Clausewitz’ concept of friction is an excellent metaphor to understand the behavior of complex adaptive systems such as an enterprise (or indeed any human organization). The defining characteristic of a complex adaptive system is that its behavior at a global level cannot be understood through Taylor’s reductionist approach of analyzing its component parts. Rather, many properties and behavior patterns of complex adaptive systems “emerge” from interactions between events and components at multiple levels within the system. In the case of open systems (such as enterprises), we also have to
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