The Mentoring Relationship as a Complex Adaptive System: Finding a Model for Our Experience

Abstract

Mentoring theory and practice has evolved significantly during the past 40 years. Early mentoring models were characterized by the top-down flow of information and benefits to the protégé. This framework was reconceptualized as a reciprocal model when scholars realized mentoring was a mutually beneficial process. Recently, in response to rapidly changing organizational and social environments, scholars have explored other models of mentoring such as developmental networks. However, as we, the authors, reflect on our own experience of an informal mentoring process in an academic context we find existing models inadequately describe our experience. The model that best fits our story is a complex adaptive systems (CAS) perspective of the mentoring relationship, and we offer this lens to reconfigure current models.