Canada and adaptation to change

"Canada faces an increasingly global and intensely competitive world economy, an economy that is characterized by the growth of knowledge-based industries and technology-intensive enterprise. Our adaptation to this new and challenging environment is fundamental to our future economic success and our ability to maintain the standard of living and level of social programming we have come to expect as a people."

This quote comes from a report by E. Harvey and R. Houle and reflects the ongoing need we have to be better at understanding the whole range of social dyanmics associated with complex systems and ingenuity. Many organizations can see in retrospect how failure to adapt was fatal - what we need more of is the ability to compare current practices with the features of successful adaptive systems so we can take advantage of changes instead of being crushed by them. Take a look here if you want to read a PDF of the research paper.