The International Research and Education Programme CHAOS intends to try to open an epistemological and methodological passage capable of making a significant contribution to rethinking the overall architecture of knowledge and skills (Dominici, 1995). This is the “raw nerve” that we have been afraid to touch; this is what stops us, as human beings and as organisations, from even attempting to govern the rapidity and unpredictability of the change that is in progress.

In other words, the kind of complex, ramified, yet much needed pathway that the CHAOS study and research programme intends to lay out, can only be undertaken through scientific research, supported by the sharing of methods and praxes and, it goes without saying, by taking a systemic approach to complexity, one that can orient its progression, shedding light on the analogies and on the elements of continuity, be they methodological and epistemological or otherwise as well. We can no longer afford to perpetuate the error of separating what is profoundly interactive, interdependent and interconnected.

Moreover, the solutions to complex, systemic problems must themselves be correspondingly complex and systemic, from the framework of an approach that can only be multi/inter/transdisciplinary. Themes and issues, obviously, which also closely concern democracy and our future of “living together”.