Rethinking Leadership When the World Won't Behave with Professor Chris Mowles - OrgDev Episode 84

Is it time to rethink leadership and management?

Many leaders work under the illusion that they can control what goes on but in reality organisations are messy, and unpredictable. So what does this Complexity  really means for how organisations function, how leaders make decisions, and how people navigate uncertainty. One person who has challenged the neat models and tidy solutions we often reach for – instead opens up more real, human, and sometimes uncomfortable conversations about leadership, change, and organisational life is Professor Chris Mowles

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We’re Dani and Garin – Organisation Development (OD) practitioners who help leaders and people professionals tackle the messiness of organisational life. We focus on building leadership capability, strengthening team effectiveness, and designing practical, systemic development programmes that help you deliver on your team and organisational goals. We also offer coaching to support individual growth and change.

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Transcript

(00:00) Hi and welcome to the org dev podcast. So many leaders work under the illusion they can control what goes on. But in reality, organizations are messy and unpredictable. So what does this complexity really mean for how organizations function, how leaders make decisions, and how people navigate uncertainty? One man who has challenged the neat models and tidy solutions we often reach for instead opens up far more real human and sometimes uncomfortable conversations about leadership, change, and organizational life. and that is professor Chris Moles.
(00:31) Professor Chris is director of the doctor of management program at internationally renowned professional program at the University of Hertfordshire. Chris also teaches on the MBA and MA programs and has taught at the Copenhagen Business School, Alberg University and the School of Oriental and African Studies.
(00:49) He also has extensive frontline experience working as a consultant with organizations supporting them to develop strategy, evaluate aspects of their work or cope with particularly difficult or stuck situations. and he's worked extensively with senior management teams and is particularly interested in the function of groups.
(01:05) His clients include the NHS, Oxford University, uh the department of international development, the UN, the government of China and lots of other fascinating organizations. And on top of that extensive work, he's also published four books, complexity, a key idea for business and society, managing uncertainty, rethinking management, uh strategic management, and organizational dynamics. And all of those books will be in the show notes to accompany this interview as well.
(01:29) And he also has a brilliant substack called on complexity. So thank you so much for making time for us, Professor Chris. We're really glad you could join us today. Garren obviously gave us a bit of an overview of your what you do, but can you bring that to life for us a little bit? Paint a picture of what that actually looks like in practice, the work that you're doing.
(01:53) My principal job is director of a program called the doctor of management program and that's a program of research which involves people studying something that's going on for them at work. People who come tend to be in their 40s or 50s so they've been around the block a bit and they take some dilemma at work as the both the sub subject and object of their research. The program has been going for more than 25 years.
(02:19) We've had 81 doctoral graduates from this program and it was the first in the UK to draw on the complexity sciences, process sociology, pragmatic philosophy and group analytic theory to inform the research that we do and also to inform the way we meet. So we meet as a psychonamic community which means every 3 months for 4 days we meet together and we study ourselves as a temporary organization.
(02:54) Um, one way that we do that is to meet three times every weekend for an hour and a half without an agenda and without anybody in charge, just reflecting together what it's like to be in this temporary organization carrying out research work. So, we find ourselves talking about all kinds of things that are often not permissible in an organizational context.
(03:19) So people coming, people leaving, people struggling with their work, people feeling envious of each other, people getting in into conflicts together, people experiencing joy at what they're doing in their research. We also divide the research community of 20 or so researchers into um four smaller groups where people write their thesis but share it with their three other colleagues and their supervisor or four other colleagues and their supervisor.
(03:45) So the thesis itself emerges in the relationships on the research program on the relationships with the students at work with their work colleagues and it's a continuous iteration of paying attention to what's going on at work writing about it thinking about it reading organizational literature and philosophy and sociology.
(04:12) coming back to the residential every three months, sharing it that with their research colleagues, sharing their writing, getting feedback from their colleagues and their supervisor, giving feedback to their colleagues and uh and their supervisor about how it's going for them. So, if you like, it's a practice of complexity. We walk the talk. We're interested in organizational complexity and we research in a complex way. Give you a flavor. It does very much so. Yeah.
(04:34) And that's quite different quite a different experience to to other other programs, isn't it? Yeah. I think it's group based. So everything we do is in a group and everything we do in life, you could say, is in a group. So even when you're alone, you're in a group because you're thinking to yourself using social language.
(04:54) So we focus very much on the group based nature of social life and we think what it means for us and for the group. Fabulous. And then you mentioned complexity science. So we we love a definition on ordev podcast because lots of people talk about complexity. They probably mean very different things.
(05:12) So what's your framing of complexity science when you when you use that term? Okay. So the the complexity sciences there's no just one single complexity science but the complexity sciences are a minority discipline within the natural sciences which essentially are computer-based models. So you could say that complexity science has arisen co-terminus with the emergence of computers in society and the the model that we take most interested in uh is evolutionary complex adaptive systems models which are agentbased models which um model something going on in nature.
