Complexity Management Articles
The VUCA Framework
The VUCA Framework The rapid growth of globalization, information technology, and a changing environmental context are all working to take us into a much more complex world. This new world is...
Agile Project Management
Agile Project Management When we are operating within a stable and predictable environment, we can break projects down into stages and use a linear process of stepping through them stage by stage...
Complex Projects
Complex Projects In 2009, the Project Management Institute (PMI) announced their book of the year as the publication entitled “Managing Complex Projects, A New Model” declaring it a...
Wicked Problems
Wicked Problems With developed economies reaching the end of the process of industrialization, we have witnessed the rise of new forms of highly complex challenges that have moved to the...
Network Organizations
Network Organizations The rise of networks and hyperconnectivity is one of the most radical and powerful forces shaping our world today. The advent of information technology and the internet has...
Self-organization
Self-organization Self-organization is one of the major themes within complex systems and a pervasive phenomenon in our world. Complex organizations like schools of fish, ant colonies, and car...
Collaborative Organizations
Collaborative Organizations As a recent research paper on the subject of organizational collaboration notes “Collaboration does not come naturally for most employees, particularly those...
Open Platform Organizations
Open Platform Organizations Complex systems are fundamentally open systems. That is to say, they have such a high level of connection and exchange with their environment that we can no longer...
Systems Dynamics
Systems Dynamics The emphasis within the systems and complexity paradigm is on local interactions and how this gives rise to emergent macro level phenomena of the state to the whole organization....
Emergence
Emergence Our general conception of organization and the profession of management is built around the idea of a hierarchy within organizations through which control is exercised in a downward...
Systems Thinking
Systems Thinking Complexity management is an alternative paradigm to our traditional management approach. If we are going to manage anything, we are going to have to have some representation or...
Complexity Management
Complexity Management This is a high-level overview to the domain of complexity management, which we will be going over in more detail in following articles. We can understand complexity...
Complexity
Complexity Complexity management, as opposed to traditional practices, may be defined simply as the management of complex systems. So, before we can go much further, we really need to give some...
Management
Management Complexity management is an alternative approach or paradigm to more traditional management methods. Thus, it might be of value to start off by discussing what is meant by...
Complexity Management Overview
In this paper, we give a high-level overview of the domain of complexity management. We can understand complexity management as the application of complexity theory to the practice of management....
Managing Complexity Short Film
A short film looking at the rise of complexity in industry and management. Complexity management is the application of complex systems theory to the management of complex organizations and...
What is VUCA?
A short video introducing the acronym VUCA. VUCA is an acronym used to describe situations or environments that engender high levels of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity....
The Nature of Wicked Problems
With developed economies reaching the end of the process of industrialization we have witnessed the rise of new forms of highly complex challenges that have moved to the forefront of social concerns....
VUCA Explained
The common usage of the term VUCA began in the 1990s and derives from military vocabulary, where it refers to the experience of officers in operations. It tries to capture the uncertain and...
Complex Project Management
A project is a temporary endeavor composed of a set of tasks that are coordinated into achieving a particular result. It is designed to execute on the organization’s strategy...
Wicked Problems Explained
The concept of a wicked problem first derives from social planning and political science. Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber formally described the concept of wicked problems back in the 1970s,...
Self-Organizing Teams
Self-organization is one of the major themes within complex systems and a pervasive phenomenon in our world, complex organizations like schools of fish, ant colonies, and car traffic manage to...
Collaborative Organizations
In this video, we look at how creating collaborative organizations requires connecting people and aligning their incentives and interests with the whole organization. We talk about how through...
Platform Organizations
Here we look at open platform organizations, where a platform organization is an organization that supports the interaction or exchange between two or more other parties....
Systems Dynamics
System dynamics is one modeling language from systems theory that is used in the management of large complex systems in order to try and capture these local causal links and how their...
Complexity Management – Emergence
In this video we talk about systems thinking and the two basic approaches to management, that of reductionism and emergence. We look a the idea of obliquity and give various example of the...
Globalization A Changing Context
Globalization refers to a process of increased interconnectivity between people around the world. This interconnectivity creates greater interdependence, with this global interdependence then...
Systems Thinking Management
In this video we look at systems thinking as applied to management. Systems thinking is a paradigm, a paradigm is the fundamental conceptual framework or model we use for interpreting events...
Complexity Management Introduction
In this video we will be giving a highlevel overview to the domain of complexity management all of which we will be going over in more detail in coming videos. We can understand complexity...
Networked Organizations
We are pleased to present our short film about complexity management and networked organizations with narration from Don Tapscott. The rise of networked organizations can be seen as a new form of...
Economic Systems & Complexity
What is an economy? It is a surprisingly simple question that would leave many - even economists - a bit caught for words. Today we talk about economies in quite technical terms, with reference...
Age of Transition
At the turn of the 21st century our global economy is in both a rapid and fundamental process of change. This change is most often understood as a transformation from an industrial form of...
Age of Disruption: Trailer
Age of Transition is a series of short films on the fundamental changes taking place within the global economy at the turn of the 21st century as it evolves into a more complex form....
Ambiguity
Ambiguity is the quality of being open to more than one interpretation. It results in the haziness of reality; the potential for misreading and mixed meanings to conditions. In relatively simple...
Uncertainty
Uncertainty is the inability to know everything fully. It is a fundamental property of complex systems primarily due to, the large number of elements, high interconnectivity, interdependence,...
Services Economy
A services economy is an economy whose primary activity it based in the tertiary or services sector. The services revolution can be described with reference to very straightforward empirical...
The Rise Of Complexity
As the Industrial Age appears to be coming to a close we are left scrabbling for new terms to define the world we live in in the 21st century and there are no shortage of candidates from the...
Peer-Production
Peer production is a way of producing goods and services that relies on self-organizing groups of individuals. In such communities, the labor of a large number of people is coordinated towards a...
Paradigm of Sustainability
The paradigm of sustainability is a new way of seeing post-industrial societies and their relationship to the natural environment, it is a recognition of the fundamentally unsustainable nature to...
Information Society
An information society is a society whose primary economic activity is the processing and exchanging of information and knowledge. It is built upon a new wave of technological development brought...
Globalization
Globalization represents the proliferation of relations on a global scale. The abstract phenomenon of globalization is one of the major processes of change in our world today. It is a social,...