Readable atlas · Release 0.35
Chris Mowles
A scholar and practitioner of complexity and management whose work argues for a radically social account of organisational continuity and change, with attention to interaction, power, uncertainty and practical judgement.
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Summary
Chris Mowles develops a critical and practice-facing account of complexity in social and organisational life. His work presses against the idea that complexity thinking supplies managers with a better control technology.
Implications for practice
The atlas is much stronger on formal and cybernetic concepts than on the difficulty of moving from models of natural complex systems to accounts of human interaction. Mowles provides a documented challenge to that transfer and a route into power, politics, improvisation and practical judgement.
Key distinctions
- Complexity as a description of social life is not the same as complexity science used as a managerial toolkit.
- Unpredictability does not remove responsibility or practical judgement.
- Organisations are ongoing patterns of interaction, not containers standing apart from the people who constitute them.
Historical development
- The work continues the University of Hertfordshire community of inquiry associated with Ralph Stacey and complex responsive processes.
- It draws critically on complexity sciences while also using pragmatic, sociological, psychodynamic and organisational traditions.
Ideas it depends on
- Complexity
- Emergence
- Power
- Interaction
Further developments
- Complex responsive processes
- Practical judgement
- Relational accounts of organising
Connections to practice
- Leadership and management development
- Evaluation and public-service change
- Reflexive inquiry into organisational experience
Common confusions
- That accepting unpredictability means giving up on deliberate action.
- That complex responsive processes is simply another systems model of an organisation.
- That a critique of control is a claim that power disappears.
Further checks
- Develop the wider Hertfordshire community constellation and document disagreement within and around it.
- Compare Mowles's use of complexity with systems-practice, critical-systems and complexity-leadership traditions.
Recorded connections
Check the wording, direction, scope, sources, and status of a connection before relying on it.
Complexity: A Key Idea for Business and Society authored by Chris Mowles
Status: accepted · Relation: authored by
First-pass wording based on the named public sources; stronger historical or conceptual claims remain open to review.
Locator: Release 0.9 public source pass
Chris Mowles developed or extended Complex responsive processes
Status: accepted · Relation: developed or extended
First-pass wording based on the named public sources; stronger historical or conceptual claims remain open to review.
Locator: Release 0.9 public source pass
Chris Mowles critiques Complexity
Status: accepted · Relation: critiques
First-pass wording based on the named public sources; stronger historical or conceptual claims remain open to review.
Locator: Release 0.9 public source pass
Sources and passage locators
- Resources on the complexity of social life (registered for source mining)
- Complexity: A Key Idea for Business and Society (checked)
- Complex, but not quite complex enough: The turn to the complexity sciences in evaluation scholarship (checked)
- The practice of complexity: Review, change and service improvement in an NHS department (checked)
- Organising as complex responsive processes of relating (checked)
Cite this entry
Taylor, B. P. (2026). Chris Mowles. The Necessary Tangle, release 0.35. https://transduction.systems/entries/person_chris_mowles/
Include the release and review status when you quote or reuse this account.