(05:49) So termite mounds, the human brain, ant colonies. So you populate a computer program with lots of interacting agents and even though the instructions you give them are deterministic nonetheless because uh they interact and they interact in a nonlinear way patterns emerge which could not have been foreseen by the programmer.
(06:21) So if you like these complex adaptive systems models are very good analogy for thinking about how society works or how organizations work. where the pattern of organization or society arises simply and only because of what everybody's doing together in their everyday activity. There are other computer-based models which are modeled more on the aggregate than on individual agents interacting but this is the one that we we choose to build analogies around.
(06:52) And what are some of the big shifts for people that come on to the program from kind of their starting point to where they end up at the end of end of their their program with you? Is are there themes that are kind of common across people joining the program and leaving the program? One of the clearest things I think is that people start to think about the vocabulary that they use on a daily basis often unreflectively.
(07:09) So uh management is a kind of um discourse that permeates everyday life. We can't escape it. So we talk about anger management, time management. Everything in society is deemed to be a problem of leadership apparently. So whatever social problem we have, it's because we don't have enough or qualified leaders.
(07:34) However, there's been 35 years of leadership education and look at the leaders that we get. So you have to say that there's there's something wrong really. So that we can manage anything and everything has permeated everyday understanding. And people who work in organizations often talk about management in an unreflective way. So for example, let me give you an example.
(07:57) How many training courses have you been on or anybody listening to this podcast been on where you're shown a 2x two diagram and asked to rate where your organization is and you often rate it in the bottom left hand quartile and then you're asked to improve it in some some way which means moving it into the top right hand quartile.
(08:23) So how is it that we come to be trained in management or go on away days in our organizations and we think that we can move an organization from one square into another square and that brings about change. Okay, it might be a helpful heruristic for understanding movement or transformation in some kind of ways. But but how do we reduce complex human interaction in such a simplistic way and think that that is convincing? There's something that you say is uh that managers are in charge but they're not in control and and that's quite a confronting thing for a lot of managers, isn't it? like you said that managerialistic speak that we have and
(09:03) even to the point of things like complexity can be managed as well. Is that something that you sort of find is is really important for managers to think about actually and have a a more sort of balanced perspective on it? Well, management is a discipline which is about controlling things. So from the Latin manus to put under your hand.
(09:22) So quite rightly if management is going to be a discipline, it has to promise something. So if you're educated in management, you should be more competent and skillful in getting the outcome that you want. And organizations do have a duty to fulfill on their mission to achieve what they're what they're supposed to achieve.
(09:42) And the idea then is that you have a skilled carter of people who can more in a more sophisticated way achieve outcomes that the organization wants. So it's not a bad premise really. However, I think management overpromises. So, one of the difficulties is that human beings are unpredictable and difficult and flawed and a lot of uh management models are based in highly abstract thinking which like economics assumes that human beings are rational and behave in predictable ways. And even if they were more rational and with a tendency to behave
(10:22) in more predictable ways, there are always things coming at you from left field. Social shocks, political shocks, changes in senior management, changes in the board of directors which you can't foresee and which will intersect with your plans and blow them off course.
(10:42) So what you can predict as a manager is that when you're managing towards some kind of organizational change, you're quite likely to get some of the change that you want, some of the change that you don't want and things that are completely unexpected simply and only going back to the analogy that I made with the agentbased models because of the interweaving of everybody's intentions.
(11:06) I think one of the things that I really because obviously we do a lot of preparation for these conversations but um there's a real although it does encourage you to sort of take a step back there is a deep pragmatism in terms of what you're trying to encourage people to do can't you but actually understanding that these things do a certain thing so as part of managelism you sort of say that for example metrics can be a form of tyranny which I thought was a was a great quote could you just expand on that a little bit more because people often see metrics they're surely a good thing aren't they
(11:32) Maybe. So, let's go back to the the idea of being able to control things in organizations. The idea of metrics really is for senior managers to be able to see at a distance and compare with one one thing with another. So, it's the um the purity of numbers if you like. So, I don't need to come and ask you whether you're doing a good job or not.
(12:01) If I set some metrics for you, I can see at a distance without even knocking on your door whether you're achieving what you're supposed to achieve. The problem is that people then when metrics are enforced in a very authoritarian way, people develop gaming strategies to deliver on the metrics uh at the expense of the work. So the famous example is I think it was the Labor government that first introduced 4hour waiting times for accident and emergency departments in hospitals.
(12:37) So you have to be seen within 4 hours. So various teams in various hospitals adopted different strategies to achieve the target but miss the point of the target. So, for example, what you might do is encourage your ambulance drivers as long as somebody isn't very urgent, driving around the hospital if A&E is full, waiting till it's less full, and then admitting the patient.
