In the 1960's, MIT developed System Dynamics as an offshoot of the broader discipline of Systems Thinking. Systems Thinking detected structures underling complex problems and allowed individuals to become aware of the mental models they used to perceive reality. System Dynamics simulated interactions between objects in dynamic systems...

Henri Fayol, the father of the school of Systematic Management, realised that organisations were becoming more complex and required their managers to work more professionally. His motivation was to create a theoretical foundation for an educational program for managers who lacked formal training in those days. Basing his work on his experience as a successful...

In 1978, the American academics Miles and Snow developed their strategic choice typology and helped launch the configurational branch of business strategy. Their study brought together the situationalist and the universalist camps who were disputing how companies should compete in a given market. For situationalists, generic strategies were intrinsically...

The Canadian academic, Henry Mintzberg, distinguished six coordination mechanisms from organisational design literature. Any group of individuals that needs to accomplish a complex task faces two opposing requirements: the division of labour of the task into subtasks to support specialisation, and the coordination of these subtasks to accomplish the overall...