Complexity Science: A Worldview Shift

One of the frustrations of working in the exciting area of “complexity science in organizations” is that there is no commonly accepted definition of what this term means (White et al., 1997). Definitions have been offered, such as “complexity is a watchword for a new way of thinking about the collective behavior of many basic but interacting units...complexity is the study of the behavior of macroscopic collections of such units that are endowed with the potential to evolve in time” (Coveney and Highfield, 1995: 7). Although this definition is very descriptive, it still seems general and unfocused. The purpose of this article is to offer a simple definition for complexity science and to demonstrate the shift in worldview necessary for complexity science to become second nature to people as traditional science now is.

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