(13:09) Or in another hospital, what you might do is discharge a patient at 3 hours and 59 minutes, put them in the corridor, and then readmit them for another 4 hours so that you can keep achieving your target. And the difficulty of targets is you can become so committed to them that everything has a target. So I I was once a trustee, a governor of my kid's local school and I think the head teacher had 42 different targets that he had to meet that somehow we'd set in various different ways. It becomes overbearing.
(13:39) So you still in organizational team terms need to address something about accountability. So how do we give an account to one another of doing the job that we're doing? And some things do need counting. For example, let's take school example again. How many children have we excluded over a term? You'd want to know that. But that's the start of the conversation and not the end of the conversation.
(14:06) So let's dig into all of these figures. What do they mean? Who are we talking about? What are the circumstances around these metrics? So I'm not against metrics in toto. What I am saying is when they're imposed across the board, when there's no conversation about them, when it's assumed that the metric is something true and real rather than some something made up or gamed, then it doesn't really give you a true account.
(14:38) I mean in in a way um philosophically I suppose it's quite moving that we don't have to get into an argument about things anymore. The numbers will speak for themselves but of course numbers don't speak for themselves. They have to be interpreted and they're put together by somebody and there are all kinds of assumptions in them.
(14:55) So unless we can have a full and complex conversation about numbers, about why we're setting them, about what they mean, about whether whether everybody's doing their best. Sometimes you can get a bad result despite your best efforts. So it's nothing to do with not fulfilling the numbers. It's some other process going on in the organization that needs addressing if we're going to realize what we want to realize.
(15:19) And I guess there's a real need for organizations to make enough time to step back and actually to understand what is really or explore what is really going on, isn't there? What kind of things does a a modern manager need to be able to create the space to do that? Because there's a lot of invitations not to do that, aren't there? Yeah.
(15:36) I mean, I can't see getting away from some kind of quantification, but organizations are so overwhelmed, if you like, they're often underststaffed and underresourced, particularly if you're working in the public sector. So we're constantly being asked to work smarter, but that often means being asked to do more with less.
(15:56) So organizations are dominated by kind of economic logic which makes it almost impossible to do the job. And uh the kind of recommendations I make are often understood to be completely impractical. Like we need to spend more time talking about what we think is going on, what these figures mean, what we think we're doing.
(16:19) And a lot of people in organizations we don't have time to do that. We're too busy delivering. And I would say if you're employed as a manager, surely one of the things you should be employed to do is to think and make sense with other people. there are so many people rushing around delivering things and not enough people sitting down together and thinking and talking about what they're doing.
(16:36) And I was going to say with that as a context, you know, going back to your 2x two grid, it's no surprise that people want the simplicity and they want to be convinced that we can go from there to there. Well, it's it's a nice straightforward three-step process and there's a nice neat solution.
(16:52) That's what you pay for your MBA for, isn't it? to be told that you can control things and now you've got this very expensive MBA you're in a very position to do that it's quite confronting isn't it when you realize the reality of things it it is more complex and it's there's not neat solutions well I'm I think that says something about the political situation that we're in at the moment in the are we um do we think of ourselves as the developed north sometimes I look across what's happening in Europe and North America at the moment it seems to me that we're less developed than we were But in
(17:24) highly complex times, in highly turbulent times, we often find ourselves voting for or being sympathetic towards the people who offer the simplest solutions. Yes. So what is it that the orange one said to the UN the other day, I've been right about everything.
(17:45) So we tend to expect and perhaps because of our own anxious state become dependent on people who offer offer us simplistic answers to complex solutions. Yes, I think we need to grow up. We need to grow up in organizations and we need to grow up in society as well. Although people are struggling, it's not surprising that they become anxious when they're struggling.
(18:01) The whole anxiety thing is really interesting, isn't it? How that's that's how that's affecting our organizations and the the world of work. Yeah. And and there's something you said there because you talk about the importance of being skillful at being uncertain because when you take away say for example you have another look at the numbers and what is actually really going on and you talk about the fact that a leader has to endure strong emotions their own and others as well. So that's a that's something that comes with sort of introducing more of those
(18:27) types of conversations doesn't it really leaning into reality. Yes. If you have a position of authority you're likely to evoke in people's strong feelings. So, just as we just just been saying, when people become anxious, they want the authority figure to sort it. And it may be that if you have a position of authority, you can't sort it.
(18:49) So, sometimes it's okay to say, "I don't know either." But we'll be okay. We'll manage this together. We'll take the next step together. Obviously, if you went into work every day and said you didn't know what you were doing, people would soon. But I think it's also important to resist the temp the temptation to say that you do know what you're doing in every circumstance and that it will be fine and that we'll find a way out because sometimes people have to be made redundant or cuts need to be made and there's no sugar coating it. We just have to have the conversation about how
(19:30) sad that is and how disappointed we are. But nonetheless, it still needs to be done. Perpetuates that myth as well, doesn't it? If if everybody's very certain and I've got the answer even though they haven't, they're kind of perpetuating myth through others and nobody feels it's safe to say actually I don't I don't know.
