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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?

The next generation faces enormous uncertainty in their future. This ComplexitySalon features their perspective: ethical choices, hopes, and needs from elders.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.