Doctor of Management/ Master of ArtsA part-time professional research degree offered by

The Complexity Research Groupat the

Business School of the University of Hertfordshire

December 2010

Taking a complexity perspective on management and leadership, continuity and change in organisations

1 About the programme

The Complexity Research Group at the University of Hertfordshire has an international reputation for its work on the implications of complexity theories for organisations. We offer a unique part-time D Man/MA which takes a complexity perspective on management, continuity and change in organisations. This is a professional doctorate, i.e. one which encourages practising leaders, managers and consultants to take their work as an object of study, and which has equivalent status to a traditional PhD.

By taking a complexity perspective we mean drawing on insights from the complexity sciences and the social sciences where they deal with complexity in human terms. In order to understand the implications of taking up this perspective for their own research, participants in the programme will be expected to take their every everyday experience in organisations seriously, to read widely in sociology, philosophy, group analytic and organisational theory, and to engage in lively group discussions. The work of doing research is a rigorous combination of reflection, reflexivity, reading, discussion, writing and rewriting.

Students who succeed in the programme are capable of pursuing a research question directly arising from their experience at work over a three year period, and will be able to write an academic thesis based on their research. In order to be awarded a doctorate, students will need to defend their thesis successfully before examiners. In order to do so they will have developed a critical understanding of the work of the Complexity Research Group, and will be able to discuss its relevance for their own work by comparing and contrasting the perspectives they learn with other critical and more orthodox theories of organising.

2 The history and achievements of the programme

The Doctor of Management programme started in 2000, attracting practising leaders and managers from a range of organisations in many countries. Since 2002, the programme has produced 51 graduates with 39 of these at the level of Doctor of Management and 11 at the level of Master of Arts by research. Graduates and current participants come from the USA, Canada, Norway, Denmark, Germany, Netherlands, Israel, New Zealand, South Africa, Ireland and the UK. They are employees of public and private sector organisations and are also self employed consultants to organisations.

3 Why come on this programme?

There are relatively few professional research degree programmes, particularly ones that emphasise a reflexive, reflective approach in which the candidates’ work is their research. This programme offers the opportunity of completing high level doctoral research in three years, provided that students become increasingly able to engage actively in the research community, can read widely, discuss critically, and reflect on their own ways of thinking and acting. It is possible to stop at the

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research Masters’ level after two years, and students may be advised to do this if, after an 18 month review, there is mutual agreement that an MA is a more suitable option.

There is an unusually high and in depth level of supervision provided by the faculty. The experience of the programme is personally developmental and it focuses attention, which we find necessary if one takes a complexity perspective, on the experience of group dynamics and the psychological dimensions of social interaction in organisations. One way of focusing on this is for participants to be prepared actively to explore their own participation in the programme. The method involves taking one’s own ordinary experience seriously, which will above all mean challenging one’s ways of thinking. Because it focuses on the participant’s current work it is immediately beneficial to the organisation.

4 Who the programme is for

The programme is for experienced leaders and managers, as well as internal and external consultants, who are interested in questioning, reflecting upon and developing their current work, particularly how they think about what they are doing. Being experienced does not necessarily imply seniority, and previous candidates have included middle managers looking to become better qualified, consultants working in and for a variety of organisations, as well as senior executives seeking to make better sense of their participation in the workplace. Previous programme participants have comprised:

a number of Chief Executives – for example two graduates are CEOs of hospitals in the USA and one is CEO of a large UK charity.

two university professors in Ireland and Canada, two Nurse Directors on NHS Boards a CEO of a major Division of the Dutch Railway system. Self-employed consultants, or consultants employed internally within organisations

5 What we expect from you and what we mean by research

The personal challenge of the programmeThis is not a taught programme, but one in which participants formulate and pursue their own particular inquiry together with others. The work of the programme will involve participants in exploring their experience of their work and how they think about it both in discussion and in intensive reading and reflective writing.

