Gerrit Van Wyk

Physician

Gerrit Van Wyk
Gerrit Van Wyk completed an MPhil in the School of Engineering Management at the University of Cape Town in 1996, and an MBA at Henley Management College in 2000, and is currently practising as a specialist physician in Saskatchewan.

His research interest and writing is on soft systems thinking, the complexity of social interrelatedness, and how that impacts on inquiry, decision-making, planning, and change. Based on his day-to-day experience in health care, he is currently working on a hypothesis of social systems as networks of complex social interactions within which people adapt and learn, in order to gain a better understanding of the regular patterns that emerge from interrelationships and how these are maintained over time, how groups form and function, and of intergroup dynamics.

He has published in the areas of systems thinking (A Systems Approach to Social and Organizational Planning, 2003), epistemology (A Postmodern Metatheory of Knowledge as a System, 2004), social change (A Systems Approach to Organizational Culture, 2011), and health care planning (Prescription for the Mess in Health Care, 2011).