Rethinking Management: Radical Insights from the Complexity Sciences

The number of graduates from business schools has risen at a dramatic rate, but given the extent of business and public sector crises and failures, what exactly have they learned and how relevant is it? In Reassessing Management Chris Mowles argues that what has been learned on management courses has done as much to contribute to crises as alleviate them, as clever managers apply management 'best practice' rather than pay attention to the game that they actually find themselves caught up in playing.Standard management courses still teach mainstream management authors who write into a discourse where there is a linear and predictable world. Questioning the orthodox conceptual assumptions that underpin a lot of management education, Mowles encourages leaders and managers to consider their professional role as practice, and to take this practice seriously. Rather than having consequences in a predictable and linear way, he argues that management practice is more helpfully understood by drawing on the non-linear complexity sciences. There are always unintended consequences of our actions and paying attention to these as a systematic form of enquiry is likely to produce better organisational outcomes. Uncertainty is not an exception, it is the norm, and a more reality-congruent way of accounting for this uncertainty is required if modern managers are to undertake their roles successfully.With narrative examples of managing and leading in contemporary organisations that will resonate with experienced managers' actual working experience, this book treats uncertainty as central to the task of leading and managing, rather than as a temporary phenomenon. It explores the limitations of contemporary management theories and takes up radical insights from the complexity sciences as a foil. In doing so it sets out concrete alternatives to the ubiquitous grids and frameworks which dominate management education, dealing instead with the messy reality of every day organising.This book will encourage and persuade management professionals and those with responsibility for business education to explore approaches that truly recognise the messiness of working in organisations and that involve a re-centring of experience, judgement and improvisation as key to good management and leadership practice.