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.

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.

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.

Capra argues that at the end of the 20th century we are shifting away from the mechanistic world of Descartes and Newton to a holistic, ecological view. He establishes patterns between ideas from such diverse fields as Buddhism and quantum physics.

A re-issue of Gregory Bateson's classic work. It summarizes Bateson's thinking on the subject of the patterns that connect living beings to each other and to their environment.

This book brings together all the work in a new field of physics, the chaos theory, an extension of classical mechanics. The author shows how computers have been able to help researchers, by mapping the whole plane of solutions of non-linear equations.

The biography of an idea: that many of the problems we face - from teenage delinquency to traffic jams - behave like epidemics and are capable of sudden and dramatic change due to their inherent volatility. The author explores the ramifications of this, offering a way to view the world.

Incorporates parallel development in quantum theory, self-organizing systems and complexity theory. This book features the synthesis of holistic thinking, operational thinking, sociocultural systems, and interactive design.

Continuing his exploration of the organization of complexity and the science of design, this updated edition on artificial intelligence adds a chapter that sorts out the current themes and tools - chaos, adaptive sytems, genetic algorithms - for analyzing complexity and complex systems.

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.

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 ..

'What is a self, and how can a self come out of inaminate matter?' This book examines this riddle. Linking together the music of J S Bach, the graphic art of Escher and the mathematical theorems of Godel, as well as ideas drawn from logic, biology, psychology, physics and linguistics, it reveals the mysteries of human thought processes.

Analyzes the social side of technological risk. This book argues that the conventional engineering approach to ensuring safety - building in more warnings and safeguards - fails because systems complexity makes failures inevitable. It asserts that typical precautions, by adding to complexity, may help create new categories of accidents.

An Integral Theory of Everything. Revised second edition.

Explores how doctors strive to close the gap between best intentions and best performance in the face of obstacles that sometimes seem insurmountable. This book discusses the ethical dilemmas of doctors' participation in lethal injections and examines the influence of money on modern medicine.

This pragmatic guide shows how to create an organization of learners. The stories in this book show that businesses, schools, agencies and even communities can undo their learning disabilities and achieve superior performance.

Offers exercises, tools and techniques for sustaining organisational learning over the long term, as well as suggestions, advice, cautions and warnings based on the experience of people who have already followed the path suggested by the author in The Fifth Discipline .