Navigating Complexity

From Control to Flow with the Process Enneagram
1. Auflage 2027
ISBN: 978-1-041-23041-0
Verlag: Taylor & Francis

Buch, Englisch, 152 Seiten, Format (B × H): 138 mm x 216 mm

Reihe: Systems Thinking

In times of felt polycrisis, when organisations face genuinely complex problems, their instinct is to tighten control. This book shows why that instinct fails and what leaders can do instead, offering a systemic framework for enabling and harnessing collective intelligence.

At its centre is the Process Enneagram, a nine-point participatory instrument tested and refined over decades in chemical plants, sugar mills, and public institutions. The book documents cases where injury rates fell 97% in two years and held for six more, where a production unit was rescued at half the cost and time, and where the conditions that produced those results were built deliberately rather than forced by crisis. It also documents where the approach reached its limits. The argument joins a century-old conversation about non-heroic leadership, beginning with Mary Parker Follett's insistence on power-with rather than power-over. It draws on Donella Meadows on indicators that lead rather than lag, Amy Edmondson on psychological safety as the mechanism behind extraordinary performance, Peggy Holman's pattern of disrupt, differentiate and cohere, Margaret Wheatley's work on self-organisation, Gerald Midgley's systemic intervention, Michael Quinn Patton's developmental evaluation, and Richard Knowles' practice, blending the power of the Process Enneagram with the theories of complexity and complex adaptive systems. The result is a framework that lets a group see its whole system, its parts and their interactions, at once.

The book offers methods for curating diverse perspectives, generating powerful questions, holding tension, and scaling change. It is written for practitioners and facilitators in organisational development, leaders and managers responsible for change, and researchers and graduate students in systems thinking, complexity science and leadership studies, with application across manufacturing, social work, public administration, education, and healthcare. Readers gain a usable instrument, the reasoning that makes it adaptable to their own contexts, and a defensible answer to how self-organisation can be created deliberately.

Zielgruppe

Academic

Autoren/Hrsg.

Knowles, Richard N.

Siebzehnrübl, Sebastian Wolf

Fachgebiete

• Wirtschaftswissenschaften Betriebswirtschaft Management Unternehmensorganisation & Entwicklungsstrategien
• Wirtschaftswissenschaften Betriebswirtschaft Bereichsspezifisches Management Management: Führung & Motivation
• Wirtschaftswissenschaften Betriebswirtschaft Organisationstheorie, Organisationssoziologie, Organisationspsychologie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction  Part I — What Becomes Possible  1. What Self-Organising Leadership Actually Produces  2. A Composite Portrait: How the Pattern Repeats  Part II — Measuring What Matters  3. Organisational Health as a Leading Indicator: Six Movements through the System  4. What Kind of Knowing Is This? Adaptive Evaluation and the Status of the Movements  Part III — Why It Works: Theoretical Foundations  5. Beyond Mechanisms: Foundations in Systems Thinking and Complexity Science  6. The Bowl: Holding Structure and the Conditions of Emergence  7. The PE: Origins, Topology, and the Nine Points  Part IV — Partner-Centred Leadership in Practice  8. The Power Question: Authority, Conditions, and the Ethics of Facilitation  9. Who Is in the Conversation? Curating for Collective Intelligence  10. Generating the Right Question: Framing for Insight and Energy  11. The Leadership Dance: Facilitation Practice and the Three Embedded Processes  12. The Inverse Problem: When Language Covers What It Should Express Afterword: The Integrated Picture

Über Autor(innen)

Richard N. Knowles is the Founder of The Center for Self-Organizing Leadership, USA. He has developed the Process Enneagram and demonstrated its effectiveness across three decades of practice at DuPont — first as a researcher accumulating forty patents in organic chemistry, then as Plant Manager at the Niagara Falls and Belle, West Virginia facilities — and through subsequent consulting work with organisations across North America and Australia.

Sebastian Wolf Siebzehnrübl is a Systemic Strategy Consultant and Process Designer specialising in adaptive leadership, participatory processes, and complexity science. He is affiliated with Context Collective, Berlin, served as Community Curator for the International Federation for Systems Research (IFSR), is a collaborator to the European Evaluation Society (EES) as well as a Trustee to the American Cybernetics Society (ASC).