With the requirement that outcomes be measurable, we immediately imply that the theory should be stated in mathematical terms.  Although I will state no primary requirement that the theory be mathematical, I am strongly biased in that direction.  In part this is a natural result of being educated as a physicist.  But, I think more importantly because I repeatedly experience what I call the fuzzy nature of linguistic explanations of cause and effect. 

In my role as a technology project manager and business consultant I frequently encounter fuzzy linguistic thinking.  Weinberg puts it very well in the following quote which I already used in Section 1 when talking about the fuzzy nature of language.

            My computer experiences have made me aware that people often have but a foggy idea of what they are saying.  Through translating thoughts into computer programs, I have learned many fog clearing techniques.  These techniques would have been impossible without the knowledge gained from computing, which is why so few of them are understood by older scientists ‑ and systems theorists. 

                                                                         ‑ Gerald Weinberg [1975, xii]

I have in mind that the theory will be explicit in such a way that it can be translated into computer based simulations.

Whenever I encounter a bit of fog I have developed the habit of saying the opposite and checking to see if it makes as much sense.  One can do this very easily with homilies.  “There is no place like home,” to which I would reply “The grass is greener on the other side of the fence.” Both are equally true or untrue, i.e.  they say nothing.   I can give a real world example from just yesterday.  I attended a presentation by a VP of one of the most prodigious global consulting firms.  He was advocating the need for organizations to develop a master IT strategic plan to implement Service Oriented Architecture that tightly couple technology approaches within large organizations for consistency and interoperability..  To which I reply with the opposite by saying that large organizations must loosely couple its various IT subsystems to allow for innovation and technological advancement.  Doing this allows incremental and independent improvement of largely independent subsystems.  The ability to communicate between these subsystems has already been solved.  In my opinion neither is concrete, specific, nor actionable.  They are no better than homilies.

A survey of the literature on various theories of society and management provides a very rich source of the nature of the problem of understanding organization behavior.  However the vast majority of the explanatory style falls into something little better than fuzzy linguistic homily. 

It is my intent to significantly diverge from prior linguistic based approaches.  The Theory of Society must be stated in either the language of mathematics of in an algorithmic form that can be implemented in a computer program.  I am aware that many will feel this is a too restrictive conceptual box.  I will not argue the point.  I will let the results speak for themselves.

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