Complex responsive processes

Summary

Complex responsive processes treats organising as the ongoing patterning of local interaction. Broader organisational patterns constrain and enable action, but they do not operate as an external system that a manager can stand outside and control.

Implications for practice

It exposes a fault line inside systems | cybernetics | complexity: whether models of systems and self-organisation illuminate human organising or quietly reintroduce an engineer standing outside the situation.

Key distinctions

• Local interaction and population-wide pattern are mutually constitutive.
• Power is present in ordinary interaction rather than added later as a contextual variable.
• Emergence does not imply harmony, decentralisation or benign self-organisation.

Historical development

• Developed in the University of Hertfordshire Complexity and Management community, especially through Ralph Stacey and colleagues.
• Uses complexity sciences as resources for analogy while explicitly disputing some systems metaphors for human action.

Ideas it depends on

• Emergence
• Self-organisation
• Interaction
• Power
• Paradox

Further developments

• Complexity approaches to leadership
• Reflexive management inquiry
• Practice-based accounts of change

Connections to practice

• Attending to live interaction rather than treating plans as causes of later outcomes.
• Developing practical judgement through reflexive inquiry.
• Taking conflict, identity and power seriously in accounts of organisational change.

Common confusions

• That local interaction means small-scale interaction is all that matters.
• That no one controls the whole means no one has more power than anyone else.
• That emergence explains an outcome without a detailed account of interaction and history.

Further checks

• Represent its critiques of systems thinking without caricaturing the many systems traditions it addresses.
• Trace its relationship to pragmatism, group analysis, Elias, Mead and Hegel using primary and scholarly sources.

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 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

  • Complexity: A Key Idea for Business and Society (checked)

• Complex responsive processes explains the emergence of organisational knowledge through Emergence

  Status: provisional · Relation: explains

  This is an account of emergent organisational knowledge through interaction, not a general theory of every form of emergence.

  Locator: University of Hertfordshire record, abstract; Emergence 2(4), pp. 23–39

  • The emergence of knowledge in organisations (checked primary institutional record)
  • Complex Responsive Processes in Organizations: Learning and Knowledge Creation (checked)

• Complex responsive processes gives a social-process account of Self-organisation

  Status: accepted · Relation: specialises

  The source explicitly narrows self-organisation in social life to local interaction and rejects equating it with self-management.

  Locator: Section “A critique from an alternative understanding of the complexity sciences”, paragraph beginning “In all three cases…”

  • What does it mean to ‘design’ complex organizations? (checked author source)

• 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

  • Organising as complex responsive processes of relating (checked)
  • Complexity: A Key Idea for Business and Society (checked)

• Culture mapping complements relational accounts in Complex responsive processes

  Status: provisional · Relation: complements

  This is a provisional semantic or practice crosswalk. It does not establish historical influence, equivalence, efficacy or universal applicability. Item-level source review and curator acceptance are still required.

  Locator: Interpretive comparison of the two maintained public descriptions and their cited source records

  • SCiO CF Resources v9 draft · No public link (pass4 legacy internal register audit)
  • SCiO Professional Accreditation and Competency Framework (checked)
  • Complex Responsive Processes in Organizations: Learning and Knowledge Creation (checked)
  • Organising as complex responsive processes of relating (checked)
  • Complex, but not quite complex enough: The turn to the complexity sciences in evaluation scholarship (checked)

Sources and passage locators

• Complex Responsive Processes in Organizations: Learning and Knowledge Creation (checked)
• Organising as complex responsive processes of relating (checked)
• Complex, but not quite complex enough: The turn to the complexity sciences in evaluation scholarship (checked)
• Complexity: A Key Idea for Business and Society (checked)
• The emergence of knowledge in organisations (checked primary institutional record)
• What does it mean to ‘design’ complex organizations? (checked author source)
• SCiO CF Resources v9 draft · No public link (pass4 legacy internal register audit)
• SCiO Professional Accreditation and Competency Framework (checked)

Cite this entry

Taylor, B. P. (2026). Complex responsive processes. The Necessary Tangle, release 0.35. https://transduction.systems/entries/tradition_complex_responsive_processes/

Include the release and review status when you quote or reuse this account.