Idea Showcase #3: How Change Happens (and Doesn't) in Organizations and the Economy
Tom Petzinger - Moderator
Doug Griffin - Emergence of Leadership
Henri Lipmanowicz - Chair, Plexus Board of Trustees
Reuben R. McDaniel - Organizational Responses to Complexity
Doug Griffin
The Emergence of Leadership: Linking Self-Organization and Ethics
Associate director of the Complexity and
Management Centre at the University of Hertfordshire, Editor of the Complexity and Emergence and Complexity as the Experience of Organizing series by Routledge,
Coautor of Complexity and the Experience of Leading Organizations and A Complexity Perspective on
Researching Organizations (both due out soon). Doug Griffin has worked as an independent organization consultant over the past 20 years and has also been employed at the Ford Werke AG in Cologne and for 3M Germany in Neuss in strategic personnel development and organizational learning services. In recent years he has specialized in the research and application of an approach which integrates insights into change processes
coming from cultural and complexity theory. On this basis he has
facilitated seminars and workshops for leading companies to
promote awareness of the dynamics involved at the deep level of
cultural change. This work has been done in both the German and
English languages.
He has coached individuals and facilitated groups and teams
across all levels in global organizations in raising awareness of the
patterns in their behavior and the consequences of their ways of
working. The goal of this facilitation and intervention is to
encourage and support innovation.
Henri Lipmanowicz
Chair, Plexus Board of Trustees
Reuben R. McDaniel
Organizational Responses to Complexity
McDaniel is the Charles and Elizabeth Prothro Regents Chair in Health Care Management in the Department of Management Science and Information Systems at the University of Texas. McDaniel also has played a key role in the introduction of complexity science into the curriculum in the McCombs School of Business.
Basic characteristics presented to managers by the fact that organizations are complex adaptive systems include the fundamental unknowability and unpredictability of the world, the importance of relationships in defining reality, and the role of self-organization, emergence and co-evolution. We will emphasize sense making, learning, improvisation, thinking about the future and designing as substitutes for traditional activities of command, control, prediction and planning when managing complex adaptive systems. Managerial strategies that depend on a fairly detailed knowledge of the present situation as well as the ability to make reasonable forecasts of a future situation are less useful than in the past. Fortunately, complexity science offers some ways of better understanding this uncertain situation
Moderator: Tom Petzinger, Chairman and CEO, Launchcyte
Tom Petzinger has acquainted millions of people with complexity science concepts through his highly regarded weekly “Front Lines” column at The Wall Street Journal and his bestselling book The New Pioneers: The Men and Women Who Are Transforming the Workplace and Marketplace.
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