The Field Guide › Paper
Stacey brings the science of complexity to bear on strategic management, and his target is the field's governing assumption that organisations move, or should be moved, towards a stable equilibrium through analysis and long-range planning. Drawing on complex adaptive systems and non-linear dynamics, he argues that organisations are better understood as far-from-equilibrium systems whose futures are inherently unpredictable, and that novelty, creativity and genuinely new strategy arise not from the planned, ordered part of the organisation but from its bounded instability, the region between frozen stability and disintegrating chaos where spontaneous self-organisation and emergence happen. Two moves matter for this map. The first is the claim that strategy emerges rather than being formulated: because non-linear feedback makes long-term outcomes uncontrollable, the detailed predictive strategic plan is close to a fiction, and what actually shapes a firm is the ongoing, self-organising interaction of its people. The second is Stacey's attention to what he calls the shadow or informal system, the web of unofficial relationships and conversations running alongside the legitimate hierarchy, which is where the learning and innovation that keep an organisation adaptive actually take place. For a corpus about psychological safety this is the strategy-theory counterpart to the interpersonal account: if the adaptive, creative life of an organisation lives in its informal, self-organising interactions rather than in its formal plans, then whether those interactions are safe enough to carry real disagreement and half-formed ideas is not a soft concern but the thing strategy depends on. It is also a direct ancestor of the Snowden and Pelrine arguments elsewhere in this cluster. Its limits are that it argues largely by analogy from the natural sciences to organisations, a move complexity-in-management has been criticised for ever since, and that it is stronger on why the equilibrium paradigm fails than on what a manager should concretely do instead. (Text drawn from the 1995 Strategic Management Journal paper, 16(6), pp. 477-495.)