ABSTRACT
We would expect that society would learn. In previous chapters I gave examples of how we could consider the world differently, from a more holistic point of view; that is essentially the subject of this book. I gave examples of how people (managers) and systems can learn, what the limits of learning are and what good experiences exist. We cannot avoid, at the same time, asking whether our society, the economic environment in which we work, for instance, is able to learn, and if it is unable to learn, why is that? If we considered society and, still more so, geopolitical organization from a holistic perspective, would we see other things? In the first chapter I gave an example taken from a pseudo-public company: chaos on the Dutch railways. What we saw in that example is that a drive for more order most probably led to chaos. If, however, we consider all the specific processes the employees executed, they did their best, and did what they were expected to do very well. But that does not seem to be enough any more. The whole is more than the sum of the parts. In dynamic systems, emergent behaviour appears, as already explained. We may want to call it a snowball effect. This behaviour has its own rationale and follows its own logic. We can of course have an impact on this behaviour, but we do not know the outcome.