(19:47) Let's work on this together and kind of lead into fact that things are more complex. Yes, I think the leadership discourse is completely overblown. As I saying earlier, I think sometimes when you listen to politicians or senior people in organizations, they talk as if all problems in or in organizations and society are to do with leadership.
(20:12) But leadership I understand as a group activity is an improvisational activity in a group and it's not always the leader who's leading. So leadership can emerge from all over the organization in all kinds of different ways and sometimes the leader's job is just to get out of the way. So if you're working with a group which is mature and knows how to work and keep insist if you keep insisting that you need to be the leader every minute of every day people will just get blocked.
(20:46) That's uh one of the things I deal with in my last book on the chapter on exercising authority and particularly in the tradition that we meet in the the uh institute group analysis methods where we meet together as I described for an hour and a half three times a residential weekend students often look to the authority figures the faculty members to resolve difficulties in the group and sometimes we help with that and sometimes we don't.
(21:12) And the point of not helping is that people have to find their own ways of dealing with something rather than looking for somebody else for mom and dad to come in and sort it out. People need different things. So depending where the first time that you encounter authority in a group is as a child. So we all we all carry that with us into organizations.
(21:36) And certainly as a young man I found myself fighting with my boss in the way that I used to fight with my dad. And it took me until my 30s to realize that that's what I was doing. Poor guy, you know, he um he didn't realize and nor did I. So, we we got caught in these awful power struggles over what could couldn't be done because I was still uh working out something unresolved from my family background.
(21:59) And sometimes as an authority figure, you can find yourself, you think, behaving a perfectly reasonable way with your team. And there's somebody in the team who keeps picking fights with you and you've no idea what it's about and it's about some other unresolved conflict that we carry with us.
(22:21) So we we all have our life histories which impact upon the way we show up in groups of other people. And one of the things that were often playing out is our early authority relationships to authority moms and dads. So there's a real need for managers to do a lot of sort of building their own sort of level of self-awareness as well.
(22:45) Um I think one of the things you talk about quite a lot is the importance of what happens in the micro sort of the gesture and the response and what happens and where these things come from. So there is a real kind of real need for people to have you know deep understanding of how they are and how they respond in the moment because that's what shapes the patterns isn't it? So I suppose one of the principal differences of my own research community in relation to many other schools of thought and management is that we understand global patterns to emerge simply and only from what's going on every day between people in micro moments. So if you like it's a way of flipping the telescope the other way round. Most people spend a lot of time
(23:24) thinking about the big picture, thinking about parts and whole in the abstract. Whereas what we're interested in is how those big picture patterns emerge from what we're doing here and now between us in the concrete and the specific as we try to negotiate what's going on.
(23:49) And sometimes those there still even if it's just between two people, there's still a group involved, aren't there? There's still an influence of them around us even if they're not present as well. Yes. So we are formed by society and we form society both at the same time. So you have individuals who are social through and through if you like. We are each a slightly different fractal of the society of which we're part.
(24:17) that we're born into a society where there's already a play going on where we learn a particular language or languages where we're taught to see the world in a particular way. So we are socialized even before we're open open our eyes. So in the womb you're already listening to music and you're listening to the pattern of language.
(24:38) But at the same time as agents we are able to act in society and in small ways change that society that we're part of. So the paradox of forming and being formed is a continuous process. But individuals in their social interaction are playing out some of those global patterns in a particular way at a particular time.
(25:03) It's what the pragmatist philosopher um George Herbert me referred to as a social object. when you turn up to a an away day or a a work-based meeting meeting, it's a social object in the sense it's not an object in nature. It's a pattern of relating that we're all familiar with that we're socialized into but which always plays out in a different way because of the particular people meeting at that particular time.
(25:29) I was reading one of your Substack articles and you one you talk about organizations are kind of as ongoing conversations and that we kind of were always joining the midstream and I thought that was really interesting as well because I think a lot of you us as practitioners working with organizations or even seeing new people join organizations I think that gets forgotten sometimes that it is an ongoing conversation and and things are happening have happened before we've arrived and they'll that continue to happen afterwards. So for me that was a
(25:53) really interesting perspective to take. I think that's um a profound pragmatic insight. So the pragmatists argue that thinking, talking, acting are all forms of action. So people say to us on with your students on the doctor management program, if you don't give them grids and frameworks, what do you give them? Well, I think what we give them is the ability to more skillfully notice what's already going on for them at work to find different ways of talking about it and thinking about it. And by talking
(26:27) and thinking differently, so they begin to act differently and affect those around them who then also think and talk differently about what they're doing. And the change comes because of that iterative cycle of thinking, talking and acting differently, which if you're living in a nonlinear world, which I believe we are, small changes can escalate sometimes in a short period of time into largecale changes in the patterning of behavior.
