What a Mess! Participation as a Simple Managerial Rule to ‘Complexify’ Organizations

This paper adopts a view of organizations as complex adaptive systems and makes a case for making organizations more complex internally through the use of a fairly simple managerial rule – using participative decision making. Participation in decision making enhances connectivity in organizations, which in turn, gives the organization the opportunity to self‐organize and co‐evolve in more effective ways than when there is minimal connectivity (i.e., autocracy). The paper uses a specific body of research to support the arguments about why participation can benefit the practice of management in modern organizations.