An Organization Is Not a Talking Shop, or Is It? Conversation as the fabric of organizing

Chris Mowles is Professor of Complexity and Management at the Hertfordshire Business School and a thoughtful voice on how organizations actually work. He writes a Substack called On Complexity, where he brings ideas from complexity theory into everyday organizational life.

His recent post, An organization is not a talking shop, or is it?, challenges some common assumptions about talk, meetings, and what counts as real work in organizations.

Many people dismiss talk in organizations as idle chatter, something to be minimized or streamlined away. Chris goes deeper. He notes that when we shift our focus from abstract structures and strategies to actual interactions between people, we are paying attention to conversation itself as the fabric of organizational life. In doing so, he draws out a simple yet powerful point: organizations are patterns of interaction, and talk is not peripheral to them; it is central to how they come into being and how they change.

At the end of the piece, he underlines what many of us in Conversational Leadership have argued for some time: Changes in organizations are changes in conversation.