1. When naysayers abound, telling us what is not possible and what cannot be done, as is currently the case, this is always an indicator of profound change. What used to be right is suddenly wrong. Many will only see the old in the new, and steer their actions in the wrong direction. In times of change, that is a common pattern.

2. Both business and society face one of history’s greatest transformations: from the Old World as we know it to a New World we do not know yet. This transformation will change almost everything: what we do, how and why we do it – and also, who we are.

3. The greatest challenge of the New World is its ever-increasing complexity. Complexity is the main reason for the escalating number of local and global crises.

4. Crises originate from outdated organizations incapable of mastering increased complexity. More and more organizations are overstrained, sluggish, inefficient, and paralyzed.

5. This incapacity results from poorly programmed navigation systems, from structures that originated in the previous century, from an outdated understanding of management, and from steering, directing, and shaping with obsolete methods and tools.

6. It is due to this incapacity that more and more organizations respond to the challenge with the wrong strategy. They attempt to reduce complexity so they can cling to their obsolete functions. To them, complexity is something entirely negative. This attitude keeps them from finding effective solutions, and further exacerbates the crisis.

7. The right strategy is to take advantage of complexity. It is the only strategy that creates solutions. Flexibility in responding to complexity is the raw material of intelligence, innovation, and evolution, for self-regulation and self-organization, and for all major achievements. Complexity and differentiation are the materials from which the New World and its new organizations will be built. The success of the Great Transformation21 largely depends on our ability to profoundly reform the organizational fabric of our society and its management.

8. A sound knowledge of complexity, and the ways of mastering it, is a key resource of a well-functioning organization. Smart use of systems knowledge, feedback loops, and control mechanisms is more productive than redoubling our time and effort. Information on cybernetics will outrank money, and smart delegation to self-organized subunits will outrank power.

9. This is equally true for society as a whole. Its previous political categories, based on the polar opposites of capitalism and socialism, are outdated because in a society of complexity there is not one best way for everything. In their stead, we need a new integration of systems – human functionism – as a compass for those navigating through times of proliferating confusion.

More often than ever before I run into people who will explain to me what cannot be done. This happens at all management levels – even the most senior ones – and it includes people who would never have said that in the past.

It almost seems to me as though it is a sign of our times that the number of inveterate naysayers keeps growing. If I count in the waverers and falterers, they are even in the majority. What used to be “anything goes” has turned into “nothing goes.”

That said, today’s naysayers are different from those of former times. Often they are not “simply against it” – they usually have good reasons. Many are even right, as it is a fact that many things are not or no longer possible.

I take that to be an indicator that the transformation that has been going on in the world, previously at a slower pace, is now entering the phase of acceleration and intensification. People sense that there are fundamental changes in more and more areas of society, and that these changes will be irreversible. But most cannot make head or tail of what is going on. They are increasingly and acutely aware that they lack orientation.

In the Old World, many things no longer work because it is coming to an end. In the New World, many things do not work yet because they are not fully evolved by trial and testing. That is precisely why it is a key task of management in all organizations to look for ways to make things happen nevertheless. It is all about navigating in the turbulent times of a major transformation. We are entering new territory, and we do not know how to deal with it yet.

In all countries around the globe, business and society are going through one of the most fundamental changes that ever occurred in history. We are witnesses to the profound transformation of the Old World as we know it into a New World of the yet unknown. A new order is forming, and so is a new mode of functioning of society – a new kind of social ^REvolution.

What may look like a financial, economic or debt crisis on the surface can better be understood as something much bigger: the birth pangs of a New World in which everything will be different from the way it used to be. And even if the transformation turns out to be less cataclysmic in retrospect, we would not have committed a strategic mistake by assuming. There is less danger in overestimating a challenge than there is in underestimating it.