Louis Klein

European School of Governance

The challenges of the Anthropocene were pre‐empted by systems scholars in the exposition of the ‘global problematique’ and are now made manifest in what systems scholars called the polycrisis. These framings alert us to our human circumstances but to date, have done little to transform our manners of being and doing, as the polycrisis is an outcome...

In his 1970 report to the Club of Rome, Hasan Özbekhan compiled an extensive collection of intersecting issues confronting humanity—the Global Problématique. Alas, half a century later, we find ourselves even further entrenched in this network of complex, systemic issues that some have framed the Anthropocene, a period new to human history. Collect...

Five clusters of concern arising from IFSR-facilitated conversations with its organisational members are used to invite the broader systems community to rethink agency. It is argued that by addressing the cluster elements, potential will be co-created for the systems community as a whole to help citizens venture beyond failing responses to the glob...

Business Excellence ist integriert oder schon im Ansatz zum Scheitern verurteilt. Business Excellence ist ein viel gehörtes Schlagwort. Business Excellence will jeder. Wie aber kann Business Excellence gelingen? Gute Ansätze gibt es zuhauf.

Business Excellence ist mehr als die Summe organisationaler Exzellenz und Change Excellence. Business Excellence, so wie sie uns in den zeitgenössischen Managementdiskursen begegnet, ist von der Execution her gedacht. Inspiriert vom Total-Quality-Management geht es im Kern um das Umblenden von Ergebnissen auf Prozesse und damit um eine Annäherung a...

Im Norden Südafrikas, dort wo sich das Highveld in Richtung Botswana neigt, gibt es reiche Kohlevorkommen. Hier stehen einige der größten Kohlekraftwerke der Welt. Hier versucht die aufstrebende südafrikanische Nation einen Großteil ihres Energiehungers zu stillen.

Total-Quality-Management ist eine Erfolgsgeschichte (Duggan 2011; Mitchell 2015; Oakland 2014; Pyzdek und Keller 2013). William Edwards Deming gilt dabei zu Recht als eine der zentralen Figuren, die die Ideen des Operations Research in die Praxis industrieller Massenproduktion überführten. Die großen Losgrößen und die hohen Repetitionsfrequenzen, z...

In diesem essential bringt Louis Klein die Praxis der gängigen betrieblichen Erfolgsmodelle von Business Excellence in einer instrumentellen Gesamtperspektive zusammen. Dabei zeigt sich, wie vieles schon vorhanden ist und nur darauf wartet, angepackt zu werden, aber auch, dass es nach wie vor blinde Flecken gibt, vor allem, wenn es um den Menschen...

Social complexity seems to be the number one critical success factor not only for project management or organisational development but for any attempt to govern the Anthropocene and bring about successful systemic change to meet climate change, poverty and political conflict to name but a few. Social systems research seems to be unnecessarily under...

The central question of this chapter is, “How are inquiries into problems structured and designed to conduct research in a systemic (holistic, comprehensive, complicated, and complex), as well as systematic (logical, rigorous, and disciplined) way?” The focus is on Problem Structuring and Research Design related to the purpose of research and devel...

The Anthropocene calls for systemic change which requires much more than good ideas, stakeholder activism and self-organization. Successful change is managed in the form of a project. However, project management itself needs to learn to cope with the systemic complexity of the real world, especially with social complexity. Hence, this paper explore...

“There is no right life in the wrong one,” Theodor W. Adorno (1951/2006) concluded in the Minima Moralia. In project management, this idea calls for rethinking the contributions and implications of the discipline for the greater context of society and the life of the individual project manager. What does it mean to be a good project manager and to...

Exploring organisations is the prerequisite for any intentional attempt to strategic change. Yet, what is it that we observe when we observe organisations? The argument chooses a narrative approach to exploring organisations. With Niklas Luhmann we look at the operations of organising which makes the organisation an organisation. The paper suggests...