(27:03) And this is very different from many organizational change processes which believe that a large intervention is needed to bring about I don't know what people think they're doing when they're doing large scale changes. They talk about changing the culture and often there's a huge program that involves everybody to achieve pre-reflective targets over a specific period of time and you often find that these largecale change processes make no difference at all for a variety of different reasons. So it's a lot of literature on this about how
(27:36) unsuccessful organizationalwide change processes are. What we're doing, I suppose, is working with a very different nonlinear theory of change. Is that thinking, talking, and acting differently and changing the way we talk about what we're doing can in a small way make changes which can escalate into big changes over time.
(28:00) And if you think about organizations, they as an individual, we all have our own habits. Habits as an individual, habits as a group as well. And those those are the opportunities for change almost, aren't they? But first you need to be sort of critically reflexive that those things are there. Yeah.
(28:19) And one of the habits that we get into in organizations as we've already mentioned are thinking that reflecting and talking together is a luxury we can't afford or perhaps we might be a bit conflict avoidant and we say well we can't have that kind of a conversation otherwise we'll open a can of worms. If I had a penny for every time I'd heard the can of worms argument for not thinking and talking about what we're doing, I'd be a very rich person.
(28:43) So, inevitably, we get into habits. And even if we are more critical and more uh reflexive over time, we still get into bad habits. And reflexibility doesn't solve every problem. Sometimes it can create circumstances where we become overwhelmed by the problems that we have. because you've been a consultant in the field and often clients want you to give them certainty.
(29:08) They want you to give you concrete outcomes and you can't give any guarantees because you're never quite sure how things will respond. You'll just know that things will be different uh in the way they were. How how do you get sort of informed consent from clients going, "Yeah, come in, do the thing, and let's see where we go with it." Yeah.
(29:28) when I was um a consultant still and and I just embarked on my studies on the doctor of management program myself, I had a friend who took me out to lunch and said, "I really want to be doing the work that you're doing as though it was a different kind of work from the work that she was doing." And my response was to say, "Well, I'm still doing the same work as you are.
(29:46) I'm just thinking I'm beginning to think and talk about it differently." And over time what I found uh when I was still a consultant is the kind of work I did got me a reputation so that people would seek me out who wanted to work in the way that I wanted to work. So with this way of working, the no guarantees way of working, let's try something and see where it gets us to.
(30:10) I I don't think you can do that in a cold call with somebody that you haven't worked with before, unless there's a general understanding that that's what they might be open to. It's a bit like um people trying to come on the the Doctor of Management program who tell me that, you know, they're open for being critically reflective and they really like to sit in a group and explore what's going on. And the moment they get there, they have what one student described as an oh moment.
(30:35) Oh, I didn't I didn't know that it meant being critically reflective about my practice in the way that we're doing. Yeah. And I think that's probably the same with relationships with clients. They might say that they're happy for you to explore and to take it a step at a time to see where we get to, but actually when it starts to happen, they may not be so happy.
(30:59) So it's something to be navigated with a good deal of care and caution I think and a lot of conversation unless people have come across you and your work before or you work wor with people before and they're comfortable with that way of working. I must say I did um uh a consultancy a while back with a Catholic NGO who had their own contemplative tradition of reflection and discussion.
(31:24) So when I suggested doing strategy with them in that way, they were entirely open to it because they knew what I was talking about. So from a religious perspective, they already knew what I was describing. But for people who want their 2x two frame frameworks and their endstep solutions, I think it's a bit of a shock. I mean, I'm lucky I don't have to make my living as a consultant anymore.
(31:42) I can do it for consultancies that interest me because I'm a full-time academic. So in that sense, I'm privileged. Hi, we're just pausing this interview for a moment. Have you ever finished an episode of the org dev podcast and wish you had a cheat sheet that summarizes all of the key points? Us two, so we made one.
(32:01) It's called from pod to practice and each week in our newsletter will share a two-page summary of the latest org dev episode and it includes key takeaways, a reflection prompt, and one small action you can try. And it's all in a digital format with space at the end to add your own notes and reflections. and it's designed to help you take the learning from the podcast into your day-to-day work.
