Recommended Reading List (Books)

Below you will find a list of recommended books categorized into four subject areas: Teams, Complexity Thinking, Leadership, and The Flow System.

This reading list is dynamic, and I will add new items as I find them. If you have a book that you would like to recommend, feel free to either contact me or list it in the comment section of this page.

Happy Reading. Any comments or reviews for any of the books listed will be welcomed and added below each text. Please keep reviews/comments to only a few sentences.

Thanks.


Teams

Extreme Teaming: Lessons in Complex, Cross-Sector Leadership

Amy C. Edmondson and Jean-Francois Harvey

Group Dynamics for Teams (current Edition)

Daniel Levi

Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration

Keith Sawyer

Group Problem Solving

Patrick R. Laughlin

Improving Patient Safety Through Teamwork and Team Training

Edited by: Eduardo Salas and Karen Frush

Leading Teams: Setting the Stage for Great Performance

Richard J. Hackman

Multiteam Systems: An Organization Form for Dynamic and Complex Environments

Edited by: Stephen J. Zaccaro, Michelle A. Marks, and Leslie A. DeChurch

Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread–The Lessons from a New Science

Alex Pentland

Team Cognition: Understanding the Factors that Drive Process and Performance

Edited by: Eduardo Salas and Stephen M. Fiore

Team Effectiveness and Decision Making in Organizations

Edited by: Richard Guzzo, Eduardo Salas, and Associates

Team Genius: The New Science of High-Performing Organizations

Rich Karlgaard and Michael S. Malone

Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate, and Compete in the Knowledge Economy

Amy C. Edmondson

Teams of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

General Stanley McChrystal, Tantum Collins, David Silverman, and Chris Fussell

The Discipline of Teams: A Mindbook–Workbook for Delivering Small Group Performance

Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith

The Wiley Blackwell Handbook of The Psychology of Team Working and Collaborative Processes

Edited by: Eduardo Salas, Ramon Rico and Jonathan Passmore

The Wisdom of Crowds

James Surowiecki

The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-Performance Organization

Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith

Theories of Team Cognition: Cross–Disciplinary Perspectives

Edited by: Eduardo Salas, Stephen M. Fiore, and Michael P. Letsky

Wiser: Getting Beyond Groupthink to Make Groups Smarter

Cass R. Suntein and Reid Hastie

Complexity Thinking

Chaos: Making a New Science

James Gleick

Complexity: A Very Short Introduction

John Holland

Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos

Mitchell M. Waldrop

Coping with Uncertainty: Insights from the New Science of Chaos, Self-Organization, and Complexity

Uri Merry

Critical Mass: How one Thing Leads to Another

Philip Ball

Design Unbound: Designing for Emergence in a White Water World (Vol. 1)

Design Unbound: Designing for Emergence in a White Water World (Vol. 2)

Anne M. Pendleton-Jullian and John Seely
Two-Volume set

Emergence: From Chaos to Order

John H. Holland

Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software

Steven Johnson

Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds Complexity

John Holland

How the Leopard Changed its Spots: The Evolution of Complexity

Brian Goodwin

Life Itself: A Comprehensive Inquiry into the Nature, Origin, and Fabrication of Life

Robert Rosen

Making Sense of the Organization: The Impermanent Organization

Karl E. Weick

Probably Approximately Correct: Nature’s Algorithms for Learning and Prospering in a Complex World

Leslie Valiant

Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies

Geoffrey West

Signals and Boundaries: Building Blocks for Complex Adaptive Systems

John H. Holland

Social Ecology in the Digital Age: Solving Complex Problems in a Globalized World

Daniel Stokols

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution

Stuart Kauffman

Think Fast and Slow

Daniel Kahneman


The Flow System

The Flow System: Key Principles and Attributes

John R. Turner and Nigel Thurlow

The Flow System: The Evolution of Agile and Lean Thinking in an Age of Complexity

John R. Turner, Nigel Thurlow, and Brian Rivera
Forthcoming–Expected this Summer 2020

The Flow System Guide

John R. Turner, Nigel Thurlow, and Brian Rivera

“When in doubt, we must suspend judgement.”
Hume

“When we are presented with an alternative that appears to us to be more meaningful and so more true, a new perception will take place and correct our errors.”
Polanyi