

Mark: 32:27 - It's exactly the same reason that I went I do feel quite lonely sometimes because of the way I think about things. It's a way to recharge the batteries and get in touch with your roots as it were.

Mark: 32:42 - So Eric look, this has been a fascinating 40 minutes and you've been very clear, very helpful and really very interesting. So on behalf of our listener, thank you very much indeed for coming on the show and talking about your stuff. So that's fabulous. Thank you.

Eric: 33:03 - Thanks for having me. I enjoyed it a lot thanks.