Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present and explain an enactive tool to be used by managers to move effectively in the context of high uncertainty and complexity that organizations nowadays operate. Design/methodology/approach – The approach raises in the enactive management that focusses on the ability of the manager to incorporate distinctions as an observer and self-observer to design interactions that can move the situation to be transformed. The key ontological tool that allow this learning is called CLEHES©. Findings: Using a soft technology as CLEHES, re configures the ways to observe and self-observe of manager and opens the design possibilities of the situation in which the organization is. Managers become choreographers in the sense they can design and move the interactions they observe. The embodied us of this tool requires an educational program that takes the form of hermeneutical laboratory where managers incorporate distinctions in the body and change the perspective they enact. Practical implications: This approach evokes changes in the observer and the enactor situation/situated in the organizational areas where the manager is responsible. Originality/value – A different and nurturing technology to self-observer and observation, allow enactive management in multiples domains and organizational contexts where the manager dance. The structural dynamics of the CLEHES dimensions creates multiples realities, through enactive conversations in a learning self-awareness process.

Key words: complexity, CLEHES laboratory, enactive management, self management.

This paper makes the case for, and calls for participants in, an interdisciplinary research program exploring the development of theatrical methods of social system modeling. It combines argumentation that synthesizes concepts from the theatre and the system sciences with results from a pilot application of some of the modeling methods discussed. Theatrical methods of modeling facilitate surprising insights regarding the impacts of emotion and other non-trivial factors on system behaviour that are difficult to address in purely computational and diagrammatic forms of modeling. While a theoretical relationship between systems approaches and the theatrical techniques discussed has been articulated elsewhere, this paper is the first to propose a more fulsome exploration of the potentialities of this relationship for systems praxis.

Key words: augusto Boal, theatre of the oppressed, theatre for living, systems theory, cybernetics, Konstantin Stanislavski, soft systems methodology, system dynamics, critical systems heuristics, enactive management.