The viability of using various system theories to describe organisational change

This article discusses the viability of concepts such as complex systems theory, evolutionary theory and chaos theory as metaphors for being able to give a global perspective of one particular school described in a previous article entitled “Leading people in a chaotic world”. The article restates and re‐explains this one particular case in question and offers a rationalisation for using chaos theory as part of a much larger theory of evolution and complexity. The argument restores the overused and popularised chaos theory to its more useful place as an emergent phase in the decision‐making and subsequent change phase of the evolution of complex systems. In so doing, the paper points out that the use of chaos theory alone as a set of management rules for any school was never the intended implication to be derived from this particular case. Instead, the intention was to create a description of the changes in one particular school organisation stretched across time and space in which its structures and processes were continuously evolving in unpredictable, sometimes chaotic, but always complex directions with other structures and processes inside and outside the school.