Summary of System Theories and Management

by Robin Arthur

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This bestseller was quoted by Xerox Business Services Magazine, as the "One of the Top Ten Business Books of all Time." And from CIO Magazines, "One of the Ten Books of the Decade that are Must-Reads for Information Systems Professionals." (Wheatley, 1999) Meg Wheatley believes our thinking has simply been all-wrong about everything involving our organizations. And in the past years all we have done is gradually corrected the old versions.

Meg Wheatley enumerated four assumptions about self-organizing organizations:

• Human beings and their organizations tend toward change and development.
• Change is a power present everywhere in the organization.
• Resistance reflects our need to protect our sense of dignity and identity as presently defined, rather than a fundamental tendency toward inertia.
• The organization is creative; it constantly seeks more effective ways of organizing itself in response to the environment (Michael Finley, pg. 6).

Everyone aims for a certain type of organization or describes their version what it should be like. In all actuality ended up being the same as a living system. These organizations are living systems that need to act like human beings, not machines. They also need, if anything, deengineered. Upper management seems to be more worried about how much production goes out the back door than what goes on with their employees, or if they keep them. In other words they care more about the dollars instead of caring for the people who help get them the dollars. Every organization seems to have a hidden agenda or enemy that we don't trust.

Confusion is a process of organization. Consider the wild there are repeated signs of chaos. This is actually a sign of order. Wheatley said, "To understand is to surrender to one's own nature. It requires trust and imagination above and beyond what any conventional organization is accustomed to or permits (Michael Finley, pg. 7).

Chaos is really order of an arguably divine sort, uninhibited by primitive notions of boxes and spheres (Michael Finley, pg. 7).