Safety practices and preparations for limited emergencies are common activities in complex systems. In contrast, the vital task of planning for a crisis is usually poorly handled. This paper seeks to provide a better understanding of the prerequisites for successful learning processes to deal with crisis situations. It reveals the barriers that emerge during the process of developing satisfacto...

DEA models treat the DMU as a “black box.” Inputs enter and outputs exit, with no consideration of the intervening steps. Consequently, it is di(cult, if not impossible, to provide individual DMU managers with speci;c information regarding the sources of ine(ciency within their DMUs. We show how to use DEA to look inside the DMU, allowing greater insight as to the sources of organizational ine(...

Naturalistic decision making (NDM) has become established as a methodological and theoretical perspective. It describes how practitioners actually make decisions in complex domains. However, NDM theories tend to focus on the human agents in the system. We extend the NDM perspective to include the technological agents in complex systems and introduce the dynamic model of situated cognition. We d...

This paper adopts a view of organizations as complex adaptive systems and makes a case for making organizations more complex internally through the use of a fairly simple managerial rule—using participative decision making. Participation in decision making enhances connectivity in organizations, which in turn, gives the organization the opportunity to self-organize and co-evolve in more effecti...

This paper adopts a view of organizations as complex adaptive systems and makes a case for making organizations more complex internally through the use of a fairly simple managerial rule using participative decision making. Participation in decision making enhances connectivity in organizations, which in turn, gives the organization the opportunity to self-organize and co-evolve in more effecti...

One of the great joys of being an academic is that you get to play in the world of ideas and words. It is like being invited to get into your favourite sandpit every day and fool around and see what happens. One of the problems with this, however, is that sometimes people ask you to explain the curious sandcastle you built or that odd looking shape in the corner. As those of you who have a psyc...

This paper introduces what is meant by a complex system, and shows how looking at systems as complex, organic systems helps to engineer the complex interconnected “systems of systems” of the twenty-first century. To the extent that we understand and can apply them to engineering, complexity theory and the sciences related to complex systems can provide research results that allow us to predict ...