Complexity, Relationships, and Strange Loops: Reflexive Practice Guide

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by Christine Oliver, Marilyn Herasymowych & Henry Senko

£40. Published by the MHA Institute, Canada.
ISBN: 0-9687704-6-0

Table of Contents

This is a book for people working in and with organisations, who imagine that organisational effectiveness is connected to communication and relationship, and who want to understand more about how patterns of communication and relationship work. The importance of staff morale in achieving success is well documented. However, initiatives to create greater efficiency, although meant to help, often do not pay enough attention to the connection between motivation and meaning. People need to experience their work as meaningful, as making sense within a larger context of organisational culture, relationship, role and communication. When our abilities to make sense get stuck or are confused we find ourselves in looped patterns that are difficult to escape.This reflexive practice guide helps us to become more critically conscious of organisational relational patterns we can find ourselves in, providing the tools to make sense of them and to decide how to relate to them. It draws on the traditions of systemic practice and organisational learning. In particular, it develops the notion of the strange loop pattern. Reflexive practice helps us to ride the strange loops that we create in organisational communication and to develop and sustain resilience, preparing us for other relationship roller coasters that may come our way.