Ungson and Trudel think these assumptions may persist even as they fail to work or do harm because many people fear that any movement away from that thinking is a step toward anarchy. Of course, many of our mind-sets as management consultants are the same as our clients. Thus, many of us do not offer more realistic alternatives for organizational structures and strategies. Well, these two books focus intensively, in different yet highly complementary ways, on what we must learn to solve problems and manage change in this postindustrial world. We must forget our conventional wisdom about corporate strategy and use what is coming from recent scientific theories about complex systems and evolutionary change.
Complex systems evolve through variation, selection, and retention of elements.
Adaptation works best when the systems are only partially connected. Successful organizations in the Information Age will be organized to change constantly, to let a semi-coherent strategy emerge from that change, and to think simultaneously about where to go and how to get there. That is to say that effective strategies can best be discovered by keeping systems loose enough to initiate, adapt, and reconfigure themselves, in continuous and complex interactions with the environment. For example, the truth is that competitive advantage today comes more from timely knowledge than any other source. Strategies that work are diverse, emergent, and complicated.