Complexity Society
Newsletter – August 2007

Layers, Players and Patterns

I'm an entrepreneur, not by design as I really wanted to be an airline pilot - but I tried that and was proved to be hopeless at landings, hence BA decided not to let me loose with anything large enough to carry passengers and cancelled my scholarship, a fair decision in retrospect.

This meant I needed a job or an undergraduate course. The labour exchange in Mexborough, South Yorkshire was more used to dealing with redundant miners than terminated pilots and the 'new' undergraduate course in Management Sciences at UMIST was willing to take me, so there I went.

Three years later with a BSc (Hons), more facial hair than was reasonable and a liking for Boddington's bitter I landed a job with an airline, Dan Air, as a graduate trainee. That was exactly 30 years ago this month and the other graduate trainee who started on my first day at work is now my business partner in Flight Directors, an organisation of 23 years standing.

What's this got to do with complexity science?

Nothing much for the first 15 years of the life of my company, Flight Directors, but quite a lot since I was introduced to the concepts and language of complexity science during a part-time MA degree in Entrepreneurship (did I say that I was an entrepreneur and had the certificate to prove it ?) at Durham Business school in 1998.

In my own words at the time, I was there to get out of my comfort zone, out of a tight world of airlines and travel businesses where I was a boss and an industry figure; out of the cosy south east of England and out of an world of balance sheets, profit & loss accounts and monthly management figures. Ready for something new and there it was… BANG!  - the idea that a new science was being developed which not only could illuminate the landscape in which I worked, but could also give me insights with which to understand and reconcile the conflicts, paradoxes and apparent insanities of business life.

Initially the most attractive feature was a multi-level representation of the empirical ontologies in entrepreneurship (see fig. 1), suddenly I could link together my (changing) personality with the global impact of Perestroika and understand that something or nothing was likely to change with regard to the performance (and/or survival) of my organisation (see opening paragraphs for a brief example of this type if thinking).  In addition concepts such as  "attractors" gave the opportunity to explore different future corporate scenarios and "Emergence" apparently gave the entrepreneur academic legitimacy to back his hunches, rather than merely analysing the figures, scenarios are intuitively developed from a unique combination of many processes (scanning, experimenting, networking, sense-making etc.) that produce the 'hunch'. "Feedback loops" meant that if you get it right the skies the limit and "co-evolution" meant that it was OK to feed off the resources of suppliers, customers, allies and foes alike. New words, new ideas and new patterns of understanding allowed me to see not just the organisation differently, but also how it interacted with other organisations within a wider context. Equally important was a better understanding of the dynamics of me, my team and my stakeholders.

Since then there have been a number of academic papers written about my organisation, initially stemming directly from the original research for the Masters dissertation and more recently from new research conducted by better and more objective observers.  A model of four general processes has been formulated called EROS (Experimental Behaviour, Reflexive construction of identity, Organising Domains and Sensitivity to conditions) and more work is planned as the mature Flight Directors metamorphoses into the fledgling www.alternativeairlines.com. The organisation has survived for 23 years. It has changed constantly and completely, concepts from complexity science have enabled me, as owner manager, to better understand the processes which have contributed to that sustainability and hopefully its continued survival.

I've listed the papers that tell the story in detail and thank Ted Fuller and Lorraine Warren for both their permission to do so and their continued enthusiasm for following this line of research.

PAUL ARGYLE
26th June 2007.

References
[1] T. Fuller, P. Argyle, P. Moran, Entrepreneurial foresight; a
Case study in reflexivity, experiments, sensitivity and reorganisation. in H.Tsoukas, J. Shepherd (Editors), Managing The Future: Foresight in the Knowledge Economy, Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, 2004, p. 171.
[2] T. Fuller, P. Moran, Small enterprises as complex adaptive systems: a methodological question? Entrepreneurship and Regional Development 13 (2001) 47.
[3] T. Fuller, P. Moran, P. Argyle. Meta-rules for organisational foresight. in Probing the Future: Developing Organizational Foresight in the Knowledge Economy, University Of Strathclyde Graduate School Of Business In Glasgow, UK, 2002.
[4] T. Fuller, L. Warren, Complex Explanations of Order Creation, Emergence and Sustainability as Situated Entrepreneurship. in P.R. Christensen, F. Poulfelt (Editors), RENT XVIII Anthology 2005: Managing Complexity and Change in SMEs: Frontiers in European Research, Edward Elgar, 2006, p. 136.
[5] T. Fuller, L. Warren, Entrepreneurship as foresight: A complex social network perspective on organisational foresight. Futures, Journal of Policy, Planning and Futures Studies 38 (2006).
[6] T. Fuller, L. Warren, P. Argyle. Entrepreneurship as foresight: a complex social network perspective on organisational foresight. in The 2nd international conference on Organizational foresight, Graduate School of Business, The University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland, UK, 2004.
[7] T. Fuller, L. Warren, P. Argyle. Entrepreneurship as Situated Foresight. in BAM 2004 (refereed paper), British Academy of Management, St Andrews University, 2004.
[8] T. Fuller, L. Warren, P. Argyle, Sustaining entrepreneurial business; a complexity perspective on processes that produce emergent practice. International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal 4 (2007).
[9] T. Fuller, F. Welter, L. Warren. The contribution of emergence To entrepreneurship theory: a review. in Research in Entrepreneurship (RENT) EIASM, Brussels, 2006.

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