This is an unconventional book for an unconventional reader. It is intended for those professionals who, in addition to their specialized knowledge, would like to get a handle on life so they may put their special text into its proper context. It speaks to those thinkers and practitioners who have come to realize that learning to be is as much a necessary part of a successful professional life as is learning to do; and that to remain unidimensional is to become boringly predictable.

This book is about a new mode of seeing, doing, and being in the world; it is a way of thinking through chaos and complexity. It is not another “how-to” book, nor an alternative to what is already available. It is not a variation on the tired theme of offering the latest version of the common characteristics of the winners.

It also violates the golden rule of best sellers. I am told the experience of dealing with too many ideas in a single book is way out of the comfort zone of most readers.

However, the ideas in this book, although many, converge and create a whole that is profoundly more beautiful than any one concept in isolation. The real beauty, therefore, lies in experiencing the whole, seeing them all come together fusing into one.

As for the choice between breaking the message or breaking the norm, it was obvious which one had to go. If that meant being a minority of one, so be it.

This book, nevertheless, speaks to everyone for whom the joy of thinking is still alive and kicking and whose enthusiasm to entertain exciting but unfamiliar conceptions is not yet exhausted.

In a nutshell, the book is about systems. The imperatives of interdependency, the necessity of reducing endless complexities, and the need to produce manageable simplicities require a workable systems methodology, a holistic frame of reference that would allow us to focus on the relevant issues and avoid the endless search for more details while drowning in proliferating useless information.

Contrary to a widely held belief, the popular notion of a multidisciplinary approach is not a systems approach. The ability to synthesize separate findings into a coherent whole seems far more critical than the ability to generate information from different perspectives.

This book, with a practical orientation and yet a profound theoretical depth, goes beyond the simple declaration of desirability of systems thinking. It deals with challenges of interdependency, chaos, and choice using an elaborate scheme called iterative design.

The iterative design explicitly recognizes that choice is at the heart of human development. Development is the capacity to choose; design is a vehicle for enhancement of choice and holistic thinking. Designers, in this book, seek to choose rather than predict the future. They try to understand rational, emotional, and cultural dimensions of choice and to produce a design that satisfies a multitude of functions. They learn how to use what they already know, learn how to realize what they do not know, and learn how to learn what they need to know.

This book is divided into four parts. Part One identifies where systems thinking fits into the overall scheme of things. It provides an overview, a total picture of major theoretical traditions in management and systems thinking and their relationship.

Parts Two and Three are the guts of the book. Part Two discusses the five systems principles as the building blocks of the mental model used to generate the initial set of assumptions about the system. It also identifies the comprehensive set of variables that collectively describe the organization in its totality. Part Three deals extensively with the development of iterative design and its practical implications in defining problems and designing solutions.

Part Four reviews five actual cases of designing a business architecture. The Oneida Nation, Butterworth Health System, Commonwealth Energy System, Marriott Corporation, and Carrier Corporation represent a diverse group of challenging social organizations. I call them “the gutsy few” because they were willing to experiment with unconventional solutions without worrying about who had done it first. I am grateful for their trust and permission to share synopses of their designs with others.