Catalyzing Stories

Reflections, Learning & Application

Plexus Institute was built on the belief that sharing stories about how organizational leaders and complexity thinkers engage in and demonstrate practical applications of complexity in their work could help others across any field address complexity in their own systems. Plexus Network members came together in 2019 to develop a project that focused on the complexity of organizational management through personal narratives that explored experiences, reflections and learning.

Over the following months five peer reviewed Catalyzing Stories were published and many more are under development.

Are you interested in…?

Sharing knowledge that reflects a unique experience and practice of addressing complexity in projects and systems that introduces complexity to a broad audience.
Engaging in informal conversations around topics of complexity in our “sand box” that anyone can play in and can lead to new collaborations, ideas and projects.
Have content as diverse as the audience that reads them, from short blog posts to peer-reviewed papers, cases and research, each piece offers new opportunities for sharing, learning and engagement with complexity.

Discovering Complexity

David Hurst tells his story of how his organization was thrown into crisis by an ill-advised takeover on the eve of a sharp recession.

Buck The System: Sense-making and Acting Into Complexity at the United States Department of Labor

Bruce Waltuck shares his story of acting to create change without the awareness of the optimal patterns and methods for acting into complexity, and the consequences that followed.

Why Schools Fail the Complexity Test and What They Need to Do to Pass It

Peter Barnard writes about how teachers in a large secondary school in the UK began a journey that would enable them to recognize the many advantages of operating as a complex adaptive system and the way unexpected outcomes can sometimes lead to surprising and counter-intuitive outcomes.

Moving from Complicated to Complex: An Organizational Transformation

Marc Narkus-Kramer’s timely story focuses on specific events that led to the major organizational changes in the Center for Advanced Aviation System Development (CAASD) at MITRE.

Listen to Catalyzing Conversations Podcast

The Catalyzing Stories authors share their work in a new podcast series that focus on complexity thinking in today’s social, organizational, institutional, technical and economic ecosystems.

Catalyzing Conversations Podcast

Catalyzing Conversations

CURRENT EPISODES