The following is the text of the Ralph Stacey Memorial Lecture which I gave at Hertfordshire Business School on Weds 5th October 2022. It accompanies the video which you will find in the post below.
The response to the lecture was give by Patricia Shaw, who co-founded the Doctor of Management programme with Ralph and the late Doug Griffin.
Here is the video recording the Ralph Stacey Memorial Lecture on Weds 5th October, where I talked about Ralph’s legacy and Patricia Shaw responded.
We reflected on Ralph’s unique ability to take his experience seriously and make it available to others.
In the Ralph Stacey Memorial Lecture, just over a year after his death and birthday, I will reflect on Ralph’s rich and varied life, his deep humanity and his intellectual contribution. Patricia Shaw will respond, offering insights into the continuing relevance of the ideas for the enduring dilemmas we find ourselves facing.
Outline programme:
4pm – 5.30pm – Experiential group. Face to face only.
6.00pm Ralph Stacey Memorial lecture by Chris Mowles, response by Patricia Shaw.
Q and A/observations.
7.45 Informal drinks and conversation.
The event will be live-streamed. Joining instructions will be sent closer to the time.
In order for us to plan for numbers in person/send a link for streaming, RSVP c.mowles@herts.ac.uk
Every once in a while, someone emerges with unique insight, who reframes the way we see the world. Ralph Stacey was such a person. He created a new vocabulary, and thus new ways of thinking and acting. Ralph developed a body of work, and founded a psychodynamic doctoral research programme, the Doctor of Management (DMan), with Doug Griffin and Patricia Shaw. At the heart of the perspective informing the intellectual position and DMan is taking experience seriously, and becoming reflexive. It remains a pioneering approach to combining insights from the complexity sciences, pragmatic philosophy, process sociology and group analytic theory, and it continues to evolve and develop.
In the Ralph Stacey Memorial Lecture, just over a year after his death and birthday, I will reflect on Ralph’s rich and varied life, his deep humanity and his intellectual contribution. Patricia Shaw will respond, offering insights into the continuing relevance of the ideas for the enduring dilemmas we find ourselves facing.
Outline programme:
4pm – 5.30pm – Experiential group. Face to face only.
6.00pm Ralph Stacey Memorial lecture by Chris Mowles, response by Patricia Shaw.
Q and A/observations.
7.45 Informal drinks and conversation.
The event will be live-streamed. Joining instructions will be sent out nearer the event.
In order for us to plan for numbers/send a link for streaming, RSVP c.mowles@herts.ac.uk
This is to give advance notice of The Ralph Stacey Memorial Lecture on Weds 5th October at the University of Hertfordshire, 6pm. The day we have chosen is close both to his birthday and to the date of his death.
I will give a tribute to Ralph and his legacy and Patricia Shaw has agreed to give a response. We hope to turn the lecture into an annual event.
The lecture will be held at the Business School, de Havilland campus, where Ralph was an employee for 32 years. It will be live-streamed so that people can join remotely. For those interested and present in person, we may follow the lecture with an experiential group.
If you’re interested in attending/viewing then please save the date. Further details will follow.
In addition, the dates of next year’s conference are 2nd-4th June 2023. I am assured that there are no further Jubilee celebrations that weekend.
The following is a longer obituary of Ralph Stacey which was commissioned by Group-analytic Contexts, and which I share here with their permission. It turns in particular on his relationship with the group analytic community, but some of his key ideas about complexity may be relevant for people working in other contexts.
Obituary Ralph Stacey 10/9/42 – 4/9/21
Ralph Stacey, economist, group analyst, Professor of Management at the University of Hertfordshire (UH) for 30 years, and much loved husband, partner, father, grandfather and colleague, died in September this year a few days short of his 79th birthday. His death was sudden and shocking, although for many years previously he had experienced quite chronic ill health. Physically frailer than some in their late 70s, Ralph was nonetheless intellectually robust right till the end. As an internationally renowned academic who developed pioneering ideas about the importance of the complexity sciences for understanding social life, and as someone who could speak without notes, and without PowerPoint slides for as long as required, exiting before his faculties declined had always been important to him. He was granted his wish.
Ralph was a great raconteur, and used to tell stories about his past in a highly self-deprecating and amusing way. He was rarely the hero of his own narrative. One tale he told about his own therapy as part of his training as a group analyst is quite instructive to understand the man. After five years or so he considered leaving the group to bring to a temporary end his therapeutic journey as patient. In response his conductor told him that she thought he still had experience to bring: Ralph, you are not yet fully part of the group. Ralph later recounted this episode as a light bulb moment for him. Indeed, he didn’t feel fully part of the group, and nor did he want to be. He was quite content to be an insider and an outsider, both at the same time. This paradoxical position pervades his thinking, and his experience as a gay, white South African who lived most of his life in the UK, as a critical management scholar who worked in an orthodox Business School, and an as eminent scholar lauding the importance of groups who was himself both shy and retiring, as a person committed to staying in relation, who on occasion could be fantastically stubborn and unmoving. To borrow Norbert Elias’s thinking, Ralph’s position in the social network as insider/outsider was pivotal in producing a canon of work which is still highly influential.
