MANAGING AND LEADING ORGANIZATIONS AS COMMUNITIES System Dynamics International Conference

All societies are a product of their age and in turn create their age. We live today in a period of extraordinary transition. We are trapped between two worlds, an old world and a new world. The industrial age was dominated by the myth of unending material progress and the image of the machine. The new age remains unnamed because it is as yet unformed. Regardless of how we label it—information age, systems age, or simply postindustrial age—it will not be more of the same. It is not possible to sustain indefinitely a continuing increase in material throughput on a finite planet. Nor can we continue to expand population and resource consumption in an increasingly crowded world of people who do not know how to get along with one another. And the metaphor of the machine, which has given us incredible material affluence but also rigid bureaucracies, assembly-line jobs and schools, and an ever more frenetic, disconnected way of living, must be superseded by the image of the living system. Nature operates through cyclic processes. The industrial age has operated, by and large, through linear processes: take, make, waste. Nature generates diversity. The industrial age has generated homogeneity, relentlessly eradicating both biological and cultural diversity. Nature focuses on means, allowing ends to emerge. The industrial age has focused on goals, allowing them to justify whatever means were needed. What kind of society will emerge in and shape the new age? What possibilities will it afford? What new ways of living? None of these questions are answerable. Yet each must be pondered. “History does not follow the path of opportunities but the path of desires,” says Chilean biologist Humberto Maturana. How we humans go about discovering, articulating, and manifesting our desires will shape the future. In particular the practices of a society are embedded in the practices of its institutions and evolve with them. This is why changes in how institutions of business, education, government, and social services operate matter, and why leadership, the energy that enables such change, is so important.