Critical Systems Thinking and the Management of Complexity

Conclusion

The only wisdom we can hope to acquire

Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.

The houses are all gone under the sea.

The dancers are all gone under the hill.

(Eliot 1959, lines 97–100)

Almost all people want to leave the world a better place than they found it. And we have a few years on this earth when we can try to make a difference. The argument of this book is that critical systems thinking can help us to do so.

The overwhelming issue facing governments and organizations, in the twenty‐first century, is complexity. This arises from increased size, interconnectivity and diversity, and from the rapid rate of change. It also stems from the increased differentiation of society, leading to divergent stakeholder perspectives, and the loss of faith in the “grand narratives” of religion, progress, economic growth, free‐market capitalism, and communism. There is a general recognition that decision‐makers need more than commonsense to meet the challenges posed by the growth in complexity and, also, that traditional analytic tools don't help much. Increasingly, international bodies, governments, businesses, public sector entities, and other organizations are looking to systems thinking for answers. Angel Gurria, the OECD Secretary General, declared, in March 2018, that “unless we adopt a systems approach, unless we employ systems thinking, we will fail to understand the world we are living in.” The UN System Leadership Framework classes systems thinking ...