Complexity and Management Conference 2025

Our family groups, the organisations we work for, and the societies we live in all shape our everyday behaviour, and our habitual ways of dealing with each other, and may have aspirations for shaping them further: to make us conform, to make us cohere with others, to behave respectfully, to help groups work, to encourage us to spend more and commit more. While our socialisation may take place largely pre-reflectively and unconsciously, in advanced capitalist economies there are algorithms, marketing and advertising disciplines which deliberately seek to direct our everyday actions towards certain ends. We live in an economy of persuasion. To what extent do we notice and become mindful of how our habits are shaped and how we try to shape others? 

From a pragmatic perspective, concentrating on the actions of one individual, as many leadership programmes do, leaves out a great deal. For example, the leader may propose, but how does everyone else respond? Until we take the gesture and the response together we cannot begin to understand what an action means. And what kind of feelings are evoked in the exchange? To what degree are the habitual patterns of relating affected by the leader’s ‘behaviours’ as opposed to the broader game of games which is taking place in the organisation and beyond? How does the unconscious manifest in group dynamics, particularly if the group is anxious and uncertain? To what degree do context, time and artefacts make a difference?

While organisations tend to have grand schemes of wholesale transformation, change is a complex and uncertain undertaking. From a complexity perspective, whatever we take transformation to be it is just as likely to arise from the micro, the minor gesture, the adjustments of habit in the everyday following a breakdown, which can escalate into population-wide change.

At the 2025 conference, we are delighted to have Carolyn Pedwell, Professor of Digital Media in the Sociology Department at Lancaster University, as a keynote speaker to explore these themes with us. Amongst Carolyn’s publications is her book Revolutionary Routines: The Habits of Social Transformation (McGill-Queens UP, 2021), which explores the paradoxical quality of habits, which enact the possibility of continuity and change both at the same time.

The conference begins on Friday 6^th June 2025 and finishes at lunchtime on Sunday 8^th. The currency of the conference is conversation and exploration in large groups and small.

On Friday 6^th there is a one-day introduction to the perspective of perspectives we refer to as complex responsive processes of relating.

The conference is residential and the conference fee covers all board and lodging. Full refund up to one week before the conference.

Prof Chris Mowles c.mowles@herts.ac.uk 

Roffey Park Institute
Forest Road
Horsham
West Sussex
RH12 4TB

Tel: +44 (0) 01293 854042