Handling organisational complexity with a framework of accessible founding principles

Abstract

Accelerating complexity is causing a paradigm shift that affects everything. Those leading at the front are creating useful experience-based tools and advice using insights from Complexity Theory. However, these deductive longitudinal experienced-based approaches suffer from:
1) A gap between Complexity Theory and practice, making it challenging to adapt the advice to rising complexity challenges.

2) The elapsed time required to publish new complexity insights.

3) An inability to cover all types of complexity evenly.

4) Unique lexicons that confuse.
An alternative cross-sectional inductive approach that could resolve these issues is to develop a framework of accessible complexity principles that can assist organisations and practitioners, on their individual journeys, to understand, navigate, and handle the complexity they face independently. Consequently, this thesis seeks to validate the suitability of this alternative approach by assessing if:
“Our understanding of complexity is now sufficiently mature that a framework of accessible founding principles can now be identified and used to develop complexity tools and advice that are at least as effective as experienced-based equivalents.”

This thesis is tested by identifying and developing a set of accessible founding principles for organisational complexity, and then determining how useful and usable tools and advice created from these principles are compared to experienced-based approaches. Three separate complexity tools and advice were created and validated via a usefulness survey, a comparison to a definition of good, and usage. The accessible founding principles complexity tools and advice excelled in the usefulness assessments conducted, compared to the experienced-based equivalents, proving their value for handling organisational complexity. Primarily, however, this qualifies the thesis and demonstrates that an alternative approach to handling organisational complexity that resolves the above issues is viable. The accessibility of this approach also enables the acceleration of organisational complexity research, which is desperately required to address rising global complexity.

Date of Award	27 Sept 2022
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bristol
Supervisor	George Oikonomou (Supervisor) & Theo Tryfonas (Supervisor)