Developing Capacity for Innovation in Complex Systems

9 Innovation – between chaos and order

Introduction

… the point about complexity is that it is useful – it helps us to understand the things we are trying to understand.

(Byrne, 1998)

As we have seen, the concepts of chaos and self-organisation have evolved from the physical sciences, whereas the idea of complex adaptive systems (CAS) has its roots in the biological sciences (Gell-Mann, 1994). The first managerial applications of complexity theory were proposed by Maturana and Varela’s work on autopoiesis (Dooley, 1997). The theory of autopoiesis suggests that structural change occurs through self-renewal: replication, copy, and reproduction (Maturana and Varela, 1992). CAS has been used to examine organisations and leadership in a number ...