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Complexity and Management: Moving From Fad To Firm Foundations

CEOs have many different complexity approaches to choose from. The books reviewed in this Special Issue more or less define frequently obscure complexity science terms and complexity science theories have been given meanings more relevant to firms. Organization change methods leading toward emergence and empowerment are powerfully set forth. But in the founding issue of Emergence one of us (McKelvey 1999b) worried that “complexity science applied to management” had all the earmarks of becoming just another management consulting fad, aimed at marketing personal skills and books. It could become just another ingredient in what Micklethwait and Wooldridge (1996) describe as management guru witchdoctoring. The record is clear over the past several decades—management ideas that do not become legitimized by resting on a foundation of quality research are quickly replaced by the next fad coming down the pike. Are complexity applications to firms vulnerable to or solidly past faddism? The purpose of this Special Issue is to give readers a broad overview of the general quality of complexity applications to CEO problems and to test how vulnerable to faddism they are. In this essay we present an overall summary of the total message that emerges from the reviews. Based on the reviews we have an interesting and fairly complete picture of what is “out there,” being aimed at CEOs, with respect to complexity science applications to managerial problems. We begin with an overview of the message given by the reviews in their totality. Then we discuss some issues related to “hard” complexity science that we found, surprisingly, to be missing—a disappointing discovery since we think these missing topics would be of great value to consultants, CEOs and management researchers. These approaches, drawn from the study of dissipative structures and fitness landscapes, are presented. Next we look at another topic little addressed, the connections between complexity and information, and in our discussion point out how “hard” and “soft” complexity might differ. The latter will be difficult to ignore by social scientists: ambiguity and its consequences are also significant phenomena in complex human systems. This takes us to a brief discussion of power, which connects nicely with a final section that includes a discussion of postmodernism—a recurrent theme in the book reviews that surprised us. Throughout our discussion, we make efforts to suggest a research directions and point to solid existing work in the organization literature that could help be developed to help move complexity science applications to management onto theoretical and empirical foundations that are firm, beyond the fad.