Managing Complexity—The Path Toward Intelligent Organizations

Coping with complexity is at the heart of management and leadership in the turbulent environments faced by the organizations and societies of our day. The systems approach provides transdisciplinary theories and tools for dealing with this challenge more effectively than efforts merely based on disciplinary insights or pragmatic recipes. In this paper, a concept of "intelligent organizations" is introduced. A framework for the design of intelligent organizations is proposed that links three organizational cybernetic models: the Model for Systemic Control, the Viable System Model, and the Team Syntegrity model.2 The proposition is that a combined use of these models, guided by the integrative conceptual framework, enables a more effective response to complex situations than merely pragmatic approaches to "integrative management." Provisional empirical evidence gathered from applied research indicates that the proposed framework is capable of enhancing such superior potential for effective response. As such, it promises to meet the specific needs of the new types of organizations that have already begun to emerge in the knowledge societies.