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Here are some observations I made from the discussion we had throughout the AI and the Art of Management day organised by ComplexitySalon in Sydney on 25th August. The day was governed by Chatham House rules, so I have generalised. I have not attempted a complete summary of what was a very rich day, and some of these remarks carry my own interpretation.

I have written before about how I was invited by a colleague to complete a questionnaire for her 360 degree appraisal of her competence as a leader. The questionnaire was long, so I have aggregated the questions, but here are the sorts of things that I was asked to evaluate.

Move fast and break things — this is the poster that one of the Tech Giant CEOs is supposed to have in his office. The invitation to ignore social conventions, perhaps even to avoid consulting people and talking things through, is a signature of managers in a hurry. The idea is that thinking, talking, can disrupt progress and slow everything down.

The term mindset, a collection of beliefs and/or attitudes, has evolved to mean any fixed group of ideas that has come to govern behaviour of an individual or a group. The term conveys cognitivist assumptions that attitudes and beliefs are confined inside an individual’s head. More, that a mindset can be changed with a particular programme of interventions of a behavioural kind.

When buying anything, using something or requesting services as a citizen it is impossible to escape the game of performance management, the metrics deployed to ‘measure’ what is generally referred to as my customer experience. ‘We want to hear from you! Give us your feedback!’

I had been working with a group of managers and we had been discussing how a lot of managerial work is about dealing with uncertainty. Things don’t work out quite how you planned, surprises come out of left field, or your boss, or the organisation with which you are working closely, has just decided that something else is now a priority. What you came in to do in the morning has somehow gone off course by the afternoon, but you’re still responsible for your first priority. This was the link I had been making in the seminar I had given them earlier in the day on the complexity sciences: I had been arguing that social life arises in the interplay of differing intentions of which no one is in control. But how do you know how to respond and what to pay attention to?

Everyone knows what good leadership is in the abstract and the ideal. But there is no leadership in the abstract and the ideal. There is only what you do when you show up at work which will never be ideal. So if you are a leader you are always a work in progress making it up as you go along with your colleagues and hoping that previous experience will count for something.

There is nothing inevitable and linear about human progress, as we might infer from listening to the evening news. Sometimes, as the sociologist Norbert Elias observed, we go through a decivilizing process, periods where human behaviour regresses and explicit conflict becomes more visible and destructive. He made sense of the regression to barbarism in Germany in his work The Germans, a subject of particular interest to a German Jewish citizen forced to flee as a refugee to the UK.

Is it time to rethink leadership and management? Many leaders work under the illusion that they can control what goes on but in reality organisations are messy, and unpredictable. So what does this Complexity really means for how organisations function, how leaders make decisions, and how people navigate uncertainty. One person who has challenged the neat models and tidy solutions we often reach for – instead opens up more real, human, and sometimes uncomfortable conversations about leadership, change, and organisational life is Professor Chris Mowles

Video recording of the event "The Experience of Polarisation"