Chapter 3: Organizations in a Complex World

Social collectives pass through changing internal and external environments that lead them to experience complex problem situations. They need to deal with this if they want to become cohesive and improve their capacity to survive. This chapter will explore two perspectives concerned with the way that social collectives are able to survive in a complex world.

One perspective is referred to as systematic luck, and is concerned with how an organization can change the probability of the outcomes of a set of its actions in its favour. The nature of the theory of systematic luck is that those who wish to achieve it can enable purely their preferences to gain ascendancy over the preferences of others. The theory can be developed to enable one to describe an organization’s interest in engineering its environment so that any outcomes that it has to its activities are aliened with its preferences/needs. To do this requires that the constraints of the theory be loosened.