Conventional organisation science has taught us that organisations function like colliding billiards balls. Push button X and Y will inevitably occur. However, there is no certainty that Y will happen when an executive pushes button X.
Billiards balls are stable; they always behave the same way because they cannot think. However, humans constantly change because they can think and feel and continuously react to numerous influences.
Organisations are not compositions of physical entities interacting mechanistically; they are neuro-biological systems in constant exchange with their internal and external context.
People are continually subject to a complex interplay of perpetually shifting influences, within and outside the organisation, often counterintuitive, frequently random, and nonlinear, many of which we do not know about and even more that we can never know about.
Complexity Links
- Overview
- Causation in Organisations
- The Illusion of Control
- What is Complexity Science
There are no laws that we can use to predict how people will behave irrespective of time and place. The most we can say is that there are general tendencies for people to act in a specific way, but these can always be subject to countervailing influences.
The increasing world turbulence acting on organisations makes understanding organisational behaviour imperative. The greater the turbulence, the more dangerous billiards-ball reasoning becomes. To exert some control over organisational behaviour, we must understand the complex phenomena that cause it.
Researchers have started integrating various analytic methods with an alternative scientific approach that organisations can adopt to understand organisational behaviour.
The approach is an alternative scientific mindset, a new way of thinking about the cause of behaviour, not a methodology such as Agile, Scrum or Kanban. However, such methods and many others may complement the perspective.
This emerging perspective is a response to a growing understanding of the limitations of billiards-ball thinking.
This new perspective is Complexity Science.
