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Systems Thinking: Managing Chaos and Complexity: A Platform for Designing Business Architecture [Paperback]

Jamshid Gharajedaghi
4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)


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Systems Thinking, Third Edition: Managing Chaos and Complexity: A Platform for Designing Business Architecture Systems Thinking, Third Edition: Managing Chaos and Complexity: A Platform for Designing Business Architecture 4.3 out of 5 stars (7)
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Book Description

May 24, 1999 0750671637 978-0750671637
In a nutshell, this book is about systems. This book is written for those thinkers and practitioners who have come to realize that while the whole is becoming more and more interdependent parts display choice and behave independently, and that paradoxes are the most potent challenge of emergent realities.

With a practical orientation and yet a profound theoretical depth, the book offers an operational handle on the whole by introducing an elaborate scheme called iterative design. The iterative design explicitly recognizes that choice is at the heart of human development. Development is the capacity to choose; design is a vehicle for enhancement of choice and holistic thinking. 'Designers', in this book, seek to choose rather than predict the future. They try to understand rational, emotional, and cultural dimensions of choice and to produce a design that satisfies a multitude of functions. They learn how to use what they already know and also about how to learn what they need to know.




The imperative of interdependency, the necessity of reducing endless complexities, and the need to produce manageable simplicities require a different mode of thinking, a holistic frame of reference that would allow us to focus on the relevant issues and avoid the endless search for more details while drowning in proliferating information. While organizations as a whole are becoming more and more interdependent the parts display choice and behave independently. This is the dilemma this book tries to resolve. It is a unique, cutting edge work, with a practical orientation and yet a profound theoretical depth, which goes far beyond what is currently available.

Leading edge systems thinking and practice that goes far beyond what is currently available
It deals with the whole, both conceptually and practically, written in a reader-friendly style
Five real cases cited to demonstrate practical application of theories discussed


Editorial Reviews

Review

"This is an excellent addition to books written on Systems Thinking. It is practical and timely and can be used by a vast majority of professionals such as engineers, planners and managers. I recommend it very highly to practitioners and academics."
C. J. Khisty, Dept. of Civil Engineering, Illinois Institute of Technology

Book Description

Expanded and updated edition of a best selling classic that expands on developing all inclusive systems methodologies allowing for optimal business/organizational efficacy --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

  • Paperback: 240 pages
  • Publisher: Butterworth-Heinemann (May 24, 1999)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0750671637
  • ISBN-13: 978-0750671637
  • Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.7 x 9 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
  • Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #951,109 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

4.5 out of 5 stars
(19)
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
50 of 53 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars A "Grand Unified Theory" of Management Practice? June 22, 2001
By A Customer
Format:Paperback
I have been an incurable "process geek" since first reading Hammer and Champy's "Reengineering the Corporation" about a decade ago. However, despite practicing reengineering and process management since then, it has always felt like something was missing. Other popular business books have filled in some of the missing puzzle pieces but the picture has not been complete. Jamshid Gharajedaghi's "Systems Thinking" brings it all together in a coherent whole. It's as close as I've come to a "Grand Unified Theory" of management practice.

Gharajedaghi's book is paradoxical. It is in some ways a difficult read, being at times quite theoretical and always intellectually stimulating. Like many other readers have reported, I had to read the book several times to really understand it (I've read it five times over the past six months). On the other hand, the material is extremely logical, well laid out, and quite common sense. At one level it is almost depressing as it lays out the challenges of dealing with highly complex and even messy sociocultural systems. Yet, it presents a straightforward methodology for systems design, analysis and improvement that can seemingly be used for any sort of organization. The book has all the rigor a scientific and analytical person would insist upon; but, it presents the purposeful and sociocultural organization in such a holistic way that I'm sure most philosophers, psychologists and sociologists would be nodding their heads in approval throughout the journey. I'm sure Jamshid would not view these as paradoxes at all. I'm sure he'd view all of these apparently opposing tendencies as "two sides of the same coin."

Since reading the book, I've had a chance to begin applying the principles to two design efforts. Understanding systems has helped immensely, and I have just barely dipped my toes into these waters. I won't forget the process management tools. Not at all. As it turns out, however, process management is, as Gharajedaghi might say, "necessary but not sufficient" for business success.

For those interested in putting their management tools together in one extremely useful took kit, "Systems Thinking" is a great albeit challenging next step. I've recommended it to many, and I recommend it to you.

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38 of 41 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars An important book of theory for systems practitioners January 25, 2001
Format:Paperback
This is a book for people who want to know the why of systems theory and the how of systems practice. In addition to chapters on those two subjects, it also includes actual examples of organization designs the author and his colleagues have created with their clients. Imagine a theory expansive enough to guide the redesign of a nation, an organization, a work unit, a product, a service, or a process. This is what Gharajedaghi has done.

