Introduction

Ostensibly this book is about management and the management of change in all its rich complexity. But it is not a book about the management of change. It is a book about managers and organizations seeking to exist in such a way that change is just part of the normal flow of process that should be organizational life. What I mean by these seemingly paradoxical statements should be explained and become apparent as you read through this book. It is no mystery. It is about taking organizations and their managers ‘out of the laboratory’ and into the real world. This is the complex world that has emerged from millennia of massive and sometimes cataclysmic upheavals and is today’s living planet. In order to better understand this world and what it implies for organizations and managers this book uses as its guide science: complexity science.