ABOUT THIS MAGAZINE
A Magazine from the Enlightened Enterprise Academy focused on Critical Systems Thinking & Practice as a Way to Navigate the Metacrisis and Encourage Enlightened Enterprise
The Enlightened Enterprise Academy has been running programmes in Critical Systems Thinking and the Management of Complexity, based on a book of that title by Michael C Jackson (2019). We developed the programmes with Mike having discovered that there were no existing programmes for executives.
Having Read Mike’s book, and having invited him to speak at a conference in early 2020, just before the UK went into the first Covid pandemic lockdown, I was convinced that Systems Thinking and Practice is an under appreciated discipline in management theory and practice. Mike agreed and we decided to change that.
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For the record, I believe that systems thinking and practice offers the solutions to the seemingly intractable problem, the fact most strategies fail. I am told it also it may solve the problems that exist in field of Risk Management.
The Metacrisis intensives the challenges faced by leaders as they grapple with the challenges of the 21st Century and the associated risks. The time has therefore come for systems thinking and practice approaches to be taken far more seriously than they have to date.
The reason the discipline has not been taken as seriously as it should is largely due to the way it has evolved, with “academic warfare” between the various ‘schools of systems thinking.” Critical Systems Thinking and Practice has tried to address this by suggesting strengths and weaknesses of each approach depend on the nature of the problem or opportunity they are being applied to.
The discipline, the schools, and the approach advocated by Mike Jackson are all continuing to evolve, but they are already able to offer considerable benefits to today’s business leaders who find what they already know is not working, and what they may have learned in business schools is outdated.
This magazine will be of interest to anyone interesting in the discipline, its usefulness, and the new thinking that emerges as it matures.
