Chaos

Laurie A. Fitzgerald, PhD is Principal and Senior Practitioner for The Consultancy, Inc., a US-based firm providing services in organizational design and whole-system transformation to the international business community. Her special expertise is in the facilitation of profound organizational change initiatives aimed at the creation of optimally sustainable enterprises. For most of the last 25 years, Dr Fitzgerald has anchored her practice in the tenets of chaos as it is defined in this journal, as well as in her 1996 publication Organizations and Other Things Fractal (a publication of The Consultancy, Denver, Colorado). In consequence, her clientele ranging from the Johnson & Johnson, Motorola and McDonnell-Douglas Aerospace in the USA to Nedcor Bank of South Africa report having achieved not only measurable results but also significant enhancements in their ability to thrive in the unprecedented turbulence of the global marketplace. Frans M. van Eijnatten is an Associate Professor at the Institute for Business Engineering and Technology Application (BETA) at Eindhoven University of Technology in The Netherlands. His main research interest is in socio-technical systems design (STSD), an ambition he has pursued by initiating and coordinating PhD design-oriented action research projects in R&D and information systems. In 1993, he produced a comprehensive overview of STSD entitled The Paradigm that Changed the Work Place (a publication of the Swedish Center for Working Life, Stockholm). Currently Dr van Eijnatten studies the implications of chaordic systems thinking (CST) for application in the process of organizational renewal. As founder of the European Chaos and Complexity Network (ECCON), he has participated in numerous European Union-funded research and development programs (4th and 5th Framework, IMS). Previously published in: Journal of Organizational Change Management, Volume 15, Number 4, 2002