Gharajedaghi's contributions are particularly useful and challenging to practitioners of quality management. Systems practice (design) produces unique solutions to entire sets of problems that can't be solved one at a time. It produces solutions dependent on the context or situation rather than attempting to replicate "best practices" across settings. (Deming's admonition against copying holds true here.) Gharajedaghi emphasizes that function (what the organization, product, or process is supposed to do or produce), structure (the component parts or work groups and their relationships--what Gharajedaghi calls the architecture), and processes (for governance, engagement, learning, throughput, and conflict management) must be considered and designed simultaneously for compatability. Quality management practices address function and processes, but offer no guidance for structure.

The book is not an easy read: the concepts are substantive, and the theory is relatively complex. But the text is clear and the language spare, with few wasted words.

Gharajedaghi has contributed an important book, one to be read, re-read, studied, translated, tested, and challenged by those who would tackle the large and complex problems of social system organization and operation.

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29 of 32 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars A conceptual and operational tour de force! April 5, 1999
By A Customer
Format:Paperback
In a world drowning in a lot of mostly useless information, at last this outstanding yet accessible work from one of the leading social systems thinkers, educators and practitioners, one who not only makes coherent and comprehensive sense of the complexity and apparent chaos characterizing our new realities, but provides us with the operational principles and methodology for managing change and creatively co-designing a desired future, both in business creation and transformation toward an order of magnitude improvement in the pursuit and performance of multiple concurrent ends, as well as in community and national development.

Outlined systematically in this work by Gharajedaghi, is a conceptual and operational methodology that is indeed applicable to any type of social system, whether a business corporation, government institution, community or nation. It is a vehicle for understanding and learning how to do more with less, and achieving not only higher levels of economic performance, but also quality of life, learning and development for the members of our organizations and communities, who are after all, the true 'ends' which our productive efforts should serve.

Here you will not find simplistic 12 step programmes and gimmicks clothed in the latest buzzword terminology but which bring no true understanding of social systems and their dynamics, but a meaningful, comprehensive understanding of how social systems work and how they can be participatively transformed to serve our human purposes and needs. The author deals not only with economic variables, but also those pertaining to power (participation; beauty, (that which excites and inspires people); human values (culture); and knowledge (our pursuit of truth and understanding), and how they collectively and interactively, define the nature of a society or business. Visible also is his own compassion and appreciation for people's efforts to create a better world, an understanding that has allowed him to create a truly human systems approach, and one which inspires others to have the courage to do what so far, only the 'gutsy few' have done.

This work, in moving from systems philosophy and theory, to a method for understanding and designing social systems, explained in accessible language and concepts which make sense of what otherwise must seem complex and obscure, is about learning to do, learning to learn, and learning to be - a way to understand and create truely multidimensional organizational and societal development, not the tunnel-visioned fixation on financial performance to the detriment of all else.

This bootstrapping integration of theory and practice in one congruent and consistent methodology, is something which no systems methodology has thus far achieved in comparable depth and breadth, placing effectiveness ('doing the right things'- or ENDS)in primacy over the single-minded pursuit of efficiency ('doing it right'- or MEANS), the latter invariably occurring at the expense of people and the natural environment in the absence of a systemic methodology - and something which virtually all management 'solutions' out there in the market continue to pursue despite lip-service to the contrary. The purveyors of quick-fix solutions and 'panaceas' may apologize (belatedly) for the societal and real human suffering caused by downsizing and 'hardwire' reengineering 'solutions', but few aside from Gharajedaghi, Ackoff, Senge, Banathy and a handful of other systems thinkers, have sought to create and develop (to the level of operational applicability), a way of overcoming the dilemma of inverting technological means over human ends, which is the source of so much of our societal dysfunction.

In this methodology, aimed at the present and coming global development and business challenges in which knowledge, understanding, and dare one say it, wisdom, are critical requirements, people are seen not as 'costs to be minimized', but embodied capital, and an organization and nation's chief asset, since they bring to their work and communities, the irreplaceable, namely their time, creativity and commitment.

Gharajedaghi brings a multidimensional and coherent conceptual light that allows us to see the dynamic patterns behind the turbulent and ever-changing detail characterizing social and economic reality. This work is based on more than 30 years of systemic thought and hands-on, ongoing learning experience in the transformation of business enterprises and national development planning. It comes to grips with the nature of change, itself a complex and multidimensional reality, and demonstrates how counterintuitively, success is transformed to failure in a changed environment.

This leads to questions of how we can understand and manage the multiple dimensions and change drivers that coproduce economic and social complexity, and the criteria which should define 'success'. He also explores the nature and meaning of management, planning and leadership for this and the coming era, a domain where linear thinking and socalled 'tried and tested' piece-meal analytical solutions create more problems and more intractable ones, than they solve, as each addresses single variables in a type of system (a social, open, dynamic one) where 'multimindedness'and the increase in differentiation behavior, is its chief feature - (each person has choice and the ability to influence the system, and knows it, yet at the same time, needs the larger systems of which they are a part), and therefore interdependence of the whole, AND autonomy of its parts, BOTH need to be accommodated, in organizations no less than in the broader society.

