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Ian I. Mitroff and Harold A. Linstone describe "the world that was and is no more" of American preeminence in resources, education, technology, and scale economies of production and marketing. Other nations with newer and more flexible organizations challenge U.S. business leadership, while interconnectedness of problems and opportunities challenge current modes of thinking.
Following the Orwellian decade of the 1980s and its "newspeak" concepts of "conservative revolution," "deregulation," and "balanced budgets," the authors propose systems of "newthink" to cope with growing complexity in business decision making. First they illustrate that traditional empirical and rational thinking are not adequate for solving the interwoven problems which we face. Then they propose three "ways of knowing" better suited to the complexities of the new world order: Multiple realities evaluation to assess a range of theories and evidence, conflict to confront and learn from contradictions, and unbounded systems thinking to utilize all sciences from technical, organizational, and personal perspectives.
Were it not for practical examples, all of this would seem an interesting but not very useful exercise in thinking about thinking. But organizational crises resulting from complex situations indicate that conventional decision-making processes are insufficient. Disasters such as those at the methyl isocyanate facility in Bhopal, at Three Mile Island, at Chernobyl, or the interwoven cultural/political/military problems in...