Transforming the Systems Movement

By Russell L. Ackoff

Posted on 3/31/2014

The situation the world is in is amess. This hardly requires documentation; it's obvious. Furthermore, as Leslie Gelb observed (1991), the prospects for improvement are not promising: the emerging world requires a new foreign policy agenda, and fresh faces to execute that agenda. The trouble is, the same old "experts" are still running foreign policy and most of them only dimly understand the world they preside over. Indeed, few people today, in or out of Government, have the backgroundand skills to grasp, let alone direct, the new agenda.

Reform will not do it; transformations are required, two kinds. First a transformation of the way nations and international institutions handle gobal affairs and second, a transformation in the way systems thinkers collectively conduct the systems movement. The second must come first if we hope to have any effect on the global mess.

 

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