When we recognize that individuals, groups, and organizations have needs that must be
satisfied, attention is invariably drawn to the fact that they depend on a wider environment
for various kinds of sustenance. It is this kind of thinking that now underpins the “open
systems approach” to organization, which takes its main inspiration from the work of Ludwig
von Bertalanffy, a theoretical biologist. Developed simultaneously on both sides of the
Atlantic in the 1950s and 1960s, the systems approach builds on the principle that
organizations, like organisms, are “open” to their environment and must achieve an
appropriate relation with that environment if they are to survive.