Legacy Approaches

Some challenges of complex environments are vexing because they cannot be managed suitably by legacy modes of thinking. Those approaches organize and delimit reality according to concepts and categories that, by and large, have gone unreflected-upon and unrevised for many decades. As workable as they've been in earlier eras of commerce, they are not adequate to solve the problems we address. They do not conceptualize issues at sufficient levels of abstraction to allow for the sustained exactness of action that complex environments often demand. They do not facilitate conceptual integration across functions to the degree needed to rebuff the environment’s disordering influences. They do not dispel anachronistic category distinctions that foreclose new measurement and computational capabilities. In these ways and others, firms are limited by legacy approaches to contemporary challenges.