Topic 5.2: Capacity for Change and Innovation – Complexity and Context

In setting up for change and innovation, consider the concept of ‘conceptual slack’ – ‘a head-full’ or sets of ‘diverse theories, models, and causal assumptions about technology and production processes that serve as a hedge against surprise and analytical error’ (Schulman, 1993:16)^[1].

The point for you to consider is that ‘a head-full of theories’ allows you to increase the sets of options available to you, and the space to test and explore those options. We call this the Law of Requisite Variety – which suggests that if you want to cope successfully with a wide variety of inputs, you need a wide variety of responses (Weick & Sutton, 2007)^[2]!

In a practical sense, whilst ‘theories’ might sound abstract, we all operate in a theory-building, hypothesis testing, and sense-making manner, either formally or informally. The outcomes of these continual thought experiments and applied tests are our sets of heuristics – our ‘rules of thumb’ about what works and what doesn’t.