TRANSFORMING SYSTEMS

By the turn of the millennium, the dominant idea was that not only should the business of business be only business, but countries, governments and civil society organizations should also be run on principles of business. Soon, the realization that, while economies had been growing, systemic problems of social inequality and environmental unsustainability were becoming intolerable, led to the Sustainable Development Goals, which all countries signed up to achieve. A new toolkit is required to attain these goals that go beyond the precepts of good business management and prevalent best practices in government as well as civil society organizations. In Transforming Systems, Arun Maira stresses that a new toolkit has to be founded on disciplines of systems thinking, ethical reasoning and deep listening. It should focus more on concepts of governance of networks, rather than the management of organizations. Diverse points of view must be heard and valued, not smothered beneath technology-driven quantitative data analysis. Maira brings the wealth of his knowledge and experience to highlight the uncertainty of our future that is bound to change dynamically, and points out how we can cope with the changes. He insists that the most useful life skill for young people is to learn how to be lifelong learners, sensitive to their own evolution within an evolving system.