The difficulty we have in defining where the enterprise begins and ends is symptomatic of our mistaken belief that, because we can put a name to it, an enterprise is a thing – an object like any other – this intuitive oversimplification becomes more overt when we attempt to comprehend what goes on inside. The first dictionary definition of “complex” is certainly true of the enterprise: “consisting of many different and connected parts.” But If we are to improve the performance of the enterprise, we must know how those parts interact with and affect each other over time, and many of those causal relationships are arranged in positive and negative feedback loops that make changing one part of the system have unpredictable affects on the whole system. And although we humans are pretty good at thinking in three dimensions, we struggle at four; enterprises manifest many more than four dimensions. (Analysts who have attempted to diagram how enterprises work will know what I am talking about – two-dimensional paper just can’t hold a picture of how everything works together.)