Total quality management, reengineering, downsizing and benchmarking have frustrated more organizations than they have helped. They have failed where management has not taken the whole organization and its environment into account. Instead, they tried to improve the performance of parts of their businesses as though they were mechanisms; a 400-year-old perception of human organizations. For years, we've struggled to find a more holistic perspective. It's now beginning to emerge. In the past 10 or 15 years, leading thinkers in physics, economics, biology, philosophy and social sciences, among other disciplines, have been developing an integrated and organic approach to organizations and the people in them. These activities were often pursued in isolation of each other but last years' establishment of the Integral Institute marked a milestone in the joining of these perspectives and disciplines in generative and exciting new ways. One aspect of the emerging understanding of systems and structures, called "complexity," provides a useful inroad and powerful insights into organization in the natural world (Sherman, 1998; Kauffman, 1995). Like other systems-thinking approaches, it has had great difficulty in bearing fruit in human organizations. That is because it has lacked, until now, the integration of the human interior experience. Introducing developmental psychology and spirituality, along with an understanding of shared cultural models provides the missing element to making complexity-based systems thinking fuller and more useful to those organizations and individuals who have intuited its value all along. Albert Einstein once said: "Without changing our pattern of thought, we will not be able to solve the problems we created with our current patterns of thought." This describes the best way to make use of integrated complexity. Applying it to organizations is most powerful through the use of a theoretical framework that uses complexity as the systemic framework to inform decisions and actions. Understanding the perspective of complexity will help an organization not only to improve its existing processes and systems, but also to encourage the innovation that it needs to adapt to changing business landscapes or in some cases create new environments. We can start with an exploration of complexity, to which we will add missing dimensions.
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