ABSTRACT
Some two years into my involvement with Oliveira and the development of his innovations, described in the last chapter, I joined a doctoral group at the University of Hertfordshire. The members of the group were particularly interested in exploring how insights from the sciences of complexity might enhance our ways of making sense of life in organizations. Even before my encounter with Oliveira I had been fascinated with questions around how innovation actually occurred. For some years I had worked in industry and found mainstream ways of thinking quite limited when it came to understanding how innovation came about and how it was blocked in my own work experience. My encounter with Oliveira only increased my interest and on beginning to read about the implications of the complexity sciences for understanding organizations, I came to sense a close link with my interest in innovation.
I found the discussions in the doctoral group very challenging. We all talked about chaos and complexity, at first using terms and concepts drawn from the natural sciences, without being at all clear about what they might mean in terms of human behaviour. We talked about various approaches to psychology and tried to make links, again without being all that clear about what we meant. Some of the group members were interested in social constructionism and began to make links between the construction of social realties in conversations (Shotter, 1993) and the emergence of order in complex systems. The focus of attention in our own conversations began to shift to the nature of human communicative interaction and how unpredictable its emergent patterns were.
