Managing Complexity In Organizations

New tools for managing complexity Does your organization manage complexity by making things more complicated? If so, you are not alone. According to The Boston Consulting Group’s fascinating Complexity Index, business complexity has increased sixfold during the past sixty years. And, all the while, organizational complicatedness—that is, the number of structures, processes, committees, decision-making forums, and systems—has increased by a whopping factor of thirty-five. In their attempt to respond to the increasingly complex performance requirements they face, company leaders have created an organizational labyrinth that makes it more and more difficult to improve productivity and to pursue innovation. It also disengages and demotivates the workforce. Clearly it’s time for leaders to stop trying to manage complexity with their traditional tools and instead better leverage employees' intelligence. This book shows you how and explains the implications for designing and leading organizations. The way to manage complexity, the authors argue, is neither with the hard solutions of another era nor with the soft solutions—such as team building and feel-good “people initiatives”—that often follow in their wake. Based on social sciences (notably economics, game theory, and organizational sociology) and The Boston Consulting Group’s work with more than five hundred companies in more than forty countries and in various industries, authors Yves Morieux and Peter Tollman recommend six simple rules to manage complexity without getting complicated. Showing why the rules work and how to put them into practice, Morieux and Tollman give managers a much-needed tool to reinvigorate people in the face of seemingly endless complexity. Included are detailed examples from companies that have achieved a multiplicative effect on performance by using them. It’s time to manage complexity better. Employ these six simple rules to foster autonomy and cooperation and to effectively handle business complexity. As a result, you will improve productivity, innovate more, reengage your workforce, and seize opportunities to create competitive advantage.

This book delivers new IMD insights on an emerging challenge - how to deal with overwhelming complexity. Global organizations face a complex decision-making environment. On one side, diversity of cultures, customers, competitors and regulations creates complexity; on the other, competitive pressures cause expanding countries to extract more synergies across products and regions. In such a climate, a new way of thinking, acting and organizing is needed beyond the familiar ‘control’ mindset. Drawing together insights from across the expert faculty, Managing Complexity in the Global Organization presents IMD’s framework on how to understand complexity and its four key drivers (diversity; interdependence; ambiguity and flux), along with solutions on specific issues in a variety of functions, industries and markets. The focus is on providing practical solutions based on real-life examples.

Organizational Systems clarifies the application of cybernetic ideas, particularly those of Beer's Viable System Model, to organizational diagnosis and design. Readers learn to appreciate the relevance of seeing the systemic coherence of the world. The book argues that many of the problems we experience today are routed in our practice of fragmenting that needs to be connected as a whole. It offers a method to study and design organizations and a methodology to deal with implementation problems. It is the outcome of many years of working experience with government offices as well as with all kinds of public and private enterprises. At a more detailed level this book offers an in depth discussion of variety engineering that is not available either in the primary or secondary literature.

A fundamental problem of public sector governance relates to the very way of thinking it reflects; where organization is thought of as a ‘thing’, a system designed to deliver what its designers choose. This volume questions that way of thinking and takes a perspective in which organizations are complex responsive processes of relating between people. Bringing together the work of participants on the Doctor of Management program at Hertfordshire University, this book focuses on the move to marketization and managerialism, paying particular attention to human relationships and group dynamics. The contributors provide narrative accounts of their work addressing questions of management, pressures, accountability, responsiveness and traditional systems perspectives. In considering such questions in terms of their daily experience, they explore how the perspective of complex responsive processes assists them in making sense of experience and developing practice. Including an editors’ commentary which introduces and contextualizes these experiences as well as drawing out key themes for further research, this book will be of value to academics, students and practitioners looking for reflective accounts of real life experiences rather than further prescriptions of what organizational life ought to be.

Combining rigorous academic research with the latest practical tools and techniques, this book explores the growing area of complextity management in business. Through a range of high quality international cases leading authors help students to understand how to manage organizations in unpredictable and complex business environments.

Lissack and Gunz have gathered many of the leading practitioners from the science of complexity and its emerging applications to management to give us an understanding of this field and how it can change the way we think about the organizations.

The application of complexity theory to management and the social sciences has been a key development in theory and practice over the last decade. This approach questions the possibility of finding universal methods of practice, and proposes a pragmatic and humanistic management style that evolves out of a reflective method. The focus is on practitioners observing patterns of similarity and being adaptable in decision-making. Bringing complexity theory into management reveals the importance of organizational culture and effective communication because people, their values and their objectives are at the heart of this method. Information technology provides a framework for complex communication and knowledge use, but it cannot replace highly developed professional negotiations and cooperation. This book argues that the complexity of the public service world limits the usefulness of classical and rational scientific management approaches such as New Public Management. Excessive marketization threatens a collaborative approach and overly rigid approaches to performance management and strategic management can be dysfunctional. Managing Complexity in the Public Services 2nd Edition advances a method of management practice that copes with the stark realities of the complex and unpredictable public policy world. It develops pragmatic management practices from action research that will be valuable to both academics and practitioners. The result is a new value-based practice for the post-crisis public service world.

Available in paperback for the first time, this book describes and considers ideas and insights from complexity science, and examines their use in organizations, especially in bringing about major organizational change.