Practical Wisdom – Understanding and applying complexity theory to enhance our effectiveness - with Dr Graham Curtis

This one-day workshop will be of interest to anyone working in OD, Organisational Leadership, or Change Management.

Complexity theory – Its origins and its implications for OD practice.

As a participant you will engage in an interactive and discursive session led by Dr Graham Curtis. You will work in plenary and small groups to consider how complexity theory can introduce different perspectives on your experience of working with people and organisations. Graham will introduce the origins and history of complexity theory and how it has been understood as analogy for organisation development and culture change practice. There will be opportunities to work with others in practical activities to translate theory into practice. The session will look at how differing perspectives have emerged over time and why those different perspectives call for different ways of practicing.

Functional Collusion – A potentially problematic organisation phenomenon and how to work with it.

In the afternoon, Graham will invite you into a conversation to explore the phenomenon of ‘Functional Collusion’ that he developed during his doctoral research at the University of Hertfordshire Complexity and Management Centre. Working in large and small groups you will able to draw on your own experience to think how ‘Functional Collusion’ shows up in organisational life. Graham will draw on theories from sociology, psychology and organisational studies to explain and explore how global patterns of relating, which we might call organisational culture, arise from our everyday interactions. He will go on to explore how such patterns affect what we are able to achieve together in our work, often outside of our awareness. Graham will invite you to consider how a change of mindset, and the development of new habits and attitudes, can enable you to work productively with difference and workplace culture.

Our guest:

Dr Graham Curtis

Graham has over 25 years of experience, working in the UK and internationally, most recently as the Director of Operations of Roffey Park Institute. He has designed and led the delivery of global leadership and management development programmes in the UK, Nigeria, Kenya and Columbia aimed at supporting and challenging participants to reflect on their practice and their relationships with their teams. He has also led global transformation programmes, supporting organisations to deliver more distributed and diverse governance and leadership.

Graham’s approach to understanding the development needs of leaders and organisations was forged in his early career in operational leadership and management. Having completed his MSc in People and Organisational Development at Roffey Park in 2009 he went on to hold numerous senior roles, leading Organisational Development and Human Resource functions. More recently he completed the Doctor of Management Programme at the University of Hertfordshir. During his doctoral research he took up theories of complex responsive processes of relating to understand the role of the OD practitioner in organisational culture and change. Graham is a master practitioner of NLP and holds certification in several psychometric tools such as MBTI, FIRO-b and Wave.

Graham believes that great leadership is founded on developing our flexibility in response to dynamic and emergent situations through growing our curiosity, and our capability to reflect upon the contexts we find ourselves in and our relationships with those around us.