“The difficulty with all revolutions is this: the leaders think that they can substitute new ideas for old before they have changed the action tendencies, habit systems of people. As this cannot be done, revolution after revolution fails. The first thing that a normal class of revolutionists should be taught is that behaviour must be changed through experience, that it cannot be changed through the impact of ideas.”
Mary Parker Follett (Creative Experience, 1924, p.200)

This blog explains exactly why this is true for social systems. We are not dealing with changing individual ‘mindsets’ but with collective behaviour, “habit systems” – entangled practices that can be changed only by action, experiment and feedback i.e. “through experience”, not by a set of cognitive abstractions.

The blog indicates that there are real limits to the validity of the mainstream Anglo-American view of management as a technical practice that proceeds by the rational, top-down application of principles (abstractions) to practices (actions). This may work for complicated challenges, where the axioms of physics are valid over a wide range, but it does not work for complex ones, where an ecological-adaptive approach is required to handle unique circumstances and emergent events.