South Africa, May 26 -- What's your default operating system? For more than a century, organisations have largely been built on industrial-era Western models designed for stability, efficiency and control. Not surprisingly, these systems viewed organisations like machines, where leaders made decisions, managers directed execution and communication flowed through rigid hierarchies.

These systems shaped not only how organisations operated, but how they communicated. In classical organisational theory, communication was largely treated as a mechanism for control and coordination. That worked in environments where work was repetitive and information moved slowly. But today's organisations are no longer static systems. They are complex adapti...