The Project
The CUOA Complexity Community is a community of practice where members can exchange knowledge and experiences in the field of complexity sciences as applied to management.
This “community of practice” is a space where every member has the opportunity for lifelong learning based on the sharing of expertise, practices, ideas, studies, research, experiments, and more.
Intelligence is distributed and must be harnessed and nurtured in collaborative environments such as our community. The future belongs to “many-minded” organizations, and we aim to be like a Renaissance “workshop” where people can expand their awareness, learn, interact, exchange ideas, and improve their skills.
Communities of practice are self-organized systems based on shared interests, professional diversity, mutual relationships, the exchange of both tacit and explicit knowledge, and cooperative learning. The construction of shared collective knowledge enables the development of genuine cognitive redundancy grounded in open-mindedness, new perspectives, intellectual curiosity, and nonconformity. The reward is a compelling one: cognitive enrichment that allows us to navigate the seas of complexity like “wise travelers.”
Enhancing Professional Knowledge
CUOA Business School offers the “Complexity Community” because it believes this is the only way to enhance professional knowledge—which is distinct from scientific knowledge, yet complements and enriches it. Professional knowledge is created through the decision-making process and the actions of professionals who tackle ill-defined, unique, and ever-changing problems.
Donald A. Schön (1930–1997), a professor at MIT, described this process of building professional knowledge as “reflective practice.”
Schön argues: “Usually, reflection on knowing-in-action goes hand in hand with reflection on the ‘things’ at hand. There is a phenomenon—somewhat problematic, unsettling, or interesting—that the individual is trying to address. As they seek to make sense of it, they also reflect on the understandings implicit in their action—understandings that they bring to light, critique, restructure, and incorporate into their next action. It is this overall process of reflection in action that is central to the art through which professionals sometimes address situations characterized by uncertainty, instability, uniqueness, and conflicts of values.”
According to the professor, reflection during action involves: “Bringing to the surface in the moment, critiquing, restructuring, and evaluating intuitive understandings of the phenomena being experienced; it often takes the form of a reflective conversation with the situation.”
