Advances in Strategy Development for the 21st Century |
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Page 4 of 11 Scientific management in all its forms – Taylorism, bureaucracy, command and control and a chronology of correct steps and processes required to achieve a predetermined result (predictable cause and effect) underpinned the way business was organized and lead. Late in the 20th Century organizational learning and development became fashionable, but the application was an implementation resource - not a driving strategy. There were exceptions. Silicon Valley and professional services found less command and control, more access to information and more freedom for people to engage in their areas of greatest interest, for example, frequently produced better results. Concomitantly, the field of Human Resources Management experienced a renaissance. After coming into the foreground in the late 60s and 70s through tools such as psychological testing (Myers Briggs for example) and team building, it had developed somewhat a reputation as struggling to deliver its promised value – a kind of ‘soft science’. However, in the 1990s, HR found a strategic voice. The Learning Organization, Intrapreneurship, Emotional Intelligence and other “tools” came to be seen not just as ways of implementing change, but as a source of competitive advantage. Likewise, the strategic literature began talking about strategy as ‘emergent’ and a competency based view of the firm (resource based view revisted). Management literature talked more than ever about leadership setting directions but not prescribing every process. ‘Soft skills have hard consequences’ (Goleman) Underpinning this renaissance is a conceptualization adapted from the physical sciences, complexity theory. Its adaptation and value to organizations, management and strategy lies in its ability to both:
“The perspective of complex responsive processes draws on analogies from the complexity sciences, bringing in the essential characteristics of human agents, namely consciousness and self consciousness, understood to emerge in social processes of communicative interaction, power relating and evaluative choice. The result is a way of thinking about life in organizations that focuses attention on how organizational members cope with the unknown as they perpetually create organizational futures together.”[1] Complexity theory and self organizing systems only entered the management arena in the early 1990s and is only developing increasing support now. The idea that an infinite number of random events can be demonstrated to give rise to orderly and repeating patterns, sounds like what happens when the hundreds or thousands of stakeholders in a business go about their daily routine. Completing conversations, following up ideas, sharing anecdotes, discussing situations, writing [1] Complexity: The Experience of Organizing |
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