All participants are required to participate in four three-day residential meetings a year in which the faculty of the DMan participate fully. Attendance at all programme sessions is a requirement. The residentials are held over a weekend and last from 3pm Friday to 3pm Monday. These provide opportunities:

for experimentation and exploration of the self-group relationship examination and discussion of conceptual material integration of learning through reflection, leading discussions and sharing experience supervision of the iterative cycle of writing the dissertation in learning groups

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Projects exploring the experience of work are a major aspect of its experiential nature. During residential programme meetings participants come together both as one large group and in smaller supervised learning groups. The purpose of these smaller groups is to provide supervision to support participants in completing projects which build up into a dissertation. This is the core of the research and will involve considerable writing and rewriting as each person’s line of inquiry deepens. Participants will need to engage critically and constructively with each others’ work. Between such meetings there is extensive support from a specified member of the faculty via phone conferencing, current technologies such as Skype, and email and any future technologies may prove helpful.

Prospective participants need to consider how they will incorporate these additional demands into their normal working and social lives. Working with organisational change cannot be separated from personal change. Questioning how one thinks is both intellectually and emotionally challenging.

What we mean by researchBy drawing on insights from the complexity sciences we have come to understand the process of organising as complex, responsive processes of relating in local interactions which produce population-wide patterning. This is in contrast to what we would term the dominant theories of organising which concentrate instead on the rational and predictable aspects of human experience, leading to attempts at programmatic, large-scale management of change. This programme focuses attention on how wide-spread change emerges as people interact locally in everyday situations.

Each participant’s research is at the same time his or her daily work. Participants are required to reflect on narratives of what they do each day in the normal course of their work in order to make sense of what they actually do. This requires them to formulate an argument about some aspect of their work in a critically aware way, locating how they are thinking in relevant discourses, traditions of thought and their literatures. The contribution they are required to make is to understanding and knowledge, and to practice.

This is very different to research on, or about, experience. In avoiding the splitting of theory and practice, and of emotion and intellect, particular attention is paid to understanding change as shifts in our experience of ourselves and of our patterns of relating to each other. As an integral part of the research, the programme itself also provides an opportunity to reflect on our own processes of working together and the insight this might provide on organisational life. Particular attention is paid to habit and spontaneity, cooperation and conflict, and power as paradoxically enabling constraints in relationships. Participants join small learning groups supervised by a member of faculty.

6 How project work leads to a thesis

All participants are required to complete the following Project Work over the course of 3 years.

Project 1, which is a narrative account of the influences and experiences that inform the participants’ current practice in organisations which is reflectively woven together with the sense they are making of what they have read and heard on the course since beginning their research.

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Research Proposal, which is a statement after 6 months of the participant’s research question and the area of organisational experience and supporting literature that the student intends pursuing for the remainder of the programme.

Project 2, which is a sense making exploration of some key processes and themes in the participant’s current practice, which have been identified in the research proposal, and which begins to make greater sense of the literature.

Project 3, where the participant is required to demonstrate an increasingly complex understanding of experiences of organisational change to which the participant has contributed as a manager, leader or consultant and which situates the participant’s thinking in relation to other approaches to understanding the issues raised.

For the MA: A synopsis of the 3 projects identifying the themes running through the work and critically appraising the methods and practices employed in the research. The coherence of the research projects must be clearly demonstrated.

For the DMan: Project 4 is a further account of organizational change that demonstrates the ability to explore one’s practice, informed in increasing depth by a coherent theoretical base and awareness of broader issues raised by this practice.

For the DMan: A synopsis and critical appraisal of the 4 projects identifying the themes running through the work, addressing the question of method and critically appraising theories and practices employed in the research. The coherence of the research projects must be clearly demonstrated and the contribution made to knowledge and professional practice must be identified. This is the final step in three years’ of intense work in which the participants have gradually developed risk-taking and spontaneity in the first order reflexivity of academic research and have become able to articulate a rhetorically strong voice in the conflictual dynamics of organizational reality.

