There is an empty chair at the conference table of business professionals, a not assigned place that increasingly demands for the presence of a new type of integration manager. The demands for an ever-increasing specialization, imposed by the modern world, are bringing out with great emphasis the need for an interdisciplinary professional who understands the demands of specialists and who is able to coordinate and to link actions and decisions. This need, often still ignored, is a direct result of the growing complexity of the modern world and the fast communications inside the network.

“Complexity” is undoubtedly the most suitable paradigm to characterize the historical and social model of today’s world, in which the interactions and connections between the various areas now form an inextricable network of relations. Since the ’60s and’ 70s a large group of scholars – including the chemist Ilya Prigogine and the physicist Murray Gell-Mann – began to study what would become a true Science of Complexity.

Yet this is not an entirely new concept: the term means “composed of several parts connected to each other and dependent on each other“, exactly as reality, nature, society, and the environment around us. A “complex” mode of thought integrates and considers all contexts, interconnections, interrelationships between the different realities as part of the vision.

What is professionalism? And who are professionals? What can define a professional? <…>

<Read More…[by Fabio Marzocca]>