Openness is an essential factor underlying a system's viability, continuity, and its ability to change. - Walter F. Buckley

Don't simply blame the individuals involved in policy decisions (although they must shoulder the moral and legal responsibilities); blame the sociocultural structure within which they are enmeshed. Search for the role pressures, the premiums and penalties that result from doing or not doing things in certain ways, the goals held out with associated carrots and sticks, and the tensions generated by the often incompatible demands of peers, family, sub- and super-ordinates, politicians, and national flag

We have argued at some length in another place that the mechanical equilibrium model and the organismic homeostasis models of society that have underlain most modern sociological theory have outlived their usefulness

The more recent concern with complex adaptive organization has led to the notion of contingency as the important key. Thus Wiener, while working in the field of communications and probability theory, became convinced 'that a significant idea of organization cannot be obtained in a world in which everything is necessary and nothing is contingent'