7 Publishing the work of programme participants

The research community of the programme has been well placed to generate material and insight into the everyday practices of actual organisational life. The programme is building up a body of knowledge about what managers and leaders actually do at the micro level. This research has been published in a series of edited volumes containing the work of graduates from the programme called Complexity and Emergence in Organizations, published in London by Routledge. Titles so far published are:

A Complexity Perspective on Researching Organizations: Taking experience seriously, edited by Ralph Stacey and Douglas Griffin;

Complexity and the Experience of Leading Organizations, edited by Douglas Griffin and Ralph Stacey;

Experiencing Risk, Spontaneity and Improvisation in Organizational Change: Working live, edited by Patricia Shaw and Ralph Stacey;

Complexity and the Experience of Managing in the Public Sector, edited by Ralph Stacey and Douglas Griffin.

Complexity and the Experience of Values, Conflict and Compromise in Organisations, edited by Ralph Stacey and Doug Griffin.

An appendix on the website http://tinyurl.com/35yl89x gives a list of the theses completed by those who have graduated.

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8 Timing, costs and entry requirements

New participants are admitted to the program every six months in April or October.

Dates of the residential units over the next three years will be: 20-23 January 2012; 20-23 April, 2012; 6-9 July 2012; 12-15 October, 2012; 25-28 January 2013; 19-22 April 2013; 5-8 July 2013; 11-14 October 2013.

The fee is GBP 8,000 per annum. This does not include accommodation and conference facility costs so that participants can expect to incur costs of about GBP 2,000 per annum for accommodation and of course travel costs to a meeting venue near London. A discount of £1,000 per annum is available for those who have to pay 50% or more of the fee from their own private resources.

Applicants should: be competent and fluent in the English language, both spoken and written; normally have a first degree, or equivalent; have at least five years of practical experience of organisational life in a managerial or consulting role; continue working in or for organisations throughout the programme.

9 The Faculty Members

Dr Chris Mowles is the Programme Director of DMan Programme run by the Complexity Research Group, and an independent consultant. In his consultancies he has worked with the British, Dutch and Chinese governments, the UN, the NHS and leading international NGOs. He has held senior positions in organisations in the private, public and not-for-profit sectors.

He is the author of Rethinking Management: Radical insights from the complexity sciences (Gower: 2011); Conflict and Compromise in Aid Agencies, in Stacey, R. and Griffin, D (eds.) (2008) Complexity and the Experience of Values, Conflict and Compromise in Organisations, Routledge: London; Post-foundational Development Management: Power, Politics and Complexity, Public Administration and Development, (2010) Volume 30, issue 2, 149-158.

Current research Interests: ethics, management, strategy, complexity, development management

Professor Douglas Griffin, visiting Professor at the Business School of the University of Hertfordshire, is a member of the Complexity Research Group and an independent consultant. Doug is an American and resident of Germany and has worked in a number of especially European countries as an independent organization consultant over the past 25 years and additionally been employed in positions of strategic personnel development in globally operating companies in Europe.

He is co-editor with Ralph Stacey of two series, each including six volumes, published by Routledge: Complexity: the experience of organizing (2005) and Complexity and emergence in organisations (2002) and author of The Emergence of Leadership: Linking self-organization and ethics also published by Routledge.

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Current research interests: Complexity, culture, power, the importance of rhetoric in practical management and leadership, progressing research – method and the development of reflexivity,

Dr Karen Norman, Associate Fellow of the Complexity Research Group, and Chief Nursing Officer & Director of Patient Services for Gibraltar Health Authority.

Karen’s professional background is nursing. Her work history encompasses thirty years working in healthcare, in both the public and private sector, in the UK, Australia and New Zealand and latterly, Gibraltar. With fifteen years working at Board level, she also has management consultancy experience gained with an international consultancy company.

Karen gained her Doctorate in Management (D.Man) in 2005. Her thesis focused on strategic change and accountability and risk management. Winner of four scholarships, she has further supplemented her learning through study tours in Australia, USA and Europe. She is Editorial Advisor to International Journal of Health Care Quality Assurance and the Nursing and Midwifery Council journal.

