ABSTRACT
In prehistoric societies, man’s tasks were largely ephemeral problems having no significance beyond themselves. He collected firewood, hunted prey, forged tools, and sought mates. The low complexity of both the tasks and the social structures within which they lay meant that they could be pursued on an ad hoc basis, and only rarely did the need to view problems as being embedded within other problems arise (Dörner, 1996). Passing through early human history, man became more dependent on others and aware of his influence on the environment, and developed rudimentary economic and political systems to manage these interdependences. Initially, small-scale sufficiency economies and councils of elders were sufficient to coordinate the limited division of labour and facilitate an understanding of causal relationships between human activities and the natural environment (Hofstetter et al., 2002). However, as specialisation and differentiation grew, technology and industrialisation advanced, population burgeoned, and economic and social systems became increasingly intertwined, complexity has come to characterise the modern world. We now must deal with a series of closely, and often subtly, related problems, with the consequence that our approach to problem solving increasingly requires attention to interdependencies of social and natural systems, and an awareness of
the often latent second and third-order effects of decisions and actions (Dörner, 1996). For various reasons, we seem ill-suited to this task.
