Book Review: Managing risk and complexity: Through open communication and teamwork

This book provides an easily readable summary of the work completed in the field of organizational communication by Phillip K. Tompkins, professor emeritus at Purdue University. After receiving his PhD in organizational communication from Purdue in 1962, Tompkins was a consultant to NASA working under the legendary Wernher von Braun during the development of the Saturn V (the “moon rocket”). Based on that experience, he published two books on his time at NASA and his involvement in the space program. More recently, he has worked as a volunteer at the St. Francis Center, a homeless shelter in Denver, Colorado, resulting in a book about homelessness in the United States. In Managing Risk and Complexity, Tompkins draws on these experiences, and others, to present a theory of what he calls “open communication and teamwork.” This theory is drawn from work began in 1984 to present a theory of “concertive control,” which he and his co-researcher, George Cheney, believed “captured the essence of participatory, democratic decision making” (p. viii). The theory of concertive control has been criticized, though, for achieving the exact opposite. For example, in his study published in 1993 in Administrative Science Quarterly, James R. Barker of Marquette University concluded that