Chris Mowles

Complex, but not quite complex enough : The turn to the complexity sciences in evaluation scholarship

This article offers a critical review of the way in which some scholars have taken up the complexity sciences in evaluation scholarship. I argue that there is a tendency either to over-claim or under-claim their importance because scholars are not always careful about which of the manifestations of the complexity sciences they are appealing to, nor do they demonstrate how they understand them in social terms. The effect is to render ‘complexity’ just another volitional tool in the evaluator’s toolbox subsumed under the dominant understanding of evaluation, as a logical, rational activity based on systems thinking and design. As an alternative I argue for a radical interpretation of the complexity sciences, which understands human interaction as always complex and emergent. The interweaving of intentions in human activity will always bring about outcomes that no one has intended including in the activity of evaluation itself.

The practice of complexity : Review, change and service improvement in an NHS department

PURPOSE In the last five years more and more scholars have drawn on insights from the complexity sciences as a way of understanding the process of managing and organising in the NHS differently. This paper aims to describe working methods derived from the theory of complex responsive processes, a more radical interpretation of these insights, used by a consultancy team in one NHS setting. DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH The authors were invited to undertake this intervention over a two year period to bring about service improvement. The paper sets out a critique of systems theory, which underpins most management literature, as well as offering a critique of some of the ways that complexity theory gets taken up in the health literature. As an alternative it explores the theoretical underpinnings of complex responsive processes and gives practical examples of methods that the authors believe are more suitable for understanding the complex environment NHS staff work within. FINDINGS Working with ideas of ambiguity, paradox and complexity are not easy for staff educated in a Western tradition of linear cause and effect. However, as a result of this intervention managers and staff pointed to a much greater confidence and skill in dealing with the complex daily process of organising, which they attribute to the methods used. Although the authors make no claim that service improvement arose as a direct consequence of the methods employed, significant, observable improvements in service provision did occur during and after the consultancy intervention. ORIGINALITY/VALUE The description of working methods based on reflective and reflexive group processes, alongside more empirical data-gathering methods, is offered as a radical alternative to more orthodox ways of understanding, and attempting to work with change in the NHS.

Successful or not? Evidence, emergence, and development management

This article offers a critique of the dominant ways of conceiving of, managing, and evaluating development. It argues that these management methods constrain the exploration of novelty and difference. By drawing on insights from the complexity sciences, particularly the theory of emergence, the article calls for a broadening of our understanding of how social change comes about. Arguing that the domain of development is not a narrow technical discipline, but an intensely social and political practice of mutual recognition, this article calls for a greater focus on power and processes of relating as they affect local interaction between people.

Values in international development organisations: negotiating non-negotiables

Values are an important theme in discussions in international NGOs, helping to create the conditions for solidarity among staff. But at the same time they are also frequently a source of demoralisation and destructive conflict. This is because the prevailing perceptions of values as instruments of management or as elements in some inchoate mystical whole render the power relationship between staff and managers undiscussable. Values need not be thought of as an instrument of management, and they are above all idealisations. An alternative theory of values is that they are emergent and intensely social phenomena that arise daily between people engaged in a collective enterprise. They are idealisations, but they must be discussed in the everyday context. Conflict is inevitable, but the exploration of the nature of this conflict in daily practice is the only way of ensuring that the discussion about values is an enlivening process.

Planning to innovate. Designing change or caught up in a game

In this article I engage with some orthodox theories of the management of innovation and change, which take for granted the idea that they can be predicted and controlled. Organizations are thought to be systems with boundaries, which managers acting as engineers, or doctors, can ‘diagnose’ and restore to ‘health’, or order differently. As an alternative, and by drawing on an experience of working with health service managers, I argue instead that change and innovation arise as a result of the interweaving of everyone’s intentions. Organizations are sites of intense political interaction and contestation, and exactly what emerges is unpredictable and unplannable, even by the most powerful individuals and groups.

Group analytic methods beyond the clinical setting – working with researcher-managers.

Group analytic scholars have a long history of thinking about organizations and taking up group analytic concepts in organizational contexts. Many still aspire to being more of a resource to organizations given widespread organizational change processes which provoke great upheaval and feelings of anxiety. This article takes as a case study the experience of running a professional management research doctorate originally set up with group analytic input to consider some of the adaptations to thinking and methods which are required outside the clinical context. The article explores what group analysis can bring to management, but also what critical management scholarship can bring to group analysis. It considers some of the organizational difficulties which the students on the doctoral programme have written about, and discusses the differences and limitations of taking up group analytic thinking and practice in an organizational research setting.

