Complex Responsive Processes in Organizations: Learning and Knowledge Creation

• argues that the information processing view of knowledge creation held by systems thinkers is no longer tenable
• develops the alternative perspective of Complex Responsive Processes of relating, drawing on the complexity sciences as a source for analogies with human action
• places self-organizing interaction at the centre of the knowledge creating process in organizations.

Learning and knowledge creation are seen as qualitative processes of power relating that are emotional as well as intellectual, creative as well as destructive, enabling as well as constraining, and the result is a radical questioning of the belief that organizational knowledge is essentially codified and centralized. Instead, organizational knowledge is understood to be in the relationships between people in an organization and has to do with the qualities of those relationships.