■ Research Paper Strategic Thinking in the Context of Complexity Leonardo Augusto Amaral Terra* and João Luiz Passador Faculdade de Economia, Administração e Contabilidade de Ribeirão Preto, Universidade de São Paulo, Ribeirão Preto, SP, Brazil This article seeks to provide a discussion of the paradigmatic changes that the complexity of scenarios has imposed on strategic thinking and promote an epistemological reflection that can guide researchers in the field. As a result, the article explores the limitations of the atomists and dialectics approaches and proposes the construction of a unified theory of strategy that recognizes the complex nature of its object of study. The paper also concludes that the area needs to create new structures of empirical and conceptual analysis and suggest a series of recommendations to develop studies in the field. © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Keywords strategy and policy; epistemology; complex systems INTRODUCTION During much of the 20th century, natural and social transformations were routinely treated as part of a large superficial phenomenon in an essentially stable world (Capra, 1983). Despite the telltale advances that were developed in natural sciences, the interest of organizational science in studies based on a universe governed by instability only came to gain strength from the 1980s, when the increasing number of variables arising from globalization, a new spec- ulative model of financial markets, technology and from the vision of society itself, made explicit that the environment was too dynamic and complex to be predicted (Peters, 1991). For Prahalad and Hamel (1994), this phenome- non showed the shortcomings of classical man- agement models before intense transformation scenarios, especially in the area of strategy. This is largely due to the fact that the deep logic of strategic thinking is still based on ‘[…] determin- istic assumptions of cause and effect […]’ where the dynamic balance is accepted ‘[…] as a reason- able basis for the formulation of executive actions’ (Pascale, 2002, p. 112). Despite huge efforts undertaken since, Herepath (2014) and Jarzabkowski and Paul Spee (2009) state that the links between social phenomena and executive actions remain unde- veloped to handle such problems, hindering the actions of managers. The challenges posed by this new reality can be seen in the difficulties that * Correspondence to: Leonardo Augusto Amaral Terra, Faculdade de Economia, Administração e Contabilidade de Ribeirão Preto, Universidade de São Paulo, Avenida Bandeirantes, Monte Alegre, Ribeirão Preto, SP 3900, Brazil. E-mail: prof@leoterra.com.br Received 8 December 2016 Accepted 16 June 2018 © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Systems Research and Behavioral Science Syst. Res 35, 869–883 (2018) Published online 22 August 2018 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/sres.2530