Ledelse i kompleksitet

This book is a Danish introduction to Ralph Stacey's body of work, which in a short and precise language explains complexity in a way that is easy to understand. The fascination with Ralph Stacey does not lie in his giving me very concrete instructions on how to approach a change or what to do in specific situations. On the contrary. His fundamental point is that, as leaders and change leaders, we should not spend so much time planning, because it does not work! Instead, we should take our experience seriously. What we forget, quite concretely, is to do something other than what we usually do when things are not going the way we dreamed. Stacey is inspired by chaos theory, and his point is that, since organisations constitute the sum of a mass of human actions, organisations' actions are just as (un)predictable as the people in them. Organisations are made up of an interplay between people, and when organisations develop, it does not happen on the basis of grand change strategies. But as a result of small, iterative steps that are the result of human interaction. This interaction is playing out all the time, when we, with our different agendas, meet with others whom we influence and who influence us back