Ralph D. Stacey > Quotes

“Most Western managers believe that long-term success flows from a state of stability, harmony, predictability, discipline, and consensus-a state that I refer to as stable equilibrium. This belief leads them to demand general prescriptions that they can immediately convert into successful action. The most popular prescriptions are to formulate a vision of an organization's future state, to prepare long-term plans to realize that vision, to set strategic milestones and monitor achievements against those plans, to write mission statements and persuade people to share the same culture, to encourage widespread participation and consensus in decision making, and to install control systems that allow top executives to set the organization's direction and stay in command.”
― Ralph D. Stacey, Managing the Unknowable: Strategic Boundaries Between Order and Chaos in Organizations

“There are ideologies of control lying behind the insistence on the need for instrumentally rational tools and techniques. In reflecting these ideologies, some believe that without the tools and techniques organizations would not be able to produce success; indeed, they would be ungovernable. Others believe that without the tools and techniques it would be impossible to improve the human condition or take action to sustain the planet. There is a very powerful belief that ‘we’ must be able to improve whole organizations intentionally. For some, these beliefs are impervious to reason, perhaps because it is too disappointing to accept the humbler realization that success and failure, sustainability and destruction, all emerge across populations through myriad local interactions and all anyone can do is participate as meaningfully and as influentially as possible, acting on practical judgment, in these local interactions.”
― Ralph D. Stacey, Tools and Techniques of Leadership and Management: Meeting the Challenge of Complexity

“From the dominant perspective, organizational continuity and change is the realization of the choices of powerful people. From a complex responsive processes perspective organizational continuity and change emerge in many, many local interactions as patterns across population which no one planned or intended. Outcomes emerge in the interplay of everyone’s plans and intentions and no one can control the interplay.”
― Ralph D. Stacey, Complexity and Organizational Reality

“Cults are maintained when leaders present to people’s imagination a future free from obstacles that could prevent them from being what they all want to be. The visions that leaders of organizations are nowadays supposed to have are examples of this.”
― Ralph D. Stacey, Tools and Techniques of Leadership and Management: Meeting the Challenge of Complexity

“… mess is the material from which life and creativity are built …”
― Ralph Stacey

“I do not think that it is too sweeping to say that instead of provoking new thinking, the sciences of complexity have been used in ways that simply justify existing ideologies, preserve without any questioning the taken-for-granted underlying assumptions of causality to be found the dominant discourse and so simply re-present that discourse in strange jargon. Furthermore, it is striking how in the dominant discourse and its re-presentation in the vocabulary of complexity, the organizational reality of ordinary people acting in ordinary, everyday ways to get things done together, disappears completely from the scene. Instead, we have forces, wholes, systems, abstract entities such as ‘the organization’ which intends and does. Organizations interact with each other and ordinary people are simply their resources. What we seem to be stuck in is an abstract way of thinking which distances us from our experience of being immersed in the experience of daily life in real activities of organizing. If we are to slowly develop a more promising way of rethinking management then it seems to me that it is important to understand the split in our thinking between abstract reasoning about organizations and immersed experience of daily organizational life. I argue that rethinking management would require a more paradoxical way of thinking than that provided by a split between abstraction and immersion. The”
― Ralph D. Stacey, Complexity and Organizational Reality

“Western thinking evolved from a mode that took the form of a tension between immersing in experience and abstracting from that experience through categorizing it (first order abstracting) to a mode that focused increasingly on second order abstracting in which the first order categories of experience were used to map and model not just the natural world but also the social world. This increasingly drew even further away from the local interaction of immersing in experience itself. Thought came to focus so heavily on second order abstractions of systems and models, understood as science, that when it was applied to human organizations, the ordinary reality of the experience of local interaction between actual human bodies disappeared from view as attention was focused on objectively operating on abstractions as if they were reality. I suggested that it was this movement in thought to second order abstraction, split off from immersion in local interaction, that led to the belief that organizations could be designed and manipulated by objective observers. The result is an inadequate way of thinking about organization and management that covers over the simple organizational reality of local interacting and leaves us without satisfying ways of understanding what is currently happening to organizations. In”
― Ralph D. Stacey, Complexity and Organizational Reality

“In a linear world of equilibrium and predictability, the sparse research into an evidence base for management prescriptions and the confused findings it produces would be a sign of incompetence; it would not make much sense. Nevertheless, if organizations are actually patterns of nonlinear interaction between people; if small changes could produce widespread major consequences; if local interaction produces emergent global pattern; then it will not be possible to provide a reliable evidence base. In such a world, it makes no sense to conduct studies looking for simple causal relationships between an action and an outcome. I suggest that the story of the last few years strongly indicates that human action is nonlinear, that time and place matter a great deal, and that since this precludes simple evidence bases we do need to rethink the nature of organizations and the roles of managers and leaders in them.”
― Ralph D. Stacey, Complexity and Organizational Reality

“In Chapter 4, I reviewed the application of the complexity sciences as science or as metaphor and concluded that these applications have generated some insight into the dynamics of organizations but have primarily simply reproduced the prescriptions of the dominant discourse in somewhat more esoteric language. This is not surprising when one notices how those applying complexity sciences both as science and as metaphor focus their attention on the second order abstraction of system or on somewhat mystical wholes and in doing so banish ordinary, bodily human activity from view. It seems to me that there is a pressing need to develop modes of thought in which there is a tension between immersing in ordinary daily experience of local interaction and abstracting (first and second order) from that experience, also itself understood as emerging in local interaction, in order to understand what we are doing.”
― Ralph D. Stacey, Complexity and Organizational Reality

“This means that the use of the tools of instrumental rationality cannot be rational in an objective, instrumental sense. Their use will arouse emotion, threaten or sustain existing power relations, provoke resistance and conflict between different ideologies. Instrumental rationality turns out to be a fiction in ordinary everyday life in organizations.”
― Ralph D. Stacey, Tools and Techniques of Leadership and Management: Meeting the Challenge of Complexity