The Crisis of Knowing in the Age of Complexity

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’ (see Hessel, 2011, p. 43). We argue that the crisis of our time can be taken as being both a financial, economic, political and scientific 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’s eye view of the crisis. Consequently, nobody seems to know what is underlying the very crisis we are still in. We seem ‘simply’ 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: that is, about the very limits of our 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 (see Table 1). The crisis is very much a crisis of our learned ignorance: the ignorance about the unknown unknown. It is the crisis of complexity, of complex phenomena, which we still take so much for granted. We take not only complexity for granted but also the very notion of reality. We have ‘simply’ disregarded the very complex nature of reality: that is, the nonlinear complex reality (Mainzer, 2004). Our view of complexity of reality is ‘simply’ insufficiently complex. The map we have of reality is a reduced version of this reality. We seem insufficiently aware of our assumptions about reality, being so reduced. We seem insufficiently aware that reality can be different: nonlinear and complex. This is very much true for innovation. Innovation is a complex topic being part of our nonlinear complex reality. But we ‘simply’ do not know how to deal with this complexity. Dealing with the complexity of reality demands a new approach and new ways of thinking about reality. The crux of our crisis is that “we don’t have the right vocabulary to precisely describe what we’re studying” (Mitchell, 2011, p. 301). We are a kind of prisoners of description. Henceforth, we need a new approach, with a new language, a language of complexity, with a new vocabulary, with new terms, concepts and metaphors, so to be able to describe reality as a nonlinear complex reality. We have to learn to use the term reality in a new way, based on a new way of thinking. We urgently need a new kind of map about what is the real(m) of our sciences. That is, a map about the complex dynamics of reality. We need this map to overcome our learned ignorance and learned incapacity in dealing with reality. This map is linked to the complexity of knowing. We need a more complex map to deal with the hitherto unknown territories of complexity of a nonlinear complex reality. These territories are the territories of the complexity of knowing, but also of innovation, novelty and creativity (cf. Kuhn, 1999, p. 90). To be able to deal with this complexity, we need a new way of thinking: of thinking in complexity (see Jörg, 2011).