The Crisis and the Complexity of Knowing

Introduction

In this contribution we want to go deeper into the crisis of our time and its consequences for organizations and companies, operating in our society commonly conceived as a kind of ‘information society’ or ‘knowledge society.’ According to the French thinker Edgar Morin, we may speak about a so-called ‘poly-crisis’ (Hessel, 2011, p. 43). We argue that the crisis can be taken as being both a financial, economical, political and moral crisis. The crisis is very much the crisis of Western Culture. According to Sandywell (1996), we may speak about a crisis of Western reason. We ‘simply’ lack an adequate understanding of the crisis we are in. To understand the very crisis we are in, and its effects on Complex Organizations (CO’s) and their management, we need to become more reflective on the nature of this crisis. We argue here that the deep nature of the crisis is still very much hidden. After reading the papers, journals and more specialist literatures, we are of opinion that nobody seems to have a kind of bird eyes view of the crisis. Consequently, nobody seems to know what is underlying the very crisis we are still in. Even worse, we seem not able to view the system with new eyes.

We want to argue here that the crisis is very much the crisis of our common way of knowing. The crisis we are in is very much the crisis of a learned incapacity to make the link between the known known and the field of the unknown unknown (Table 1).