Why There's Nothing Wrong With Systems Thinking a Little Chaos Won't Fix? A Critique of Modern Systems Theory and the Practice of Organizational Change It Informs

Abstract

We find ourselves at the dawning of a new millennium, uneasy denizens of a world of growing flux. The models of reality on which we rely in our continuing effort to master the turbulent and hypercompetitive marketplace are failing us. Even the much touted 20th-century innovation referred to by Peter Senge in his 1990 bestseller of the same name as the “fifth discipline,” that is, systems thinking, turns out to be less than adequate to the task. Therein lies the central purpose of this paper: to demonstrate why there's nothing wrong with systems thinking that a little chaos can't remedy. My intent is twofold: first, to expose the problematic partialness of this paradigm, given its tendency to direct one's focus to not to the whole system, but to its exterior “half,” and, second, to introduce the reader to Chaos, the powerful cosmology now emerging from 20th-century science, as a science of whole wholes—one that enables the practitioner of management and systems sciences to comprehend the system's externality, its subtle within, and most importantly, the crucial relationship between them.