Ralph D. Stacey

Ralph Douglas Stacey (October 1948 – September 4 2021) was a British organizational theorist and Professor of Management at Hertfordshire Business School, University of Hertfordshire, in the UK and one of the pioneers of enquiring into the implications of the natural sciences of complexity for understanding human organisations and their management. He is best known for his writings on the theory of organisations as complex responsive processes of relating.

Stacey passed away in September 2021 shortly before his 79th birthday.

He published his first book in 1990 which was on his experience of doing strategic planning and this was followed in 1991 by the first of his books, The Chaos Frontier, which sought to explore the implications of the complexity sciences for management and organisations. Then in 1993, he published Strategic Management and Organisational Dynamics, a textbook which located complexity thinking about strategy and organisations in the wider strategy literature. The textbook is now in its 6th edition. The year 1996 saw the publication of his book Complexity and Organisational Creativity. In the meantime he had embarked on the training programme of the Institute of Group Analysis in London, qualifying as a group psychotherapist in 1998 and becoming a member of that Institute and of the Group Analytic Society. He ran clinical therapy groups at a local hospital until about 2004. Also in 1995 he set up a group supervision of PhD students and it was through this activity that he met Patricia Shaw and Doug Griffin as their PhD supervisor. They became friends and colleagues and together they developed the theory of complex responsive processes of relating as a way of understanding human organisations and their management. The collaboration between the three had a major impact on what Stacey was writing so that there is a radical shift in his way of thinking from a systemic approach prior to 2000 to a responsive processes approach in 2000 and thereafter. Together, in 1995, they set up the Complexity and Management Centre as a research centre at Hertfordshire University with Stacey as its director. Also in 2000, Stacey, Griffin and Shaw established the Doctor of Management programme at Hertfordshire Business School and Stacey took the role of its director until 2011 when he was succeeded by Professor Chris Mowles The programme is still running and has produced 58 graduates from many different countries.

In 1968, he returned to South Africa where he taught applied economics at the University of the Witwatersrand for two years after which he moved permanently to the United Kingdom where he has lived ever since 1970. He took a post in the Commercial Assessment Department of the British Steel Corporation where his main task was forecasting the demand for and prices of a range of steel products. In 1972 he moved to the Corporate Planning Department of the international construction company, John Laing, where he eventually became the manager of the department. He left in 1984 to become an investment analyst at what was to become an investment bank and then in 1985 moved briefly to a management consultancy before taking a position as senior lecturer at Hatfield Polytechnic. This organisation became the University of Hertfordshire in 1992 and in the same year Stacey was appointed Professor of Management.

Stacey was born in Johannesburg, South Africa to Jack, an English immigrant, and Auriel, a South African of Scottish descent. His father was a welder in the steel industry and his mother was a housewife. He completed school at Jeppe High School for Boys in 1960 and was awarded an NCR Scholarship to study at the University of the Witwatersrand where he pursued the degree of Bachelor of Commerce specialising in law subjects. He had the intention of going on to study further to become a lawyer but in the course of his studies he developed a greater interest in economics. He won the McBride Scholarship to the London School of Economics which enabled him to travel to London in 1964 and complete a Master of Science degree in 1965. This was followed by a PhD which he completed in 1967; the research topic was the construction and estimation of econometric models intended to predict patterns of industrial development.