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Ralph Stacey

Alguns parágrafos pinçados das resenhas publicadas na emergence sobre dois entre os vários livros de Ralph Stacey. O link para as resenhas foi enviado à lista competitive-knowledge por Cristiano Saito.

What is needed instead, says Stacey, is an approach that frankly acknowledges the nature of human organizations as complex, adaptive nonlinear-feedback networks. Complexity theory addresses the fundamental properties of such systems, comprised of a number of agents that interact in response to each other's behavior, seeking to improve their outcomes and thus that of the system of which they are a part.
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Creativity in adaptive systems occurs in a special zone between the unstable disorder of chaos and the stability of no change
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"Organizations are creative when their individual members learn and interact creatively with each other in groups"
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Rather than maintaining stability and control, managers' and executives' roles, in Stacey's view, move increasingly toward fostering the conditions to permit active learning. This means maintaining diverse viewpoints, rapid information flow, rich connectivity among individuals and groups, and a culture that legitimates constructive confrontation.
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The dominant strategic management paradigm, as articulated by Rumelt, Schendel and Teece (and innumerable management gurus), insists on equilibrium, causality and predictability, internal consistency,
choice and intention (Rumelt, Schendel et al., 1994). Yet these are precisely the assumptions rendered ineffective by the very nature of complex, nonlinear adaptive networks. Complex feedback systems are not equilibrium systems, for stability is at best a temporary condition, at worst the organizational equivalent of heat death. They are neither predictable nor do they perform in anything like a simple cause?effect fashion, since unanticipated consequences, exogenous factors and nonscalable reactions characterize their interactions. Internal consistency stamps out the variety that might engender creative response (Dougherty, 1992; Dougherty and Heller, 1994), and choice and explicit intention are possible only in the short term. Firms do not behave as the current paradigm suggests that they "should," and the best of firms appear to constantly inhabit a messy, disorderly region of creative change.