2023 COMMENTS, CONTRIBUTIONS & CONCLUSIONS | Mapping And Tapping Workplace Networks

“The financial system is, for all practical purposes, infinitely complex, so no matter how intensively we study the system and how hard we try to control it, we still can focus only on a tiny part of it,” argues Jón Daníelsson, Director of the Systemic Risk Centre at the London School of Economics, in The Illusion of Control: Why Financial Crises Happen, and What We Can (and Can’t) Do About It.1“Systemic risk emerges precisely where we are not looking.” Echoing Kay and King, Daníelsson notes that the economy behaves differently than the physical world. “It is based on the behavior of human beings, many of whom are intent on doing exactly what they want to do — rules or no rules,” he writes. “In physics, math captures all; not so in the society of humans that form the economy.”

“Organizations are social communities, not economic machines,” writes Elizabeth Florent Treacy, Director of the Executive Master in Change degree program at INSEAD, in Hidden Challenges: Human Dynamics in Organizational Change and Recovery.2 “Although the dynamics of crisis and change manifest at many different levels simultaneously, most people focus on what can be seen and try to ignore the unseen,” she argues. However, she encourages us to recognize, it is possible to “uncover and frame the dynamics that influence crisis and change at individual, group, and organizational levels, in ways that are pragmatic and applicable.” Key to this is adopting a “systems-psychodynamic” perspective — very much so akin to what Captain Wetherbee describes in his discussion of managing risk through “sociotechnical systems of control.” Both emphasize that patterns of action within organizations emerge from human relationships.