Transcending Systems Thinking: Critical Systems Integration and What's Love Got to Do With It

Louis Klein

Systems Research and Behavioral Science, 2025, vol. 42, issue 1, 219-234

Abstract: Systems thinking is a promise of wholeness and agency. It appears as the right approach to meet the challenges of the Anthropocene. Yet, to keep its promise, systems thinking needs to critically review itself, the wholeness it integrates and the sense of agency it informs and forms. Transcending systems thinking is a continuous process of critical systems integration. Since the 1980s, this process of further integrating systems thinking in the mirror of complex (organisational) practice has been Mike Jacksons research agenda. Today, in the light of the demands of systems change vocalised by a young generation of activists and campaigners but more so in the mirror of research in metamorphic transformation, a next chapter of critical systems integration is due. Widening the gaze and revisiting its philosophical foundations, critical systems integration dissolves distinctions in a quest for meaning and purpose and transcends in a metamodern turn the axiological struggle of the critical school. Critical systems integration embraces a wider range of lived experiences allowing itself to include the formerly excluded. It finds its confluence in a shared understanding growing from co‐reflected lived experiences. In the Tamkeen experience of metamorphic transformation, systems thinking mirrors itself and the challenges of the generation systems change growing out of itself, from itself, into itself; and finally, it needs to answer the ultimate critical question: What's love got to do with it?

Date: 2025
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