(32:20) So to get your copy, just sign up to our next step to better newsletter. The links in the show notes or you can visit our website at www.distinction.live to get the latest from pod to practice in your inbox and let us know what you think. We'd love to get your feedback. And what was your journey into the field? How did you sort of discover this as a field? What was what was the sort of the evolution of this thinking? Um, I was started out in international development and I worked in uh a conflict zone and then when I had kids I thought it was probably time not to be working in the conflict zone and I got a job in the social services department in
(32:54) the UK in the in the public sector and made made my way up the greasy pole. I was um a union shop steward and uh unusually in the public sector my my union went on strike almost unheard of in 10 or 15 years and I found myself negotiating with managers on the other side of the table once a week about the strike and I'd always had this notion that managers must be in a different category to me because they were managers and they really knew what they were doing and when I found myself opposite these on Friday afternoon. I thought I could do that. Why do I have such a high opinion of these people when they don't
(33:37) seem to be anything other than ordinary? So when I um when I was able to I I got promoted and I got on a management course where they taught in the strategy module some work by Ralph Stacy who started the doctor of management program at the University of Archer.
(33:58) It was way back in the early 90s and he just started to write about complexity and strategy. And I read his book and I had no idea what it was about. But having worked in a war zone, there was something about it about the the conflict, something about the politics, something about the constant negotiation and paying attention to micro detail which really resonated with me having worked as an aid worker in Israeli occupied South Lebanon. It all spoke to me although I didn't understand it.
(34:29) So I wrote to Ralph and said, "Look, I've already got a mast's. I don't want another masters. Do you do a doctorate in management?" And he said, "We do." So I became a student on the doctor program myself. And as I completed, Ralph was retiring and was looking for a replacement. And serendipity, I'm doing the job that he did. And I've been doing it since 2011.
(34:53) University of Hartfordshire that whole area is sort of quite renowned for a lot of original thinking that came out of there. What was it like to work in that um department at that particular time? Well, there's there are a lot of changes and the the doctor management program has always been under a lot of pressure because we are eccentric and difficult and unusual and we don't fit the mold of academic programs and in fact the the program is going to close now. that will be winding down over the next 2 or 3 years.
(35:25) But this highly intensive, labor intensive, face-to-face way of working more than 16 days a year we spend with our students is very unusual in the academic context where most PhD programs you see your supervisor once a month for a couple of hours. So we're offering a very different model and I would say we've had enormous support from colleagues in the University of Hertfordshire but it's become impossible to go on because of the cost of doing what we do. We don't make enough money basically which is such a shame because when you are sort of potentially people's
(36:04) perspectives on the world's being transformed it takes time doesn't it? It needs immersive experiences to support that to happen. Yeah. Well we're in a different world. Uh it struck me that um you know the pandemic made this kind of meeting common where prior to the pandemic it would be something you you would do to speak to somebody abroad or if you could you know push came to shove you couldn't meet face to face but you could meet face to face you do that as priority now we do this as a priority so it's not really surprising that's affected all areas of working life including the work
(36:42) that universities do. So my university at the same time as closing my program is opening up an online doctoral program where people access asynchronous materials, they watch videos, they have supervision online, they may not even come to this country at all except for the final exam and maybe not even there.
(37:03) So technology has opened up all kinds of possibilities but also there are losses along the way. So the kind of intensive program that we offer resonating bodies in a room face to face it's carbon intensive as well. So people so twothirds of my students come from overseas mostly from Europe sometimes from much further a field is a sustainable model of education I'm offering here by insisting that people fly to the UK once every 3 months.
(37:33) So our priorities change, technology enables us to work and relate differently, but also things get lost. I guess it all comes back to that conversation we had earlier about metrics and what you're measuring success and outcomes on. Yeah, that's right. Well, I think my university feels on the one hand that we're unique and different and worldleading and on on the other hand, we're in new times.
(37:58) M the university has different priorities and different metrics to keep and you know there's been a huge marketization of higher education as well. So universities aren't just universities they're businesses as well.
(38:17) What do you enjoy most about the work that you do or the work that you've done? What really kind of sparks joy? Marie Condo has changed her mind about sparking joy apparently. But um she now thinks it's okay to be cluttered. But I I take your point. about what's joy. I think the kind of um the quite moving it's a word I I use um judiciously transformation of many students who come on the doctor of management program who turn up for all kinds of different reasons. Some know what they're coming to, many don't.
(38:49) And over the three or four years that we have them with us, they become much wiser about themselves. which is not to say that they become super cool. Um, one of the stories I tell and I hope I'm not repeating myself, but the the Grandmaster Suzuki was once asked what a lifetime of meditation had done for him and he didn't say, "Well, I've now become enlightened or I'm now super wise.
(39:19) " He said, "I've become a commisser of my own neurosis." And I think that's what happens to people when they come on the demand program. They become much more skillful in noticing their own shortcomings and their own neurosis. And that possibility of becoming slightly wiser about yourself gives you more potential for acting. And some people come on the program and go through periods of uh lack of clarity and confusion and they get lost, but they find a way through.
(39:52) They write a very good thesis and it's a real joy then to see them much more comfortable with themselves and with their practice dressing up in their garish robes and funny hat to go and get their doctorate on the stage at St. Orin's Cathedral. That's that's um a really moving experience.
