Chapter 14 – “Strategy as the emergence of organisational identity” seeks to exploit a theory by Elias who emphasizes how individual personality structures and society emerge simultaneously and thereby evolves over time. The organisation seen as personality and social structures evolves as the individual plans and intentions intertwines. The structures of these changes is however not intended. Stacey tries to explore the kind of relationship in psychology that forms and dominates this kind of thinkingThe mind and the social are within the same phenomenon. The one can not exist without the other. Mind is conversation by nature and arises between bodies while being experienced by the other (Sartre & Merly Ponty). The mind is a paradoxical phenomenon while it arises at the same time between and within individuals. In another point it is also paradoxical as the mind is formed by the social/group, but is also forming the social/group.
The mind produces symbols of language and body cues as gestures that gives signals and warnings about how the following unfolding of an act will be. It is symbols that gives meaning to both the recipient and the presenter and at the same time produces new meaningful responses to the gesture. The meaning lies in the act so there should not be any shared logic to take joint action or common belief. It is continuous emerging patterns of social relationship, which emerge in conversation between individual bodies and mind.
Chapter 15 (The narrative structure of self-organising experience) builds on the notion that people relate to each other in the medium of symbols. Mind and group represents the same processes of evolving identities. The organisation should be seen as interaction between individuals and power relations. Strategy is then the patterns evolving as the interaction consciously proceed and the identities evolve. The chapter goes into the narrative structures in the organisation that is important in the emergence of identities. Stacey tries to argue that conversation is the medium were organisational identity and strategy are build. Stacey believes that the human communicative interaction can be compared with the computer simulation of a complex adaptive system divided into three points: 1. Random collections of interacting digital symbols can self-organise into orderly patterns. 2. Interaction between a number of homogeneous digital symbol patterns can produce particular emergent collective patterns, or attractors (e.g. flokking). These attractors are patterns of interaction so that interaction are producing emergent patterns in itself, through self-organisation.3. Interaction between a number of heterogeneous digital symbol patterns can produce novel emergent patterns of interaction. New attractors can then emerge and they are simultaneously new patterns of collective interaction and rearrangements of the individual symbol patterns. Interaction is producing new patterns in itself and through self-organising. Stacey would say that the human experience is organised by themes, stories and conversations.This complex adaptive system consist of many agents interacting with each other under the same order and rules. By doing this they are adapting to each others mind. Humans are consciously responding to each other by making gestures that evoke and provoke. The notion of humans creating a complex adaptive system should instead be that they are creating a complex responsive process while the interaction is consciously evolving and it does not create something stable as a system can be. In other words complex responsive processes are interacting themes that organise human experience and they largely take a narrative form. In Chapter 16 (Understanding organisations as complex responsive processes) Stacey starts out by summarises the main points of what a complex responsive process is all about (in 13 points on p.103-104). The subsequent section explores the nature of the thematic patterning of experience in organisations. The strategy of an organisation is the evolution of this thematic patterning. A system is limited by the fact that it is only capable of moving from one attractor to another and to evolve new attractors when it operates in the presence of diversity. The system is only capable of being creative and innovative when it has the internal capacity to generate and respond to variety. Seen from an organisational view the organisation is only capable of changing the strategic direction and make new innovations such as products or processes when they have the internal capacity in form of enough diversity to generate and respond to variety. This ability has to do with the nature of the complex responsive system that are within and around the organisation. The change within the organisation has to do with how the themes that organises the interaction between individuals. Organisations change in novel ways when new patterns of conversation and the power relations embedded within them emerge. In chapter 17 (Control, leadership and ethics) Stacey comes about how you might think from a complex responsive processes perspective concerning matters that preoccupy organisational practitioners, researchers and thinkers alike. Control and leadership is a question of what to control and how to be a great leader when organisations are continually iterated, self-organising processes of relating and a strategy that continuously emerges while individuals identities emerges. In the context of the complex responsive process where conversation is the key medium a question of ethics or ordinary conversation seems relevant as well. In the matter of control Stacey states that control is understood as a paradox in the perspective of the complex responsive process. Control is not the realisation of intention and the removal of uncertainty as in systems thinking, rather control is the managerial continual grappling with the paradox of being in control and not being in control at the same time.About leadership and ethics Stacey points out that leadership is understood to emerge in the process of mutual recognition in the interaction between people and ethics is understood as the continual negotiation of what is appropriate action.
