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This research presents an ontological model, to communicate the impact of dynamic preconditions for peri-urban communities. As such, this paper approaches perturbation communities as social-complex-adaptive-systems.

Previous assessment of dynamic preconditions have typically been based on top-down approaches. Through the lens of social-complex-adaptive and systemic design approaches (requiring a range of different disciplines), this work focuses on providing a broader view towards periurban research. The methodological approach involved academic literature, fieldwork observations, in-depth discussions with community, government, experts and research groups, focusing on a region called “Xochimilco” on the outskirts of Mexico City, a unique pre-Hispanic, Aztec ecosystem. This evolving man made agricultural/ecological structure of island plots, still provides environmental services to Mexico City. This region provides the basis of the research and subsequent ontological model. Ontology, in this instance, refers to the nature of being within a range of constraining dynamic forces relating to resilient behaviors of the current Xochimilco perturbation ecosystem.

Xochimilco can be considered as a longitudinal phenomenon that contributed to the understanding of observable resilient and precondition elements between the past and present of a living complex-adaptive-system.

The research has provided a better understanding of community resilience through preconditions, contributing towards preparation of environmental change and future urbanization. To this end, the research focused on visualizing key dynamics elements for communities attempting to absorb new urban conditions (being continuously pushed into it).

The outcomes of this research have provided specific systemic, bottom up approaches with ontological modeling to assist with visualizing and understanding intangible dynamic conditions that impact high complex areas of perturbation regions.

To learn to avoid pitfalls there is need to accept and understand failures. This anonymous case study aims to report a major organisational failure due to the absence of effective knowledge management, where both the reasons for, and organisational consequences of, the failure are fairly clear.

Within a theoretical framework of organisational autopoiesis, the case study compares knowledge management styles from two eras in the history of one engineering project management company: as it grew from an acquired site with a single project to a multi‐divisional leader in its regional market, and then as it failed in its original line of business to the point where it divested most of its assets.

In the first era, the executive and line managers were permissive, allowing project teams to work out local solutions for business problems as they arose producing successful and profitable solutions. The decline began and accelerated when management strengthened hierarchical command and control that stifled knowledge sharing and solution development at the work face and exceeded line managers' limits of rationality.

This study has the limitations of any historical study of a single case, exacerbated by a need to maintain the anonymity of the surviving company.

Few studies so clearly highlight the critical importance of personal knowledge and its sharing in knowledge intensive organisations for maintaining successful operations. Success may have many parents, but in this case the internal comparisons identify specific factors that caused a successful organisation to disintegrate.