Systems Thinking in the Proactive Approach to Law in Business

Abstract

Proactive law in business is about helping organizations address their legal needs before they turn into legal problems and promoting business success and organizational well-being. This chapter explains how systems thinking, systems intelligence, and systemic design can help us understand complex environments and support the proactive approach to law in business. Systems thinking provides a holistic bird’s-eye view to different systems and to the co-creation processes of the social environment in which people and their businesses must operate. Systems intelligence is an ability to use this holistic understanding in practice as part of everyday decision-making. Systemic design is a design framework and methodology that helps reconcile different perspectives into pragmatic solutions. Together these three systemic approaches may not only help anticipate and address legal challenges before they arise, but also help realize business opportunities in a legally healthy way, while considering the needs of the overall ecosystem of the business. The chapter also illustrates how systems thinking, systems intelligence, and systemic design provide a useful theoretical base to develop a better understanding of the proactive approach to law and its application in various contexts.