ABSTRACT
Ralph Stacey is an economics graduate of the University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg, and of the London School of Economics. Having subsequently spent many years as a corporate planner with the John Laing construction group, based in the UK, Stacey gradually came to the conclusion that the ordinary ‘rationality’ supposedly underlying both macro-economics and also business strategy was something of a a smokescreen. In the 1980s, as Stacey approached his own midlife, two transformations began to occur within him. In the first place he began to transfer his academic orientation from economics towards psychology, as he became ever more interested in processes of group dynamics. Secondly his own ‘mental model’ of the world began to shift dramatically from a classically linear to a ‘chaotically’ non-linear view of reality.