Im Nachklang zum dritten internationalen Coaching-Kongresses »Coaching und Gesellschaft – Coaching meets Research« trafen sich die drei Autoren, in der Praxis tätige Coaches und Organisationsberater, am 16.

Risk management is a practice. It consists of activities which ought to be focused and integrated. This chapter argues for a systemic practice of project risk management. It shows what can be done with a systemic approach to improve risk management on different levels in different ways, and how systems thinking meets the challenges of increasing pr...

The culturally embedded Algedonics of Society suggest a conceptual model for the study of social systems based on latter finding from the field of neurosciences, esp. Daniel Kahneman, and the works of Niklas Luhmann. Kahneman et al. argue that the brain processes in a fast and a slow processing mode. Cognition processes information slowly in a comp...

Project management is complex and therefore a fruitful ground for creative, spontaneous and intuitive applications of particular theories to meet the stated objectives in a constantly changing environment. This form of work is defined as improvisation, which describes a pragmatic approach of applying existing theories in novel ways to deliver a suc...

People lie. They always do. They did in the past, they do today, and they will continue to do so in the future. Sometimes people lie deliberately, sometimes they express a lie without knowing better and sometimes they believe their own lies. So what use is any survey, interview or questionnaire in finding out anything about people, organisations or...

The ecology of paradigms conceptualises an alternative perspective on culture. The focus is on practice and understands culture as the paradigmatic reference of a community of practice. This looks at procedures of self‐observation and self‐description as well as on the routines of meaning creation and sense making. The perspective brought forward i...

Efficacy in change management is an issue. Western change management approaches are well elaborated in the mechanics of change. A broader perspective on efficiency and effectiveness is rare. The “Yin and Yang of Change” brings together systemic approaches and Chinese philosophy to draft a broader perspective on efficacy, sustainability and viabilit...

Purpose This paper seeks to address the need for a comprehensive theoretical reference underlying the concerns of social complexity. The shortcomings of a very powerful yet cognitively biased theoretical model like Luhmann's theory of social systems especially call for the integration of the whole person into conceptualising social complexity. The...

The three inevitabilities of human being" are a conceptual hierarchy model for approaching social complexity. The three inevitabilities are first the conscious mind, second the living body and third the social other. For the human being these three aspects prove to be another enlightening access to the conditio humana. We are looking at a complex h...

In discourse, leadership and management are often pictured as opposed to one another. This article argues that such a conception misses a crucial third element for successful leadership as a whole, which is “entrepreneurship”. Based on the St. Gallen Management Model the relationship between the three roles “leader”, “manager”, and “entrepreneur” i...

Wir haben uns daran gewöhnt, das Soziale nur dort zu thematisieren, wo es sichtbar scheitert. Wir sprechen von sozialen Problemen und denken an Armut, Krankheit oder gewalttätigen Protest. Wir verorten das Soziale regelmäßig an den Rändern der Gesellschaft. Soziale Fragen sind dort, nicht hier. Die Beantwortung kann delegiert werden, an den Staat o...

Es gibt interne Beratung. Daran hat man sich im Verlauf der letzten fünfzehn Jahre gewöhnt. Ihre Aufgaben und Formen sind vielfältig, so vielfältig, dass man bis heute nicht so recht zu bestimmen weiß, was interne Beratung letztlich ist, was sie leistet und was nicht. „Unbestimmtheit durch Überdetermination“, würde der Sprachwissenschaftler an dies...

Purpose Change management approaches and attempts of organisational development often fail. In search of business excellence, best practice managers and consultants overestimate the value of conceptual work and forget about the actual organisation and the virtues of the people who have to carry the burden of Change. Design/methodology/approach The...

Projects fail on the people side", may be a quote to highlight the background and the case for action of our approach. We should be able to improve project management performance, if it was possible to find ways to refer to and manage this "people side" of projects. Our aim is to share some theoretical insights that helped us improving the practica...

Zugl.: Bielefeld, Universiẗat, Diss., 2002.