This multidimensional reality, characterised by emergent behaviors and phenomena that cannot be understood through analysis of its parts, requires the ability to manage 'paradox', to stomach high levels of ambiguity, and to integrate what appears to be contradictory, but are in fact complementary tendencies. Such a talent is about managing interactions, not controlling the actions of people and parts of a system.

This work represents a dual paradigm shift - one in our thinking, in the form of a shift from analytical displinary knowledge to systemic understanding; and one in our modes of organization, from organismic and mechanistic, fixed structural solutions, which create ongoing conflict between 'management and labor', as well as between society and nature - to a flexible, adaptive learning model, characterized by membership and the integration of authority and responsbility in every part' of the organization, the only way to achieve true accountability, both in business and society.

Gharajedaghi's systemic interpretive framework allows us to see the nature of the 'mess' in which we are embedded, an interacting system of problems, its dynamics, dimensions, and the governing principles which codefine social systems of any kind. It shows us, both through its conceptual framework, and the application of these principles in business design and national development projects undertaken by INTERACT, how businesses and communities can interactively and iteratively, create their desired future on an ongoing basis.

We see also that organizations in government and business do not have to 'die' as people do, but can continually recreate their products, services, processes and organizational structures to accommodate and function within a rapidly changing environment.

The principle of iteration, which we see also in chaos theory, where complex patterns emerge from the iteration of simple equations, is a central concept in this methodology, both in our mode of inquiry and in design, where depth and detail are added with each new iteration, and where former assumptions and specifications can be redefined and re-examined continually through a process of second-order (social) learning.

The model of organization developed here, is highly flexible and modular, based on internal market principles, and on the purposes and values of its members and the broader community it serves. It is one where the trauma, conflict and dislocation of periodic restructuring and reorganization are bypassed, and where conflict is dissolved through ongoing learning, participation in the formulation of decision criteria, and iterative design addressing three levels of purposeful human behavior, namely those of an organization or community's members, its management and owners, and the stakeholders in its containing environment.

Jamshid Gharajedaghi has brought new resolution, depth and dimensionality to a social systems methodology long in the making and remaking, by himself, his colleagues at INTERACT (The Institute for Interactive Management in Philadelphia, of which he is the President and CEO); through his collaboration with Russell Ackoff (founder and Chairman of the Board of INTERACT) and others, and through his own experience in working with a diverse array of clients in business and governments, in many countries. Some of these experiences and organizational and development transformation projects (Oneida Indian Nation, Butterworth Health Systems, Commonwealth Energy

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Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars A superb book got better!
It is rare that one can improve what is already a superb book, but Jamshid Gharajedaghi has managed to just do that in the third edition. I got it last night through Fed. Read more
Published 22 months ago by A. Nadim
5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent practical guide for business practices...
I have had this book for quite a long time and have read it many times. Each time that I read it I come away with fresh ideas and views on how to apply systems thinking to... Read more
Published on May 7, 2009 by Yuri Kuzyk
4.0 out of 5 stars Multi-point reference, strong in all areas but very broad
The concepts of system thinking, enterprise architecture, business architecture are big enough by themselves to be covered in a book. Read more
Published on April 13, 2006 by Mark P. McDonald
3.0 out of 5 stars Go west young man go west!
If this book takes you back to the source material, then it will have accomplished its goal. The book itself, lacks the finesse of it's intellectual founders. Read more
Published on November 16, 2005 by Adventures in Complexity
5.0 out of 5 stars Good Service
Good service. Order shipped on time, was received on time and in excellent condition.
Published on July 19, 2005 by Terry J. Hauck
2.0 out of 5 stars Where's the Beef?
This book is written by one of Ackoff's disciples. In the middle of the dot.com boom, while many less qualified people were successfully marketing "high-concept" business books,... Read more
Published on February 2, 2005 by Erkut Eronat
5.0 out of 5 stars An Old IBM saying
The reason I bought this book is purely out curiousity on the subject. I got this one along with the one by Ludwig Van. Read more
Published on December 15, 2004 by Le Pakshi
5.0 out of 5 stars Practical systems thinking!
I have just reread Mr. Gharajedaghi's book. It is a very thoughtful and engaging review of systems thinking placed in the context of other world views in Modern Times. Read more
Published on March 12, 2003 by Lawrence A. Reeves
5.0 out of 5 stars Systems thinking applied to perfection
This is a book about changing the way we usually think. It goes beyond simply proposing systems thinking to delve into the art of managing complexity (as the title mentions). Read more
Published on February 17, 2003 by Denis Benchimol Minev
5.0 out of 5 stars The best of the best!
This book has taught me more than the $50,000 top 25 MBA program I am just finishing. It is unbelievably rich. Read more
Published on March 4, 2002
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