Ralph Stacey: Complexity and Paradoxes 2015

[@janicemoorhouse4830]

I am new to Ralph Stacey's work and I was expecting him to emphasise consensus and co-operation but in fact he celebrates conflict and anxiety. A pleasure to listen to his conversation with students in which he explains how his thinking evolved over a lifetime of engagement in - and thinking about - strategic management.

[@victormae]

Prof Stacey always illuminating the criteria towards an intelligent management practice.. Thank you for all your intelectual generosity. Cheers from Buenos Aires, Argentina

[@alexd.3048]

Any and every Manager, worker, citizen, whoever in general, should know about this

[@russgaskin]

If this is of interest, then I'd suggest looking into Polarity Thinking and Gestalt OSD which, respectively, go much deeper into the actual dynamics paradoxes (and how to better leverage them) and the dynamics of human experience and meaning-making (and how to foster more effective experiences at all levels of a system).

[@peterweston1356]

Also check out Iain McGilchrist’s masterful work, ‘The Matter With Things’ a two volume exposition on the unmaking of the Western world.

[@ann-louisehoward4276]

Thank you! I would love to know more about enabling-contraining and its relationship to power and belonging.

[@geordie4339]

Stacey sees an organization as a complex of social processes, or communicating people. For me, that is a social entity, of which an organization is a subtype, whose "organization" can be defined in some kind of model. Stacey's three “paradoxes” don’t seem like paradoxes to me. They seem to describe any social entity. 1 Human interaction is predictably unpredictable. 2 Power relationships both enable and constrain us. 3 We co-create our social life and vice-versa. Continual change of the kind in 1 and 3 undermine the idea of "organization", which usually implies a particular pattern of communication/interaction/behavior, and perhaps some power relationships as well. Moreover, the discussion leaves us unclear how we decide which people are members of which organizations, and how our membership of several (possibly competing) organizations affects us and them.

[@dr.sigalitshahar4281]

very interesting