Description

This is a book about managing complexity, and within it we adopt a management systems approach to situations that we see as uncertain and complex, and that involve what many might refer to in the abstract as purposeful adaptive activity systems. When purposeful adaptive activity systems are considered in terms of their exogenous
behaviour and their interaction with other such systems, we might more simply refer
to them as actors. When considered in terms of their endogenous processes, however, we might more usefully think of them as organisations. Management systems is the use of systems thinking to pursue management activities. It can provide an important way to showing managers and other leaders how they may
be able to satisfactorily deal with omplexity. Some aspects of management systems provide ways by which complex situations can be described, while others give guidelines that enable us to explain such situations. Our interest will, in addition to this, be to explore the nature of systemic inquiry into complex situations through methods that enable managers to formulate dynamic strategic plans. To do this we will take you on a journey through ideas of management systems. We explore methods that are capable of dealing with complexity by creating conceptualisations that in effect simplify the complexities. The methods generate rules that centre on these conceptualisations, and that the inquirer will adopt to explore the situation of
interest. These methods are phenomena that, following Cohen and Stewart, we might refer to as instruments of complicity that turn complexity into simplexity. We shall explore some of these methods, and show the power that they have in helping an inquirer seek intervention strategies in given situations. While all the methods have some broad similarities (since they are both scientifically and system based), they also have differences that come from the distinct perspectives of the people who create and evolve them. These perspectives are embedded in what we
can call a cognitive model, and each model that links with each method is unique in itself. This very uniqueness means, according to some people, that there is no way that we can use the different methods together in an assembly that takes advantage of their uniquenesses.