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  "release": "0.35",
  "citation": "Taylor, B. P. (2026). Complex responsive processes. The Necessary Tangle, release 0.35. https://transduction.systems/entries/tradition_complex_responsive_processes/",
  "licence": "CC BY-SA 4.0 for original atlas text and data; linked works retain their own terms",
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    "id": "tradition_complex_responsive_processes",
    "label": "Complex responsive processes",
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    "description": "A perspective on organising in which continuity, novelty, identity and power emerge in local interaction among interdependent people rather than being the straightforward implementation of a system-wide plan.",
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    "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.",
    "why_it_matters": "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_lineage": [
      "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."
    ],
    "logical_antecedents": [
      "Emergence",
      "Self-organisation",
      "Interaction",
      "Power",
      "Paradox"
    ],
    "dependent_subsequents": [
      "Complexity approaches to leadership",
      "Reflexive management inquiry",
      "Practice-based accounts of change"
    ],
    "practice_connections": [
      "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_misreadings": [
      "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."
    ],
    "open_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."
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