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Claremont's Managing Director originally trained as a physicist; this has put her in a good position to work with complexity theory and consider its implications for management, policy-making, strategy development and change.
The ideas are particularly relevant in situations which are:
unique (such as finding the best way to support someone with mental health problems, whose needs are very person- and situation-dependent),
fast-changing and uncertain (how to develop strategy in emergent markets such as text messaging)
and systemic (harnessing diversity and allowing interconnections across and within organisations to grow).
Jean runs workshops on complexity, has taught MBA students at Cranfield since 2000, designs change programmes with these ideas in mind and lectures widely on the implications of an holistic world view for organisation design, collaboration, innovation, policy development and saving the world!
If you are interested in complexity,as well as other articles listed in other sections, an article on the mechanical paradigm can be downloaded here.
Click here to download a paper on complexity theory and implications for policy development.
And if you'd like an easy-to-read reflection on aspects of complexity, click here.
Jean Boulton and Professor Peter Allen have written a book chapter on strategy and complexity in 'Advanced Strategic Management: A Multi-perspective Approach' edited by Véronique Ambrosini, Mark Jenkins & Nardine Collier (Palgrave Macmillan) (ISBN-10: 1403985928 & ISBN-13: 978-1403985927). To download the introduction, click here.
Please do note that Professor Peter Allen and Jean Boulton are in the process of writing a book, called, at present, Embracing Complexity.
The book is about complexity, ambiguity, emergence, evolution and radical change.
This book is different from others in that it will present an easy-to-understand yet accurate and up-to-date view on what this ‘new science’ perspective means and then go on to apply these ideas in a practical way to issues affecting managers, policy makers -but also, more generally, those interested in the increasingly pressing issues of climate change, the imminent global energy and resource crisis and social justice.
Jean, together with Eve Mitleton-Kelly from the LSE, has guest edited a special edition of the journal of Emergence, Complexity and Organisation, to be published in June 2010, on Complexity, Policy and Climate Change. Click here for the editorial.
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