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Suggests how periodicity can be used with complexity theory to enable businesses to understand their position in the periodic cycle of gather, repeat, share and transform. Looks in detail at how complexity, information and organizational structure interrelate and influence learning organizations.

In the world of business, visionary leaders are creating a conscious renaissance. With growing success and surprising earnings, they are teaching humanity the meaning of the word “transformation.” The authors assert that this renaissance, this dawning and awakening of humanity, is the emerging era of evolution. In this era, a new human role is being called for, and the noun “evolutionary” will name those who seek to work with and for the natural order of evolution itself. The Theory of Transformative Growth states that everything that grows and evolves, including a business, does so in a multi‐stage process‐pattern consisting of Gathering, forming a sustainable physical being or idea; Repeating, making multiple likenesses of a new being, product, or idea; Sharing, the process of expanding by integrating differences and increasing relationships; and Transforming, creating a higher order union of increased potential.

“While we were once perceived as simply providing services, selling products, and employing people, business now shares in much of the responsibility for our global quality of life. Successful companies will handle this heightened sense of responsibility quite naturally, if not always immediately. I see a future in which the institutions with the most influence by and large will be businesses.” These are the words of the late Robert Goizueta, chairman of the Coca‐Cola Company. They were quoted in an article by Theo Lippman Jr in The Baltimore Sun on July 5, 1998. This quote and the remaining article triggered my thinking about the need to bring this strategic concern to the fore in Strategy & Leadership.

This paper seeks to investigate the influence of the external environment on the choice of strategic management activities, from a chaos and complexity perspective, since a business environment is a complex adaptive system.

The study in this paper was of an exploratory nature, using the qualitative techniques of case study, depth interviews and document analysis to collect data from two companies each in the IT and packaging industries, namely, more successful/less successful companies.

The paper finds that first, it was proposed that more successful companies in turbulent environments would use radical, fast and disruptive strategies. Furthermore, strategy making should be a democratic, bottom‐up process and should be organic, self‐organising, adaptive and emergent. The results confirmed these propositions. Second, it was proposed that more successful companies in stable environments would use more traditional management and strategies and more formal strategy planning activities. The findings did not confirm this proposition, probably due to the fact that in reality a truly stable environment does not exist in South Africa.

This paper is of benefit to managers and strategists by emphasising a new way to consider the future management and strategies of their companies. Since businesses and markets are complex adaptive systems, using complexity theory to increase understanding of how to cope in complex and turbulent environments is necessary, but has not been widely researched.