The Nature of Change Or the Law of Unintended Consequences: An Introductory Text to Designing Complex Systems and Managing Change

Description

This absorbing book provides a broad introduction to the surprising nature of change, and explains how the Law of Unintended Consequences arises from the waves of change following one simple change. Change is a constant topic of discussion, whether be it on climate, politics, technology, or any of the many other changes in our lives. However, does anyone truly understand what change is? Over time, mankind has deliberately built social and technology based systems that are goal-directed there are goals to achieve and requirements to be met. Building such systems is man's way of planning for the future, and these plans are based on predicting the behavior of the system and its environment, at specified times in the future. Unfortunately, in a truly complex social or technical environment, this planned predictability can break down into a morass of surprising and unexpected consequences. Such unpredictability stems from the propagation of the effects of change through the influence of one event on another. The Nature of Change explains in detail the mechanism of change and will serve as an introduction to complex systems, or as complementary reading for systems engineering. This textbook will be especially useful to professionals in system building or business change management, and to students studying systems in a variety of fields such as information technology, business, law and society.

Get the book

Amazon.com

Search the book

eBay.com

Search the book

Other editions

• 

  The Nature of Change or the Law of Unintended Consequences:...

  • 2010-03-22
  • 212 pages
  • Ebook
  • World Scientific

Similar books

• 

  Family History Digital Libraries

  By William Sims Bainbridge

  One named Sara and Timberlake had 11 male workers, 1 female worker, and 4 children workers, so it might have employed the Minor family.

• 

  Foundation Dreamweaver MX

  By Craig Grannell, Jerome Turner, Matt Stephens

  So here's what we need to do to arrive at our layout: s Create the main table to hold all the page elements. s Deal with the navigation area which is ...

• 

  Cisco CCNA Certification, 2 Volume Set: Exam 200-301

  By Todd Lammle

  This inclusive, two-book set provides what you need to know to succeed on the new CCNA exam. The set includes Understanding Cisco Networking Technologies: Volume 1 and the CCNA Certification Study Guide: Volume 2.

• 

  CompTIA Network+ Study Guide: Exam N10-006

  By Todd Lammle

  ... you can use: –a –A –c –n –r –R –S –s All nbtstat switches are case sensitive. Generally speaking, lowercase switches deal with NetBIOS names of hosts, ...

• 

  CompTIA Network+ Study Guide with Online Labs: N10-007 Exam

  By Todd Lammle, Jon Buhagiar

  ... you can use: –a –A –c –n –r –R –S –s All nbtstat switches are case sensitive. Generally speaking, lowercase switches deal with NetBIOS names of hosts, ...

• 

  CCNA: Cisco Certified Network Associate FastPass

  By Todd Lammle

  S The S reference point defines the point between the customer router and an ... with the letter E deal with using ISDN on the existing telephone network.

• 

  Stranger in the Chat Room

  By Todd Hafer, Jedd Hafer

  A sequel to In the Chat Room With God finds a group of teens contacted by a mysterious and increasingly malevolent character who claims to know about their encounters with the Almighty and challenges their beliefs. Original.

• 

  Error Correction Coding: Mathematical Methods and Algorithms

  By Todd K. Moon

  M M−1∑ k=0 −∞ ∞ k=0 The average energy per signal E s ∫ can be related to the ... we will deal primarily with additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN), ...

• 

  Security+ Training Guide

  By Todd King

  ... to deal with most , but unfortunately not all , of these potential threats . ... The S / MIME standard implements encryption for message content using ...

• 

  CCDA: Cisco Certified Design Associate Study Guide: Exam 640-861

  By Todd Lammle, Andy Barkl

  S reference point The S reference point defines the reference point between ... with the letter E deal with using ISDN on the existing telephone network.