Continue readingIf you’d like to pop in for just an hour to hear about the new book, to meet others interested in complexity, to meet old friends and perhaps some new ones, and to celebrate the legacy that Ralph Stacey has left us, then write to me at c.mowles@herts.ac.uk and I’ll send you a link 24 hours ahead of the launch.
I am writing to let you know that I heard from Ralph Stacey’s family on Sunday that Ralph died peacefully in hospital on Saturday night after a short illness over the summer.
Many of you who follow this site may already know a lot about Ralph and will have met him in person. For those who didn’t know him, here is a brief obituary.
Ralph was trained as an economist graduating with his PhD from LSE in 1967. He came to Hatfield Polytechnic in 1985 having worked in corporate planning for the construction company John Laing, and having briefly been an investment analyst in the City of London. In the same year that the polytechnic became a university, 1992, Ralph was made a Professor of Management.
Ralph was one of the pioneers of adopting analogies from the sciences of complexity into theories exploring group dynamics in organisations. He published his first book in 1990, and went on to write 12 in all, including a textbook which is now in its 7th Edition. Just as important as his publishing record is his founding of the Complexity and Management Centre in 1995, and the establishment of group supervision for doctoral students. He combined the group approach with the development of a conceptual framework he, Doug Griffin and Patricia Shaw termed complex responsive processes of relating, a radical critique of systems theories, into the Doctor of Management programme. As those of you following this blog will know, the DMan is still running 20 years later and has just produced its 71st doctoral completion.
He was a scholar with a global reputation and was invited to speak all over the world. He made contributions to the field of organisational theory, to the development of experience-based pedagogy, and to the thinking of the Institute of Group Analysis where he trained as a group analyst in the 1990s. Ralph ran clinical groups in the NHS as well as groups within the university of Hertfordshire, including working with management teams.
Ralph continued to have a part time role as a supervisor on the DMan programme into his mid-70s and only finally retired three years ago. Some of you reading this post will have attended the retirement event at Roffey Park and experienced the great esteem in which he was held by everyone present.
Those of you who have met him will know that Ralph was a great story-teller. Despite his genius he was self-deprecating; he was kind, generous and provocative. He was also, at times, fantastically stubborn.
Ralph was a figure of great stature in the academic world. He was a loyal employee of HBS for over 30 years. But above all he was a great colleague, and with his immense gifts and deep wisdom he was very supportive of everyone who sought his help. Ralph helped us understand the world differently, as complex and paradoxical, and through his insights he helped us better understand ourselves. For many of us, he taught us how to think critically and reflexively.
We will be thinking of ways of continuing to discuss his legacy in the coming weeks and months.
If you would like to say something about Ralph and what he meant to you I have created a tribute page here.
This video is a very poor quality recording of Ralph Stacey giving his last exposition of complex responsive processes at the Complexity and Management Conference June 2018 before his retirement.
Apologies for both sound and picture quality.
Before starting this post, and for those readers interested in attending the next Complexity and Management Conference, next year it will be slightly earlier: 17-19th May 2019.
Introduction
This post is the theoretical introduction to the perspective of complex responsive processes of relating, which I gave in the afternoon of the one-day workshop preceding this year’s Complexity and Management Conference. It informs a whole raft of publications written and edited by Ralph Stacey, Doug Griffin, Patricia Shaw and myself along with all the theses of graduates of the Doctor of Management (DMan) programme at the University of Hertfordshire, who now number 72 (60 doctorates and 12 MAs). The perspective has also been adduced by a wide range of consultants, scholars and graduates of other programmes. I mention this at the beginning of the post because I often get asked ‘what next for complex responsive processes?’, or ‘what or who constitutes the complex responsive processes community?’ I think the question is sometimes aimed at asking who decides what the perspective of complex responsive processes is, to which the answer must be, the original authors, everyone and no one. The glorious thing about ideas is that once published, they belong to everybody, irrespective of whether they are reproduced or developed in ways in which the ‘original’ scholars would recognise. And when other people develop the ideas in their own way, then this just leads to opportunities for further discussion. This is not to suggest that as far as I am concerned ‘anything goes’. The point about having an intellectual position is that you are prepared to argue for it, whilst acknowledging the perspectives of those you argue with.
The perspective of complex responsive processes rests on four pillars of intellectual tradition: it draws on insights from the complexity sciences; it is based in Norbert Elias’ processual sociology; it takes up key ideas from pragmatic philosophy, particularly from Mead and Dewey; and it borrows from the group analytic tradition as set out by SH Foulkes, particularly in terms of the working methods which we adopt on the DMan programme. What all four have in common is that they are concerned with phenomena in a state of flux and change over time, and they are focused more or less on how global patterns arise from micro-interactions, or how micro-interactions embody global patterns. Our particular interpretation reads paradox into the working of complex adaptive systems models (CAS), just as see paradox deployed by Mead, Dewey, Elias, and to a lesser degree, Foulkes. In other words, and in the perspective of complex responsive processes you can see Heraclitan dialectic running through our interpretation of CAS, in the work of the pragmatists and Elias, which draws on Hegel, and perhaps more falteringly in Foulkes. Elias and Foulkes are also informed by the thinking of Freud. There are links, then, between the four pillars of thought which underpin the perspective. Continue reading
Complexity & Management Centre 