Christopher Mowles - Complexity and Change

The Lounge loves to present different approaches and aspects of complexity science, and we are delighted to welcome Professor Christopher Mowles.

Chris will give a brief history of his research community, the Complexity and Management Centre at the University of Hertfordshire, which has been going for 25 years, working with a radical interpretation of the complexity sciences. He will briefly explain the key ideas of the perspective of perspectives called complex responsive processes of relating, which adopts a non-teleological view of change. That is to say that there may be things we aspire to, but even our aspirations will evolve and change in our interactions with each other and the world. To take the implications from the complexity sciences seriously means treating the future as radically open and impervious to our grids and frameworks. He will go on to explore what all of this might mean for practice in the increasingly dark times we face, a practice he has begun to think of as hopeful pessimism.

Bio
Professor Chris Mowles has been director of the Doctor of Management programme (DMan) at Hertfordshire Business School, UK, for the last 15 years. The program works psychodynamically with insights from the complexity sciences, process sociology and philosophy, and group analytic theory to inform practice.

Chris’ publications include: a four-volume Complexity and Management series published by Routledge, with titles addressing leadership, consultancy, the public sector and research methods. In addition he published Complexity: a key idea for business and Society (2021); Managing in Uncertainty: complexity and the paradoxes of everyday organizational life (2015) also published by Routledge and the 7th Edition of Strategic Management and Organizational Dynamics: the challenge of complexity to managing organizations, written with Ralph Stacey.

He teaches regularly at the Copenhagen Business School and has taught in other Danish universities (Aalborg, SDU) and in the Netherlands and Switzerland, as well as UK universities.

Chris started out in international development, working in the Middle East with Oxfam. Thereafter, he worked as an organizational consultant in China for the British government, in the Middle East for the UN, in many countries in Asia and Africa on EU-funded projects, and in the UK in voluntary, public, and private sectors. He is an associate member of the Institute for Group Analysis.

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This event will be recorded. The event link will be published on meetup.com 1 hour prior.

Please note the time slot- this is an afternoon event for those of you on EST (12:00 pm to 2:00 pm).