Content-type: text/html Downes.ca ~ Stephen's Web ~ Complexity: A Leader's Framework for Understanding and Managing Change in Higher Education

Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

I think longtime readers of OLDaily will find most of the core concepts discussed here pretty familiar. They include complexity ("many simple parts [that] are irreducibly entwined"), networks, emergence, self-organization and social coordination, feedback sensitivity, and agility. The article gives a brief mid-level definition of each, and then orients to to a management perspective (for example, "if the operational balance of control is weighted toward administration, an organization is unlikely to be able to quickly respond to complex pressures"). Mostly, though, this reduces to how management can attempt to influence an otherwise self-organizing system. For example, "a complexity leadership approach seeks to balance the interplay between the administrative and the adaptive functions in an organization." But that's probably the limit of what can be done in this article's context.

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
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Last Updated: Apr 24, 2024 8:03 p.m.

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