Student Inquires.....Assignment Help

I assume that someone in UWIC or Cardiff has set an assignment on SEMCO and is, it seems comparing this to my work in various organisations as I have had several student enquires pouring into my inbox. 


However, my work is nothing to do with SEMCO, as it is based in Complexity, Complex Evolving Systems and Chaos Theory. SEMCO and indeed Ricardo Semlar the founder of this wonderful organisation based in Brazil, and who now has operations in over 16 countries, is a unique organisation, with only similar principles and some core values to what I am attempting to do here in the UK.

However, let me answer in more depth, to help those assignments. Management practices of this century have been and still are greatly influenced by Taylor's concept of 'scientific management'. Taylor's theories can be traced to the paradigm of Newtonian mechanics. Yet ALL organisations are non-linear and organic. It is simply the assumption by managerialist perspectives, and teachings that it should be something else, which traditionally is 'industrialist', mechanistic and 'clockwork'.

As you will see with my work, the Newtonian perspective, or current teachings could not be further from the reality of human systems. People are messy and a number of authors have stated that organisations are simply a collection of messes! Not cogs or parts in a machine. Systems can be understood by basic physical laws that describe a deterministic world in objective ways. The natural state of the system is equilibrium; disturbances to equilibrium are controlled via negative feedback. The complexity paradigm uses systemic inquiry to build fuzzy, multivalent, multilevel and multi-disciplinary representations of reality. This is where SEMCO is not BGCBC or any other company involved by my methods.

Current HR practices for example can be summed up by the mechanistic, simplistic, and rational perspective. This is nonsense compared to current thinking even in Science. And this is the core issue of my work, vis traditional thinking. Business thought has been greatly influenced by reductionism. These concepts and practices, all steeped in the Newtonian paradigm, came about in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which was good for its time: division of labor, the idea of task, interchangeability of parts, standard procedures, quality control, cost accounting, time and motion study, and organisational charts (George 1968).

As systems theory or complexity has been applied across the disciplines, a number of "theoretical fields" have developed consistent with the complexity paradigm. Here specifically with HR and what the HR lecturer is informing you, simplistically and incorrectly that there are just traditional v SEMCO, as there are several, along a continuum and multi-dimensional with two bodies of theory as an example - nonlinear dynamical systems (or "chaos theory"), and complex adaptive systems being just two to develop the relationships and change in my organisations yet I draw upon several as each case develops.

Chaos theory as an example has developed along two dimensions. Experimentalists found ways to discover deep and complex patterns in seemingly random, or "chaotic" systems. Prigogine and Stengers (1984), among others, use chaos to describe how order can arise from complexity through the process of self-organization.

Here is a summary of some of just a few of the main points from chaos theory:

(a) observed randomness may not be randomness after all,
(b) even simple deterministic systems can have limited predictability (HR rules example), and
(c) a system can move from equilibrium to chaos not only through structural changes but also parameter changes.

Here you will see that with BGCBC and even within BGCBC there cannot be replication of any practice or process to achieve a given end. There is no such thing as 'Best Practice' as often stated, only 'past practice' based on highly subjective, newtonian thinking. What I offer via Complexity is an Architecture to see/understand the world in which we live. It does not allow you to predict only provide a limited, and accepted understanding of the limitations of 'knowing' in a human systems world. To predict the outcomes of companies would simply place me back into the Newtonian, Mechanistic perspective!


BGCBC, is of course there to provide a service. However, when you adopt a Human, Individualist, Post-Structuralist perspective you move away from efficiency (as with pay scales etc.) to effectiveness (mess and individual systems). As with the Pay and rewards, once you provide the frontline staff with the budgets, salaries of all, bosses, admin, HR, etc. to get them to rationalise the contributions they make from the work up, not 'HR' or Management down. In simple terms it means treating people like Adults not Children! We are all adults if allowed to be, even Binmen or Admin staff. The result when you do this is breathtaking, spectacular and challenging to those who only think there is one way to achieve 'work'.

Regarding the success of BGCBC, well the documentary is out in March and as a post structuralist, Complexity Thinker I will let you be the judge of this, but it is already revolutionising Management here in the UK and the world. Lets hope that University Lecturers  who study books and fail to connect with real world practice, catch on soon or some students will I am sure be asking for their fees back quite quickly after venturing back into the real world.


Lets hope this helps..... I hate email at the best of times!