Karen’s publications include: Norman, K. The Experience of Clinical Risk Assessment in the Health Sector, in: Complexity and

the Experience of Managing in Public Sector Organisations, Stacey, R. Griffin D. (eds) (2005) Routledge.

Parsley* K, Corrigan P. Quality improvement in healthcare: Putting evidence into practice.( 2nd edition) Chapman & Hall, 1999.

Parsley K. In search of pathways. Nursing Times 1998; 94 (32): 40-41.

Current research Interests: management, complexity, strategy, nursing.

Dr Nicholas Sarra, Associate Fellow of the Complexity Research Group, Member of the Institute of Group Analysis. Nick works primarily as an organisational consultant supporting teams and individuals in Healthcare and Government institutions. He has lived and worked extensively in Africa, China and the Middle East.

Nick’s publications include: The Emotional Experience of Performance Management in the Health Sector; The Corridor and Organisational Development in the NHS, both in the Complexity series (Eds: Stacey,R. and Griffin,D.).He is a Consultant Psychotherapist in the N.H.S and lives in Devon.

Current research Interests:

Ralph Stacey’s professional background is in management and organisational research. His work experience of more than forty years covers working as an economist in the steel industry, director of corporate planning in the construction industry, investment strategist in the finance industry, management consultant, group therapist and academic focusing on teaching, research and research supervision in relation to organisations and their management. He is now Professor of Management and member of the Complexity Research Group at the University of Hertfordshire and Member of the Institute of Group Analysis.

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He is author of Strategic Management and Organisational Dynamics (Pearson, 6th edition, 2011), Complexity and Organizational Reality: Uncertainty and the Need to Rethink Management After the Collapse of Investment Capitalism, ( Routledge, 2010); Complex Responsive Processes in Organisations (Routledge, 2001) and Complexity and Group Processes: A radically social understanding of the individual (Routledge 2003).

Current research Interests: leadership

Faculty members contribute to a blog which can be found at www.complexityandmanagement.wordpress.com

If you are interested in applying please contact: Chris Mowles at c.mowles@herts.ac.uk

Further details on publications, the annual conference etc to be found at http://www.herts.ac.uk/gsa_courses/DManMA-by-Research.cfm

Frequently asked questions (FAQs)

What kind of a time commitment does the programme require from students?Students who come on the programme are already committing to four lots of three day residentials annually, which, with travel for those coming from abroad, may amount to 16 days a year. These residentials are always held at weekends starting on Friday afternoon and finishing on Monday afternoon.

To finish a doctorate or masters degree in three years requires a considerable amount of reading, thinking and writing. We would suggest that at a minimum participants on the programme consider setting aside at least a day and a half a week, which is likely to increase as deadlines approach for submitting projects or preparing for examinations. Students are also required to read and comment on their colleagues’ work as they produce it according to timetables agreed in their learning set (usually a learning set comprises four people).

Those managers or consultants who travel regularly may find that they can use their travel and time away from home more to read and write in contribution to their research.

Is a DMan equivalent to a traditional PhD?The university is clear that both professional doctorates and traditional PhDs are of an equivalent standard. In the UK, and in many other countries in Europe and N America, there has been a big expansion of professional doctorates which are aimed at encouraging already experienced professionals to study further. In order to do so they are often configured as part time degrees so that students can go on working, but they still demand the necessary rigour to satisfy academic and accreditation requirements. Professional doctorates are aimed at holding onto the generative tension between theory and practice and in many cases are thought to be much more relevant to students who want to take seriously their practice as engineers, consultants, managers and leaders.

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How will I be allocated a supervisor?The programme accepts new students every six months (students join in April and October), so new participants will be joining an existing learning community. As already described, the learning community is further divided into learning sets, each one being assigned a supervisor. Depending on when a new student arrives, there may be little or limited choice as to where they are assigned. However, students usually have some degree of choice as to which group they join and who becomes their supervisor. In all cases students will be assigned a second supervisor, and can always share work and ideas with other students outside their learning set.

