Chris is Professor of Complexity and Management at the University of Hertfordshire Business School, and has directed the Doctor of Management programme (DMan) for more than 15 years. The DMan is an innovative programme combining insights from the complexity sciences and the social sciences and was the first programme of its kind. Chris occasionally works as a consultant, is an Associate Member of the Institute of Group Analysis, and has published a number of books and articles. He has taught in universities across Europe, including regularly at the Copenhagen Business School. Chris is interested in the complexity of trying to get things done with one another. Through his consultancy, he has led projects for the UN, EU, and British government across Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and China, as well as the UK’s public, private, and voluntary sectors.
Related Events
Hope in Dark Times: The politics and practice of lived experience
November 16, 2026
9:00 am
GMT
ComplexitySalon comes to Oxford. A day for lived experience practitioners with Professor Les Back and Professor Chris Mowles at Rhodes House.
Most organisations value quantities over qualities, claiming to be more 'evidence-based'. In institutions grounded in natural science, the appeal to evidence can silence the particular, the personal, and the experiential. This is why lived experience testimony and narrative can present powerful challenges to orthodox ways of managing and making policy. But bringing lived experience into an organisational setting is beset with difficulties. It is also a political act, and is likely to be resisted. So what are the strengths and limitations of lived experience? What possibilities are there for developing the approach as method? How might we learn from one another?
Live
Oxford/UK
How lived experience reveals what we owe one another
May 26, 2026
6:00 pm
AEST (UTC+10:00)
ComplexitySalon is delighted to host Professor Laura Abbott from the UK and Tahlia Isaac from Australia, who will share their research and experiences relating to women and children navigating the justice systems. Together, they will explore how power operates at the margins of society, and what these experiences reveal about our humanity, our institutions, and the values we choose to uphold.
Online
The uncontrollability of the world
December 3, 2022
9:00 am
AEDT (UTC+11:00)
It appears it is becoming hard to talk to each other, and even harder to listen. But if we are to break out of the cycle of increased polarisation which seems to affect virtually every country in the world, then we need to consider changing our practices. The way we relate to each other every day is directly linked to the kinds of institutions we create.
Live
Whale Beach, Sydney
Moving from “power over” to “power with”
February 19, 2026
9:30 pm
AEDT (UTC+11:00)
Join us to consider how diplomacy shows up in our everyday relationships.
To look around the world at the moment one might conclude that there is a reformulation of how to exercise power and influence. Out go empathy, rules of engagement, liberal interdependence, good enough consensus, and in come chainsaws, coercion, bullying and faits accomplis. ComplexitySalon is delighted to host Dr. Geoff Raby AO - Australian Ambassador to China 2007-2011, Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the World Trade Organisation and to APEC amongst other major appointments; and author of a number of books and papers on global politics, including his most recent Great Game On: The Contest for Central Asia and Global Supremacy - to talk about the practice of diplomacy.
Live
Sydney
ComplexitySalon Online: with Professor Carl Rhodes
November 18, 2025
7:00 pm
AEDT (UTC+11:00)
In a turbulent world, those with greater ability to influence often chose to push the burden of uncertainty onto those who are already more marginalised. The greater and more visible this inequality in society the more likely it is that groups who feel underrepresented become anxious and more susceptible to simplistic solutions.
Online
AI and the Art of Management
August 22, 2025
8:30 pm
AEDT (UTC+11:00)
AI brings huge potential for greater innovation and prosperity, and at the same time may cause radical instabilities in the way we organise our societies. No technological development is solely good, and becoming dependent on algorithms is bound to challenge what we think it means to be human. This was an opportunity to explore the everyday implications of AI in the workplace alongside hopes and fears.
Live
Sydney, Australia
Complexity & practice for management
February 4, 2025
9:00 am
AEDT (UTC+11:00)
A one-day introduction to the complexity sciences and their implications for the workplace with Snowmelt Consultancy and The Upfront Thinking Company. If we can’t predict and control, then what are we doing at work as we try to go on together? The complexity sciences offer a radical alternative to the tools and techniques of orthodox management.
Live
Wynyard hub, Sydney
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ComplexitySalon with indigenous leaders from Australia, New Zealand/Aotearoa, Fiji and the Solomon Islands
December 1, 2022
9:00 pm
AEDT (UTC+11:00)
Two day workshop to explore alternative ways of knowing, speaking and being together to explore asymmetric power relationships and the politics of development. In conjunction with the Institute for Human Security and Social Change, La Trobe University, with Professor Chris Roche.
Live
Whale beach, Sydney
Managing in uncertainty
June 26, 2022
9:00 am
AEDT (UTC+11:00)
Two-day seminar/experiential learning opportunity with Australian INGOs and La Trobe University on managing in uncertainty. An antidote to the dominant tendency of talking in managerial abstractions, what we now term ‘management speak’. It focused instead on what programme participants actually find themselves doing in the daily messy reality of organisational life, which involves dealing with power and politics, and processes of inclusion and exclusion. Funded by the La Trobe Building Healthy Communities Research Focus Area and the Institute for Global Development at the University of New South Wales.
Live
Melbourne
Related Media
Substack
Talking ‘bout my generation Young people and uncertainty - ComplexitySalon Aug 26, Sydney
Chris Mowles
August 31, 2026
Every generation faces common questions that arise simply from being human, such as how to live a good and fulfilling life. At the same time there are particular dilemmas that each generation faces, which are specific to their time. We tried to hold both in focus during the Aug 26 ComplexitySalon hosted by young people.
Substack
The Practice of diplomacy: power over and power with
Chris Mowles
February 23, 2026
One of the basic assumptions of ComplexitySalon is that we are always and already interdependent. We are so because we need each other for love, respect, recognition and inclusion. So to be interdependent with others constitutes a set of power relationships, which both constrain and enable.
Substack
Reflecting on what it means to be human
Chris Mowles
August 25, 2025
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.
Substack
What kind of leaders do we need in a complex world?
Chris Mowles
April 17, 2025
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.
Substack
Move fast and break things
Chris Mowles
April 17, 2025
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.
Substack
Changing our mindset for organisational culture change
Chris Mowles
April 17, 2025
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.
Substack
Playing the ratings game
Chris Mowles
April 15, 2025
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!’
Substack
Experiencing uncertainty
Chris Mowles
April 10, 2025
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?
Substack
Hard talk on leadership
Chris Mowles
April 10, 2025
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.
Substack
Before fascism becomes a movement, it must circulate in everyday life
Chris Mowles
April 10, 2025
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.
Youtube
Rethinking Leadership When the World Won't Behave | Professor Chris Mowles | OrgDev Podcast #85
OrgDev Podcast, Chris Mowles
November 28, 2025
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
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