Sharon Varney - Leadership in Complexity and Change: For a world in constant motion

Change is the natural state of the universe. We live and work in a world that is in constant motion. As philosopher William James puts it, reality is in the making (James, 2012: 138). In the flux of life, change is not an achievement. Stability is the achievement. This is important, so I am going to repeat it. In the flux of life, change is not an achievement. Stability is the achievement.

Have you ever tried to keep your mind or your body completely still? If so, you will probably have discovered that stillness does not come as naturally as you might have thought. It takes practice. So, why does conventional wisdom about leadership and management suggest just the opposite? Managers at all levels are expected to be on top of things, which assumes stability. They are also expected to shake things up, which assumes things are not changing. They are then expected to demonstrate their leadership of change, which assumes that things are unmoving unless there is deliberate leadership action.

This chapter unpicks a lot of conventional wisdom about the context for leadership. That conventional wisdom largely assumes that organisations are stable, and change is an accomplishment. Even in a VUCA environment, one that is volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous, organisations are largely thought of as stable and needing clear leadership to change, and thus to stay relevant in that highly dynamic environment. Not so, say Tsoukas and Chia (2002), who explain that organisational life is a process of becoming and that, counterintuitively, change comes before the more orderly state of organisation.

As we will see in this chapter, assumptions about stability have been hardwired into our thinking and practices over the past 100 years. They provide the foundations for many of our taken for granted ways of working, even influencing the language we use to describe how we do things, and how we think about what we do. It is extremely difficult to challenge this thinking because it has become so ingrained in our mental models of leadership and change that we do not even notice it.

Unfortunately those mental models of organisational stability create unhelpful traps (Argyris, 2010, Garvey Berger, 2019) that keep people stuck in prevailing patterns of thinking, talking, and behaving. Getting out of those traps can be difficult. Most managers have been trained and conditioned to talk and behave as if organisations are relatively stable, certain, and thus controllable. Such beliefs often run deep; they get entangled with our own sense of our professional identity and in social norms of what we should say and do and how we should be in our working lives. Changing our minds can, therefore, feel uncomfortable in our bodies as we challenge the certainties of ourselves and others.

In this chapter we will consider the trap of assuming that organisations are naturally unchanging when they are actually in constant motion. I call this dynamic patterning. We will then challenge the implications for how we think about and talk about leadership and change. In order to do this, we will need to surface our own obvious, challenge it, and perhaps replace it with a new obvious. I will call on complexity science here to provide us with a coherent conceptual foundation to underpin this important work. Complexity science is ideal for the job as it is the science of evolutionary change, adaptation and self-transformation (Merali and Allen, 2011: 43).

Many managers tell a familiar story of working ever harder and longer in a continuous struggle to keep up with things, to get on top of things, and to stay on top of things, without ever getting there. When I introduce managers and professionals to complexity science ideas, their sense of relief is often palpable. Oh, I thought it was just me, they say. Let me be clear, it is not just you. The world really is in constant motion.

We have known this for a long time. Some 2,000 years ago, Greek philosopher Heraclitus, known for his doctrine that things are constantly changing and flowing (the idea of universal flux), argued that it is not possible to step into the same river twice. Around the same time, William James, the American pragmatist, advised; philosophy should seek this kind of living understanding of the movement of reality, not follow [Newtonian] science in vainly patching together fragments of its dead results (James, 2012: 138).

But is this just poetic fancy? We can turn to complexity science to explain what is going on (more in Chapter 2). Key terms, first instance in bold, can be found in the glossary.

Complexity science explains how complex systems are naturally dynamic, due to continuous internal processes of exploration, experimentation and innovation at their underlying levels (Allen, 2014: 265). In the working world, this encompasses all the different ways in which different people continually adapt and respond to one another as they say and do things in the normal course of working together. Ralph Stacey refers to this everyday interaction as complex responsive processes of relating (Stacey, 2001; 2012).

These everyday ways in which we adapt and respond to one another are so ordinary that we rarely think of them as change. But the amazing thing is that these micro dynamics are the source of large-scale patterns of change. A helpful analogy to bring this idea to life is to think of a large flock of starlings (known as a murmuration) and the amazing patterns the birds create in the sky as they fly over their roosting site in early evening. These fascinating patterns are complex and continuously changing. The constant motion and the fact that the larger patterns never repeat makes it mesmerising to watch. If you have not had the chance to see this stunning phenomenon for yourself, you can find plenty of murmuration videos on the internet.

The dynamic patterning here is co-created by the flocking behaviour of tens of thousands of starlings, sometimes millions, as each bird adapts to the other birds immediately around it and to the prevailing conditions. Complexity science explains that small differences between the individual starlings and in how they respond and adapt in the moment create novel patterns across the flock. Like a river, those dynamic patterns are never the same twice, even when they look similar. The beauty of this example is that it shows coherent patterns of change arising rapidly across the flock