Abstract
The more our knowledge grows, the more complex we perceive the world to be. And the exploding population and technology further compound this complexity. We are hurtling on a wild, uncharted river into the 21st century, sensing a desperate need of some control in navigating our way past the rapids to attain “a just society for future generations”. And the systems community has not been able to keep up with the need. In recognizing this quandary, I must look at both theory and praxis (or craft). What follows is unabashedly a personal perspective and reflects my four decades of experience, about evenly split between industry and academe.
An earlier version of this chapter was originally presented as the Von Bertalanffy Lecture, which the author was invited to give at the meeting of the International Society for Systems Sciences (ISSS) at Portland State University, Portland, Oregon, July 9, 1990.
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Linstone, H.A. (1993). Breaking Out of the Systems Quandary. In: De Greene, K.B. (eds) A Systems-Based Approach to Policymaking. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-3226-2_9
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