Chris Rodgers - The Wiggly World of Organizations
Details
We are very excited to welcome Chris Rodgers to the Lounge.
The well-ordered, fully aligned view of organization and management practice, with its unfailingly positive results, bears little relationship to the world that managers and others experience every day. This straight-line, ‘do this, and you’ll get that’ idealization is far removed from the wiggly reality. Despite this, the former continues to dominate how management is discussed and judged in formal organizational arenas and wider society. This creates unrealistic expectations about what managers (from the CEO to the front line) can sensibly achieve independently of others' actions. Crucially, it also distorts how they and others formally account for their actions. And so, the fantasy continues.
Chris offers a different way of thinking about and engaging with the irreducible complexity of organizational and management practice. He offers a practical approach to everyday practice that takes complexity seriously.
Bio
Chris originally worked as an engineer and later as a senior manager in the UK power generation industry, including the period of its ground-breaking privatization and subsequent commercial transformation. For the past 27 years, he has worked as an independent consultant in a diverse range of organizations, both in the UK and internationally. He has also contributed to several business and academic forums, as well as being an Honorary Senior Visiting Fellow for 12 years at Cass (now Bayes) Business School in London. He has written two books: Informal Coalitions (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) on the hidden dynamics of organizational change, and The Wiggly World of Organization (Routledge, 2021), which takes the complex social dynamics of organization seriously and highlights what he sees as the muddling-through nature of real-world management practice.
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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 in EDT (12:00 pm to 2:00 pm).