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

The Complexity Trap

According to Stacey and his colleagues, the particulars vary from author to author, but the argument made by most management complexity writers goes something like the following:

Organizations are more like organisms than machines. Local interaction among the parts of an organization produce emergent reality that doesn't follow an overall plan dictated by upper management. Managers can't really predict anything, so they need to move their organizations intentionally to the edge of chaos, where there is just enough structure for people in the organization to follow simple rules to achieve the leader-specified goals.

If what Stacey and his colleagues say is true, these writers fall into what I call the complexity trap. They're ...