Introduction

As foreseen by Creswick and Williams (1979) and others, complexity and uncertainty are rising both in our daily lives and in business. In business, many of those accorded guru status, such as Charles Handy (1990, 2002), Henry Mintzberg (1989) and more recently Dave Snowden (2007), are discussing a future with less order and structure, whilst the scientists Jared Diamond (2005) and James Lovelock (2007) have both made strong and well-researched cases for this being a tipping point in human history. As Tett (2016) puts it:

if you look around the world today, our twenty-first-century society is marked by a striking paradox. In some senses, we live in an age where the globe is more interlinked, as a common system, than ever before. The forces of globalization and technological change mean that news can flash across the planet at lightning speed. Digital supply chains link companies, consumers, and economies across the globe. Ideas—good and bad—spread easily. So do people, pandemics, and panics. When trades turn sour in a tiny corner of the financial markets, the 2global banking system can go topsy-turvy. We live, in short, in a world plagued by what the economist Ian Goldin has dubbed the ‘Butterfly Defect': a system that is so tightly integrated that there is an ever-present threat of contagion. ‘The world has become a hum of interconnected voices and a hive of interlinked lives,' as Christine Lagarde, head of the International Monetary Fund, observes. ‘[This is a] breakneck pattern of integration and interconnectedness that defines our time'.

(Tett 2016, p. 2)