Blog
Royal Bank of Scotland fiasco shows the power of networks
By Paul Ormerod The last week or so has seen complete mayhem in the Royal Bank of Scotland and its subsidiaries. A computer glitch has caused their payments systems to collapse. Monies have not been processed, 17 million customers have been unable to access their accounts and pay their bills. The impact for RBS has been catastrophic. So, presumably, an incident of this magnitude must have been caused by a massive event? Perhaps the building containing the Bank’s main computers was burned to the ground? Or the system was the...
read moreHealthy Cities
By Claudius Van Wyk Recently I went to the launch of a report by the UCL–Lancet Commission of Healthy Cities. The report affirmed that the requisite knowledge was in place for transforming a ‘city’ into a ‘healthy city’, however it also acknowledged that how to deliver potential health benefits and how to ensure that they reached all citizens in urban contexts across the world was less well understood. This issue was seen as representing an increasingly important task since the majority of the world’s population now...
read morePower versus Authority
By Greg Fisher I have recently been involved in conversations about the difference between power and formal authority in organisations. It is an important distinction which I’d like to explore in this article. The parts of the management science literature that refer to and borrow from Complexity theory tend to define formal authority in line with conventional language i.e. it is the authority conveyed on someone in an organisation due to their official role. On the other hand, power is a trickier concept to grasp and it is also more...
read moreKahneman and schizophrenia in economics
By Paul Ormerod I was at a fascinating session last Thursday, with Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman in conversation with a leading thinker from the advertising world, Rory Sutherland of Ogilvy and Mather. Kahneman was talking about his book Thinking Fast and Slow, a summary of his life’s work. I am a great admirer of Kahneman. Trained as a psychologist, along with his co-Laureate Vernon Smith, he more or less created experimental and applied behavioural economics. He had the extraordinary idea (!) that instead of theorising a priori...
read moreLondon Segregation and Weak Ties
By Paul Ormerod The political map of London is like the United States, with strong geographic segregation. But is there something more subtle going on? Thomas Schelling is a brilliant American polymath, who deservedly won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2005. One of his most remarkable insights is about segregation in cities, which he published as long ago as 1971. The residential pattern of American cities tends to be pretty sharply divided on ethnic grounds. The population of many areas is often overwhelmingly drawn from a single...
read moreThe Tao of Leadership
By Greg Fisher Last week I had the honour of being involved in a set of meetings in Beijing, which represented the inaugural meeting of the Hanwang Forum, of which I am a member. There are many very supportive things I would say about this Forum but in this article I would like to focus on how this Forum came to be, which was due to the leadership of a Taoist master. I want to relay my experiences here because we Westerners have a lot to learn from the Chinese philosophy of Taoism, which curiously has a great deal of overlap with...
read moreWhat Could Complexity Theory Ever Do For Us?
By Orit Gal & Greg Fisher Over the past few years, the spillover of complexity theory from the natural into the social realms has intensified, instigating a whole range of new theories and insights about the manner in which complex human systems emerge, behave, and transform. But, with a few honourable exceptions, complexity theory has struggled to make the leap from the academic community into the real world. Could policy makers use ideas emanating from complexity theories, to design and implement better policies? Or, to paraphrase...
read moreComplex Care
By Greg Fisher I was recently given two papers to read on the nature of “Multiple Exclusion Homelessness”, which is about people with multiple care needs e.g. housing, drug addiction, unemployment, etc. The papers covered (i) Tackling homelessness and exclusion: Understanding complex lives i.e. need and (ii) Implications for Workforce Development and Interprofessional Practice i.e. the attempted satisfaction of need. In this article I’d like to consider this subject from a “complexity perspective”. The reports painted a picture...
read moreAccountability in an Uncertain World
By Greg Fisher What does accountability look like in a world that is uncertain and in which innovation is not only prevalent but also essential? In this blog I would like to argue that how we currently “do” accountability stifles innovation. This is an important issue given how rapidly the world is now changing with the on-going diffusion of information and communications technology. I conclude by calling for a serious re-think about what accountability looks like in organisational life, notably for those organisations operating in...
read moreValues, the Economy, and the Financial System
By Greg Fisher Recently I have spent a lot of time thinking about the relationship between human values and economics & finance. Specifically, this has been in two related areas: the types of corporate legal forms that exist (see Paul’s blog on this); and the “Social Investment market”. In this blog I would like to begin to flesh out a way of thinking about these issues: at the core is an emphasis on human values in an economic and financial system that has a number of collective action challenges. In particular, I believe that...
read more