(40:12) What what's particularly interesting you in the field at the moment? I did a one day uh event with um a colleague in Australia this year on AI and and mostly I tend to avoid things that are overhyped and I think AI is probably overhyped but nonetheless in order not to make a complete fool of myself I did some reading on AI before I went and I I think that this is another potential um it's obviously a benefit in all kinds of ways but one of the downsides of AI is going to be exactly the and kind of instrumentalizing and abstracting processes which make us less human in the workplace. So I'm become a little bit
(40:50) more preoccupied with what algorisms are doing to um oversimplify our relationships with each other, the ethical choices that we make. And we had a fantastic speaker at the conference this year, Carolyn Pedwell, who's written a very good book on habits, but has now be started a research project on AI and uh and what it does for intuition, for example, the way it begins to guide our intuition about so I'm very concerned about existing socopolitical processes like polarization, like financializ ization
(41:33) like instrumentalization, individualization I think is a huge problem that we think of ourselves as cut off for one another. And I think if you tip technology into that like AI, things could only get worse in some ways. And I'm not arguing that AI doesn't come with enormous benefits. It does it does it will help us enormously as well.
(41:58) But I think we have to be really careful about it. We have to apply that critical reflexivity about what's actually happening, doesn't it? I guess it and I something like AI can slowly shape things, doesn't it? Day by day, task by task that it becomes what it becomes rather than sort of us taking a step back and going, well, what's the grand strategy around this? Yeah.
(42:18) Yeah. And I I think it it it also takes some of the important work out of learning. So on the one hand, it's a useful shortcut and I've used it myself. So for example, I was doing a presentation at the last uh residential we had on Charles Taylor's book, Sources of the Self, which is about 600 pages long, and I wanted to summarize it for the students.
(42:42) So, I used AI to summarize it, and given the fact that I'd read the book already, I knew whether it was a good summary or not. And in quoting the summary, I attributed it to Claude. I used Claude as AI to summarize it. So, I referenced it in the way that I would reference any other book.
(43:00) But I do know from colleagues in the university that students are turning to AI to do the work for them and to take away any amount of effort or curiosity on their part. And the image I've heard about this, which I think is a good one, it's like taking a forkluck lift truck into the gym to lift the weights for you and then being surprised and then being surprised that you're a lot stronger having been to the gym five a week.
(43:28) Love it. I think I think the singular best metaphor I've heard yet for AI. That's brilliant. Yeah. And I I think that's there is something about the educational process where you have to do the work yourself and you have to struggle with it and you have to be confused and surprised and curious and follow up on the footnotes and AI can't do that for you.
(43:52) However, it was extremely useful in summarizing the 600page page book that I wanted to summarize. So it does have its uses, but it's that I suppose it's that engagement and that discussion that's needed on a constant basis about how we use these things to keep in mind that what we're trying to do is to provoke people to think. And I really like what you're saying there in terms of referencing it.
(44:20) So actually being explicit about when you're using it cuz again a lot of things that we're sort of seeing at the moment is managers are going away and doing their thinking with AI rather than with the team and then producing this and and there's a big part of the process that's missing. So the team aren't going on the journey with them. Yeah. Yeah.
(44:37) I quite like some of the developments in AI where when it sums something up for you or finds something out for you, it tells you the sources that it's used in doing so because that then gives me the opportunities to check out those sources myself and to find out more. So if you like it's if it used as a kind of sophisticated card index is fantastic in that way. and uh you know I I would only trust it to summarize a book I had read rather than summarizing a book I hadn't read. Yeah, I'm with you on that.
(45:05) So when you look back Chris at your career, what are what are some of the biggest lessons you think you've learned that you take forward? Well, I I suppose I've never thought of myself as having a career. So I've just stumbled from one thing into the next. My first degree was English language and literature. And here I am as a professor in the business school.
(45:26) If you'd asked me at the age, even at the age of 40, if I thought I'd end up in a business school, I would have laughed. So, I suppose one lesson from that might be to keep your eyes open and to pursue what interests you and to see what comes from that kind of engagement with the emergence and complexity, but you never know what's what's around the corner if you pursue your interests. Brilliant.
(45:50) And just looking behind you, there's an enormous bookshelf which we would actually love to do and and its own podcast on with you given us a journey of your bookshelf. How how do you invest in your own learning and development? How do you sort of stay sharp? Yeah, I mean there's there's been uh stuff on social media, hasn't there about curated bookshelves, people staging themselves uh on pop guards like this with a massive bookcase.
(46:13) I can promise you that I've read most of them. Um how do I stay sharp? Well, the students keep me sharp. So luckily having students who are always writing about something interesting at work and finding new ways to do so or always bringing new authors into the cannon of the discipline that we pursue. It's a perspective of perspectives we refer to as complex responsive processes of relating but actually it's always developing because of the work that students do and often people invite me to work with them. So for example, this
(46:44) gig that I did in Australia with my colleague Sophie Wong uh on um AI was very interesting. It was not something I would have thought of doing had it not arisen. So people invite me to think with them in different ways and that keeps me thinking, keep reading. And I mean you've got a lot of books behind you.
