Ralph D. Stacey

So, so start with a bit of theory.

Ralph Stacey, um, who was at the University of Hertfordshire, set up a center for complexity, and he talked a great deal about organizations being complex social processes.

And if that's true, which I think it is, you can't have leadership that ignores the social processes that go on, because it will just be neutralized.

And a lot of psychologists are back to studying the psychology of wisdom, the psychology of character, and the psychology of virtue, how we make good decisions.

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psychology like Carl Jung and all that kind of more unconscious or subconscious things in the mind but then I met Ralph Stacey and Esko Kilpi and Douglas Griffin while I was working for Nokia and I was in this some kind of a training program where I met those guys.

And I understood that the organizations are actually conversations, conversational patterns between people.

Okay,

And when we put these parts together, the machine works.

This is the kind of engineering perspective on the organizations.

But what Ralph Stacey and those guys kind of taught me was that actually what is happening in the organizations if you pay very careful attention is that there are people having interactions which are usually conversations of some kind you know speaking or writing or whatever but those are conversations and other people are responding to those gestures you could say and then people are responding to those responses and so on and so on and so on and so very big global patterns of conversations are all the time happening in the organizations

basically it's conversations all the way down as the saying goes