It is fast becoming clear that our lives revolve around the powers of emergence. Order arrives from the bottom-up, not top-down. This work looks at the cities we inhabit, the media frenzies we suffer and the games we play, showing how individual actions without central planning often create a wonderfully adaptive communal intelligence.

An incisive analysis of real-life situations that helps all those involved in any kind of strategic planning recognize and avoid logical yet devastating errors.. Why do we make mistakes? Are there certain errors common to failure, whether in a complex enterprise or daily life? In this truly indispensable book, Dietrich Drner identifies what he calls the logic of failurecertain tendencies in our ..

A guide to applying the new science to organisations, and our lives. This book shows how examples of non-linear networks and organizations are flourishing in the modern world. It presents examples like the E-bay, search engines and viral marketing works which are based on self-organising dynamics.

Draws on science, spiritual values, psychology, the cutting edge of management thought with leading companies which employ Fifth Discipline methods. This edition contains more than 100 pages of material about how companies are actually using and benefiting from Fifth Discipline practices.

This work develops in depth the idea that recurrent rules can produce rich and complicated behaviours. Distinguishing agents from their interactions, it argues that it is the computational properties of interactions that account for much of what we think of as beautiful and interesting .

Gregory Bateson was a philosopher, anthropologist, photographer, naturalist and poet, as well as the husband and collaborator of Margaret Mead. This anthology of his major work contains a foreword by his daughter Mary Katherine Bateson.