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This chapter uses the case of American think tanks to develop the idea of a “boundary organization,” or a formal organization that acquires its distinctiveness and efficacy from its intermediate location in the social structure. Traversing, overlapping, and incorporating the logics of multiple institutional spheres – including those of academia, politics, business, and the market – think tanks at first seem to be organizations “divided against themselves.” However, by gathering complex mixtures of otherwise discordant resources, they create novel products, carry out novel practices, and claim for themselves a crucial mediating role in the social structure. This chapter's ultimate aim is to consider the implications of this idea for theories of organizational power. With respect to this aim, I argue that boundary organizations – and organizational boundary-making processes in general – underscore the need to think about power in relational and processional terms.

The purpose of this article is to understand alternative African futures as an aid to improved decision‐making and action by governments and by other key agents and stakeholders.

The authors aim is to put the two concepts (“futures” and think tank) into context and explain how they are going to be used in this paper. The aim is not to engage on a prediction exercise about African futures but rather to understand, think about and explore long‐term trends and how they may impact on alternative African futures.

The journey towards a knowledge economy is a difficult one and the experiences elsewhere in the world show that governments on their own can not succeed without assistance from think tanks. This means that as African governments are trying to map out new visions for the future, think tanks can grab the opportunities provided by the current realities to continue playing a meaningful role in shaping African futures.

Africa's complex challenges demand the best of intellectual capacities. Think tanks are potentially one of the best‐suited organizations to develop innovative and advanced solutions to Africa's challenges. They have a special role to play in shaping African futures, both as knowledge providers and policy formulation partners.

Organizations increasingly view their internal staff as a source of innovation and change and tend to involve an increasing number of organizational members in strategy work. This inclusion is a form of decentralized strategy and usually takes place in meetings. This chapter explores how meetings can become a planned emergence strategy for unlocking endogenous innovation potential. Data have been gathered from a still ongoing field project in which employees of six public offices such as the police or fire brigade participate. The public offices’ administration is characterized by a traditional division of responsibility, meaning that strategy has so far been the business of only few people at the top of the organization. For the first time in this organization, managers and other specialists at various organizational levels have been invited to partake in the new bottom-up strategy format Think Tank. The goals of the Think Tank are to identify the needs of the employees, to find and show potential, create a subculture and encourage innovation. The Think Tank meetings are attended by highly motivated employees who want to develop further organizational goals. The investigation illustrates that exchange on an equal basis, voluntary participation and mixed teams form the foundation for planned emergence strategy meetings. The interactions within the groups are characterized by participants having a positive attitude and avoiding negatively connoted behavior. In the strategy meetings, the various organizational members are enabled to join forces and contribute to strategic renewal. Strategic renewal is essential in a volatile, uncertain, ambiguous, and complex world. This chapter illustrates how meetings can facilitate strategic renewal through planned emergence.

This paper seeks to argue that the adoption of a “critical futures” approach to management and content of a Think Tank conducted by the Centre for Military and Veterans' Health, Australia, resulted in outcomes conducive to deep level change within the organizations and professional groups involved.

The Think Tank process focused on challenging mind‐sets and entrenched systemic barriers at all organizational levels through: engagement of leadership throughout the process; broad‐based workshops involving management, professional and operational levels; use of causal layered analysis to encourage critical thinking and ideas development; and use of scenarios to imagine the future.

At the end of the Think Tank's program, a new framework supporting health services delivery had been envisaged, its components described and the cultural and structural changes needed to make this happen had been identified.

The results of the Think Tank program will provide a basis for action to achieve a preferred future over the next two decades. Such action includes research, horizon scanning, adoption of new technologies, better information collection and management, and training and education programs, and most importantly attitudinal and cultural change. A significant indicator of the impact of the Think Tank is that requests for further work using similar methodologies to move towards the preferred future were quickly received from the military and veterans' sectors.

The Think Tank worked alongside a military command control structure to maximize leverage for change, and to encourage critical and futures‐oriented thinking at all organizational levels. The result has been a comprehensive and strategic vision of the future that went well beyond the outcomes envisaged at the beginning of the process. We are unaware of any other such futures projects which have been conducted in the military and veterans' health sector.

This chapter focuses on civic and political networks. All six facets of knowledge networks are described. The importance of three of the six facets is called out, including topology, domain, and messages exchanged across the network. The authors provide three networks’ profiles, including civic and governance networks, advocacy networks, and political parties and networks.

This chapter presents Virtual Exchange (VE) and Simulation as a pedagogical strategy to train pre-service teachers. Through VE, students–teachers from geographically distant locations come together with the aim of participating in a simulation. The simulation, in turn, presents a scenario and highlights several educational challenges that pre-service teachers must solve collaboratively. In so doing it, language skills, digital competence, and intercultural competence are developed. This chapter offers an overview of Virtual Exchange + Simulation, presents a complete simulation in case other teachers want to replicate the experience, and presents some of the most relevant findings out of the experience.

IT was in September that we asked “What do Bullocks Produce?”. Well, now we know; and a right mess of controversy is the result. Or is it a result or, rather, a cause the result of which may well sound the virtual end of British business as we have known it and it has been built up over the years? It could also sound the death‐knell of the Mother of Parliaments; for power is being given, irrevocably, to the Unions.

The organisations in which we go about our daily lives are indeed complex. Not only does layer upon layer of sub‐groups interact within our educational organisations but also these same organisations interact with the myraid organisations that form the whole of society. Such continuous interaction at all levels in our educational organisations is part of a giant network which is in a state of flux. As leaders we need a theoretical tool to describe this perpetual evolution if we are to understand our organisations and so lead people. The link between complexity and computer simulation seems particularly promising in order to understand the many possible scenarios that may result from the evolving variables present in our educational organisations. Although theories on complexity, including chaos theory, are descriptive rather than predictive, an understanding of the way our organisations function must surely facilitate our role of administration and management.