(47:09) Are there any particular books that you recommend to people that have have stood out that you you encourage people to to pick up and read? Yeah, over the last few years I've um come across u a German sociologist called Hart Rosa who has written a series of very big books and then has summed them up in a very small book. Bless him. Um so he is written his thesis is about the way the world has speeded up and made it much more difficult to stay in contact with each other and ourselves.
(47:36) And his critics in responding to his first book on social acceleration said, "Well, okay, so what should we do about it?" And then he wrote a book called resonance, thinking about what resonance is and how we might achieve more resonance with each other and with nature.
(47:56) And he summed these two huge volumes up in a very small paperback called the uncontrollability of the world. So if you wanted to access to his ideas without having to read the big volumes, then you'd read that. I would also recommend Caroline Pedwell's book on habit re is called revolutionary routines and you can find her speech to our conference on the complexity and management website if you're interested. I I thoroughly recommend it.
(48:21) It's a really good talk and uh draws a lot on uh the pragmatist philosophical tradition which is part of our thinking too. She she too is arguing that change emerges in the everyday between people which is when I read the book I I could see the consistency with what we were saying. Those are really rich preferences.
(48:40) So thank you so much for that as well. And then the last question we love to ask on this um is what advice would you give someone considering a career in the field right now if they're just at the foothills? Maybe they are someone who's working in an organization is frustrated about how things are or they wonder there is must surely there must be another way than to do culture change in this particular way like what advice would you give someone just starting out now starting out as an OD practitioner or
(49:04) starting out as a manager or both. Um do you know what can we be greedy? We'd love both if that's okay as as they've got your wisdom. I I I mean I suppose the first thing is to find all allies in the organization or with other OD practitioners who think similarly to you.
(49:23) Not too similarly, but I think it can feel quite isolating if you think you're the only one who thinks that what's going on is inadequate and is not going to help. So any kind of change within an organization or keeping yourself robust and resilient as an OD practitioner would mean seeking out people who are interested in thinking about what you're interested in thinking about.
(49:49) And in an organization, I would say try and find allies who are disappointed with what's on offer. And even if it's just a way of letting off steam together, you can at least find solidarity in that. But I think isolation in organizations is a is a very real problem.
(50:13) And it's also a way of command and control, isn't it? If you can isolate people, if you can stop people from talking together or thinking together, then it becomes much easier to push through authoritarian management regimes or regimes which oppress people in the workplace. Chris, we just want to say a huge thank you. I don't know about you, Danny, but I've really enjoyed the conversation. It's been thoroughly thoughtprovoking and it's also made me think about my own practice as well.
(50:33) I think I caught myself the other day going about leaders creating the conditions and it's like no, but that's only half of the equation. And so I think it's just a really brilliant opportunity for take a step back as well. Danny, what stood out from you from the conversation? Well, lots and lots of things.
(50:50) I think, you know, I was I was scribbling down notes and I think, you know, a reminder that we can't control everything, that humans are different and difficult and flawed and unpredictable and and not rational. though to kind of let go of that illusion. I think not all problems are leadership problems. I think that's that's really one to hold on to. And I really enjoyed the way you talked about the thinking, talking and acting differently and that kind of small changes can actually escalate into much bigger changes.
(51:13) So you know we can make changes start small think act talk act differently and we that can have significant impact. Yeah. And I think for me I love counting is the easy bit. I think that we forget that bit. It's really important to make space to interpret the data and the power of micro moments as well.
(51:29) And I didn't get a chance to ask the question, but you said at one point there is no such thing as a system. So we'd lovely to have you back again to to open that discussion at some point because when it's a huge thing, it's been brilliant. If people want to follow your your excellent work, your books, your Substack, your your your talks, your your social media things.
(51:49) What is the best way people to reach out to you or to follow your work? Yes, you can find me on the uh complexity and management site which is where I advertise the annual conference that we have. So we have a conference in the first weekend of June every year and I think the substack which is Chris Moles at substack.com if you want to see some of the writing and some of the references that I'm making and it's a really good substack isn't it? It's a brilliant substack. Yeah, highly recommend it.
(52:10) Well I want to say a huge thank you Chris. Um, for those of you watching, one of the things that we love is the fact that so many people share the interviews that people watch. And if you think you know someone who would really benefit from sort of listening to Chris's thinking or the way he perceives organizations, then please do share it.
(52:24) And also, if you have a chance to hit the like button as well because the algorithm gods love it. But most importantly, thank you so much for your time, Chris. We really appreciate the deep thought you've given to the questions we've asked today. I know that people will find it really useful. So, thank you. Thanks very much for inviting.
(52:44) Thank you.