Managing Software for Growth: Without Fear, Control, and the Manufacturing Mindset

Relationships, Not Systems

Stacey and his colleagues apply realistic thinking to human organizations with the idea of “Complex Responsive Processes of relating:”

The move we want to make…is away from thinking about an organization as a system, to thinking about organizing as highly complex, ongoing processes of people relating to each other. We refer to this as Complex Responsive Processes of relating in order to differentiate what we are talking about from any notion of a system.^[11]

^[11] Stacey et al., 188.

We can't predict very much or very well how an organization will evolve, which means we can't design or plan very far in advance. Unpredictable self-organization dictates how things will go. Ultimately, human choice is limited when it comes ...