Emerging Strategies for a Chaotic Environment

Abstract

The possibility that any member of a system can foresee its future depends upon the dynamical properties of the system. Today's predominant management view is that ‘human agents’ in an organisation can foresee the future outcomes of their actions sufficiently well jointly to intend comprehensive organisational outcomes. This predominant view is based on the metaphor of an organisation as a machine or as an organism adapting to a given environment. The new science of complexity leads us to see organisations as complex adaptive systems. Such systems are creative when they occupy a space at the edge of disintegration, and here their specific futures cannot be foreseen. The price we pay for creativity and free will is an inability to foresee and intend future outcomes