Experiencing uncertainty – on the potential of groups and a group analytic approach for making management education more critical.

This article points to the potential of methods derived from group analytic practice for making management education more critical. It draws on the experience of running a professional doctorate for more experienced managers in a university in the United Kingdom over a 16-year period. Group analysis is informed by the highly social theories of S.H. Foulkes and draws heavily on psychoanalytic theory as well as sociology. First and foremost, though, it places our interdependence at the heart of the process of inquiry and suggests that the most potent place for learning about groups, where we spend most of our lives, is in a group. The article prioritises three areas of management practice for which group analytic methods, as adapted for research environment, are most helpful: coping with uncertainty and the feelings of anxiety which this often arouses; thinking about leadership as a relational and negotiated activity, and encouraging reflexivity in managers. The article also points to some of the differences between the idea of the learning community and psychodynamic perspectives more generally and the limitations of group analytic methods in particular, which may pathologise resistance in the workplace.

Risiko, Unsicherheit und Komplexität: Grenzen des Risikomanagements

Risikomanagement ist ein sonderbarer und paradoxer Begriff. Er suggeriert, dass etwas auf eine bestimmte Art und Weise ‚gemanagt‘ werden kann, so dass es nicht mehr oder nur in einem deutlich weniger bedrohlichen Mase existiert. ‚Risiko‘ impliziert dabei immer die negativen Auswirkungen einer bestimmten Handlung oder Entwicklung, deren Eintreten im Gegensatz zur positiven ‚Chance‘ grundsatzlich nicht erwunscht ist. Aus okonomischen Uberlegungen heraus kann es jedoch durchaus lohnenswert sein, Risiken einzugehen, wofur auch eine besondere Belohnung (Pramie) in Aussicht gestellt wird. Wahrend also etwa bei Finanzoperationen Risiken bewusst in Kauf genommen, ja gesucht werden, sind sie bei Herzoperationen oder auf Bergwanderungen eher zu vermeiden („keine unnotigen Risiken eingehen“).

Managing Amid Paradoxes: Perspectives of Non-Profit Management Education

Most managers experience paradoxes and contradictions as an inherent part of their daily practice. This has been recognised by various management theories for some time, although mainly with the aim to dissolve the paradoxes or at least balance contradictory issues in order to regain control over organizational realities. We argue for a different and more critical perspective. Paradoxes, contradictions and tensions are part of the everyday experience of working together, are impervious to being ‚managed’ and will certainly not disappear. This is particularly obvious in the social, education or health sectors where professionals work with and for vulnerable people, having to act sensibly and exercise practical judgment in unpredictable, uncertain and fast changing circumstances. However, managers and their staff can find ways to work together productively by looking at the enabling and constraining factors of their co-operation and competition. Confronting oneself with the paradoxes of management and being able to share and discuss these with others as peers is a key element of what has evolved as ‚reflective management practice’ in our executive trainings. We see a need to further rethink and reorient management education in general and non-profit management education in particular.

Response to Bob Hinshelwood and Morris Nitsun

I am grateful to both Bob Hinshelwood and Morris Nitsun for taking the time to read and comment on my article about some of the uses of group analytic thinking beyond the clinical setting. The article for Group Analysis is one of a pair of articles I have written, the first bringing some more critical management thinking into the group analytic context, and the second, to be published this year in Management Learning journal1, re-explains some of the key tenets of group analysis to critical management scholars. The point is that both communities have a lot to offer each other. I have little to add to what Bob Hinshelwood says, that more management does not mean better management, and that attention can be diverted away from providing services. Yes to both. I would also add that we are also all caught up in the myth of transformational leadership, where it is assumed that everyone, no matter how practical their task, needs leadership training to become a ‘visionary’ leader. This goes hand in hand with the assumption that every exercise of authority in organizations involves questions of leadership. This is not to argue that leadership is unimportant, merely that discussion of leadership is ubiquitous and unquestioned, as though we all know what we are talking about. Morris Nitsun says some very kind things about both the article and the DMan programme, but then goes on to make four criticisms, to which I would like to respond. In doing so I accept in advance that his critique is, in his words: ‘simplified or exaggerated for the purpose of communication’. 704928 GAQ0010.1177/0533316417704928Group Analysis 50(2)Mowles: Response to Bob Hinshelwood and Morris Nitsun research-article2017