Bastiaan van Gils

Strategic thinker with broad experience in improving organizations using systems theory, information theory and social psychology.

To me strategy is: Temporarily suboptimizing some local situations to get to a more global equilibrium. Then, this new equilibrium enables local situations to develop beyond the possibilities that existed before the strategy.

[Nederlandse versie]

After I studied Applied Physics, I got interested in human cooperation. During the time I worked as management consultant, I experienced and studied how people did (not) cooperate effectively. I researched topics like behaviour, communication, language, cognition, systems theory, group dynamics, emotions, etcetera. Slowly but surely I became an expert in questions regarding managing, improving and stabilizing organizations and the people working therein.

On this site you'll find what I've done, what I've read and what I've written.

Organizations keep people busy, occasionally entertain them, give them a variety of experiences, keep them off the streets, provide pretexts for story-telling, and allow socializing. They haven't anything else to give.
-- Karl Weick, The social psychology of organizing
(second edition, 1979)

[[ English is not my native language. ]]