Critical Systems Thinking and the Management of Complexity

Preface

There is a considerable debate about how to describe the modern world. Alternatives include the following: a global village, postindustrial society, consumer society, media society, network society, risk society, late capitalism, high modernity, postmodernity, liquid modernity, and the information age. To some, the new names just signal the rapid acceleration of changes in society that started to emerge between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. To others, we have crossed a threshold and entered a completely new era. What no one doubts is that things have become much more complex. We are entangled in complexity.

An IBM survey of more than 1500 Chief Executive Officers worldwide states:

The world's private and public sector leaders believe that a rapid escalation of ‘complexity’ is the biggest challenge confronting them. They expect it to continue – indeed, to accelerate – in the coming years.

(2010)

An OECD report begins:

Complexity is a core feature of most policy issues today; their components are interrelated in multiple, hard‐to‐define ways. Yet governments are ill‐equipped to deal with complex problems.

(2017)

At the global level, economic, social, technological, and ecological systems have become interconnected in unprecedented ways, and the consequences are immense. We face a growing set of apparently intractable problems, including the nuclear threat; continual warfare; terrorism; climate change; difficulties in securing energy, food, and water supplies; ...