Managing Software for Growth: Without Fear, Control, and the Manufacturing Mindset

A New Way of Thinking

Stacey and his colleagues suggest that the only way to avoid misapplying complexity is to throw out traditional ways of thinking, including systems thinking, entirely. They propose a new perspective completely different from what most management complexity writers talk about. It's a radically different answer to the questions of why organizations become what they become, how that happens, and how people participate. Stacey and his colleagues call this new way of thinking Transformative Teleology (teleology being an answer to the “why” question), but I would call it realistic thinking:

The central proposition in [realistic thinking] is that human actions and interactions are processes, not systems, and the coherent patterning ...