What can I expect from my supervisor?The DMan/Master of Arts is not a taught course: this means that students are responsible for developing their own programme of study with the support of their supervisor and colleagues in their immediate learning set, and from the wider learning community. At each residential, faculty members will lead a session on a number of specific themes , which would normally begin with a 45 minute presentation of some key texts followed by a group discussion. Students will find that in comparison with other degree programmes, including even PhD and other professional doctorates, they will receive very intensive and above average support from their supervisors. This will involve critical responses to what they have written both from their supervisor and from other learning set colleagues, as they complete at least three different iterations of each project. Supervisors will aim to respond to written work as speedily as possible, usually within two weeks and often sooner. All supervisors are only part time employees of the university, and many have substantive posts elsewhere.

What if something dramatic happens at work/I lose my job/I have a crisis in my family?We have already explained that it takes a good deal of commitment to complete work of a doctoral standard in three years. However, as might be expected for a programme such as ours, we are sympathetic to the disruptions of the unexpected happening in people’s professional or personal lives. We can renegotiate deadlines and still keep to the three year discipline. In the worst case scenario it is possible to withdraw from the programme for a specific amount of time and rejoin later. However, we would not recommend this, since our experience tells us that those who do not keep to the timetable, or withdraw with the aim of rejoining, very rarely complete their doctorates.

In saying that we are sympathetic to emergencies we are not implying that we are tolerant of students failing to meet their deadlines because of being busy at work. That everyone is busy is taken for granted on the programme.

Testimonials from former students

Professor Cathy Risdon DMan Graduate Professor of Family Medicine, McMaster University, Canada.

As someone who works within both university and clinical settings, I participate in a wide variety of planning and operational processes including clinical and curricular design, clinical operations, human resources and performance evaluations. All parts of my work have been dramatically influenced by my participation in the DMan programme. I experience more interest and

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involvement in issues which I had before experienced as mundane. I tend to also feel a little lest caught or frustrated by situations which used to cause more distress. I have told people that this programme has been a sustained antidote to cynicism or burnout. I think it is because the method of inquiry and reflection can be taken up in so many situations that the experience of work has become more dynamic. It has also amplified some of my iconoclastic tendencies which I am sure some of my colleagues find quite tiresome.

Professor Shona BrownDirector of Operations at Whipps Cross Hospital and Visiting Professor, London South Bank University, UK: DMan Graduate

Expect to have to articulate carefully your day to day work in ways you may not necessarily have words to hand as you join the programme. Expect to be pushed to locate your day to day work in a critical (good way) academic discourse. Expect a high standard of doctoral supervision. Expect to commit yourself to an intensive research learning process that probably isn't compatible with a very active social life. Don't be surprised when you find yourself three years later with a Doctorate - the pass marks speak for themselves.

Professor Nol Groot: DMan Graduate Professor at the Open University, Netherlands and formerly Director of Netherlands Railways, Netherlands

Provides an excellent opportunity to learn and improve at the same time, while combining work and research. By combining practice and research, my participation on the programme positively influenced the outcome of my daily work from day one. The only thing I regret is that I did not discover the programme ten years earlier. From the very start participating in the programme, combining work and research, helped me to improve results in my daily work.

Dr James Taylor: DMan Graduate CEO University of Louisville Hospital, Louisville, USA

If you are looking to make better sense of your organizational life, the DMan experience is what you must have. After more than 15 years as a teaching hospital CEO, I came to understand that the dominant theories of organization and leadership could not help me make sense of what was happening to me and around me every day. The DMan experience has reinvigorated my work life. The complexity-inspired theories learned on the programme help me make sense of my work life as I live it. For me, sense-making is the prerequisite for proficiency.

Dr Curt Lindberg DMan Graduate Chief Learning and Science Officer, Plexus Institute, USA

Abundant interaction with dedicated faculty, experienced students from around the world, fascinating scholarship, and a novel programme design matched with freedom to explore themes that emerge from this rich broth provided the ingredients for a life changing experience. Engaged

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fully you will learn deeply about the dynamics in human organisations, yourself and how your everyday actions affect the organisations you care about.

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