Traditional Thought
Our thinking about organizations rests on three hundred years worth of really smart guys like philosopher Immanuel Kant contemplating their navels. It's a bit cavalier to say, “What a boob, that Kant.” Current orthodoxy has some heft.
Especially in the last hundred years, we've been encouraged to imagine organizations as mechanical systems. We then make what looks like a short leap from natural systems to human organizations, treat them the same, and assume we're right. We make this simplistic assumption to stay sane. If we're not in control, we feel powerless and probably useless. So we jump to conclusions and we oversimplify.
When we do that, Stacey and his colleagues suggest, we oversimplify complexity by assuming there's ...
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