“GOD IS DEAD,” says graffiti on a notice board in Oxford University, England. “NO!” it says underneath, “HE IS JUST WORKING ON A LESS AMBITIOUS PROJECT.”

Maybe God has given up the idea of an orderly and deterministic world. Maybe he/she has playfully decided to mix it up with some degree of randomness and choice, or maybe this has been the state of affairs all along. Zoroaster, the ancient Persian prophet, proclaimed this some 3,000 years ago:

Maybe having choice is not an illusion, after all. Nevertheless, choice is but one of the three elements. The interaction of choice with chance (randomness) and certainty (laws of nature) can indeed produce some counterintuitive outcomes.

Natural science has discovered “chaos.” Social science has encountered “complexity.” But chaos and complexity are not characteristics of our new reality; they are features of our perceptions and understanding. We see the world as increasingly more complex and chaotic because we use inadequate concepts to explain it. When we understand something, we no longer see it as chaotic or complex. Maybe playing the new game requires learning a new language.

We have used a multitude of languages to express the different ways in which we exist in the world. We first told the story of our lives as myth. We sang it, danced it, and expressed it in rituals that defined the parameters of our cultures and so gave us a degree of security in a threatening environment. As our proficiency increased, so did our learning and creative capacity. We started writing in the languages of poetry, mathematics, philosophy, and science. There were times when music, along with literature and art, produced our most beautiful texts.

But during the past century, we increasingly specialized in one language, the language of analytical science. As we emphasized one language to the exclusion of all others, we became unidimensional — and boringly predictable.

Today the analytical language has penetrated every facet of our lives. Our system of production, organization, interaction, communication — even our choice of recreation, sport, and foods —is done in terms of the assumptions and applications of analytical tools. Finding a correlation is the order of the day. Best sellers, in all areas, are those that simply identity a few common attributes of the winners. No one can deny the success of this language, but it has acquired an importance disproportionate to its position as only one method of inquiry. When one game states the rules for all games, it does not matter how many new games you create, they are all the same kind.

History, unfortunately, has not been too kind to those who have capitalized so extensively on a single winning strategy. The price on selecting only one pattern of existence has been very high.

Alienation, lust for power, frustration, insecurity, and boredom are only a few symptoms of the emerging culture where ready-made intellectual goods are making the formation of mass opinion a matter of mass production.

The tendency to simplify everything to a level not requiring serious thinking has turned the political system into a voting industry, which assumes that people are ensured choice over their lives when they elect the decision makers. We have let the default values of an analytical culture define what is good, proper, and beautiful.

But, somehow, something is missing with the way we think about our lives. What has become the dominant language of our time produces only a partial understanding of our reality and relates only to parts of our being, not the whole of it. We need a holistic language, a language of systems, which will allow us to see through chaos and understand complexity. A language of interaction and design will help us learn a new mode of living by considering various ways of seeing, doing, and being in the world.

We can then design new methods of inquiry, new modes of organization, and a way of life that will allow the rational, emotional, and ethical choices for interdependent yet autonomous social beings.

The systems language, by necessity, will have two dimensions. The first will be a framework for understanding the nature of the beast, or the behavioral characteristics of multi-minded systems. The second will be an operational systems methodology, which goes beyond simply declaring the desirability of the systems approach and provides a practical way to define problems and design solutions.

To build the first dimension of this language, we need to develop a system of systems concepts. In this context, Ackoff's On Purposeful Systems (1972) is a Herculean work, a must-read book, which cannot be reproduced here. What I intend to do is share the principles and concepts that I believe are critical for developing a systems view of sociocultural systems. These principles have evolved with me during years of struggling to get a handle on systems. Details of these exciting concepts, which have been tested in a variety of contexts and cultures, are so rich that each could be the subject of a separate book. To fit my purpose here they had to be simplified at the risk of considerable distortion.

Five systems principles will be discussed in Chapter 2. The information-bonded systems and the notion of shared image and culture and the essence of self-organization will be the topic of Chapter 3. Theory of development and obstructions to development will be discussed in Chapter 4. Finally this notion of a sociocultural system (the subject of Part Two), combined with systems methodology — holistic thinking, operational thinking, and design thinking — (the subject of Part Three), constitute an interactive whole that, in my view, defines the essence of systems thinking.

A note of caution to those readers with a strong background in total quality management (TQM). There is a fundamental difference between TQM and systems thinking. TQM operates within an existing paradigm; it could be learned and applied as an independent set of tools and methods. But systems methodology cannot be separated from systems principles. Systems tools and methods are impotent if isolated from the paradigm of which they are an integral part.