Welcome

The achievements and the disasters of human existence reflect the behavior of social systems. Thus war is the result of the behavior of two, or more, social systems. Their behavior is such that they are unable to accommodate each other and disaster results. The social system that includes these systems becomes chaotic. Corporations are social systems and on occasion their behavior results in them becoming chaotic and unable to cope with their environment leading to major disasters.

On the other hand the behavior of social systems can be the basis for great human achievement such as ancient Greece, the Italian Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution in Britain or Silicon Valley.

Although there are many theories of social change used in other disciplines such as sociology and economics, they often use projections of the present state to predict the future of a social system.

We offer a theory coming directly from the approach of chaos and complexity science. Using elementary variables of internal differentiation and external centrality, we explain how to control future states of chaos, complexity and order.

Our approach is useful for a range of readers, from practitioners such as organizational consultants, to academics wishing to understand and analyze the basic processes of social change.

This web site outlines our ideas for understanding social change, incorporating ideas from complexity science and sociology. They are further developed in our book "MAKING SOCIAL CHANGE - Understanding How Complexity Science Explains, Predicts & Possibly Controls Major Social Change".

We all belong to many social groups and organizations and we are aware that that they all change over time, but what we want to understand is major change such as corporate collapse, economic discontinuity such as recessions, or new initiatives.

To do this, we study social systems and then define the possible states of such a system so that major change is a change from one state to another. Having defined change, we then define the parameters that influence change.

The pages under "Complexity Science" describe these ideas in more detail.

We hope you find the site interesting and we welcome comment, criticism, and questions.