Like many others, I couldn't make head or tail of this - and I'm a complex systems scientist.

There was more, of course. More words strung together like beads on a string. I think I noticed "evolution", "adaptation", "emergence", "weak signals" and, of course, "complexity". These words, within the science of complex systems, have deep meaning, but taken out and jumbled together, are essentially meaningless.

This whole episode, for me, has a strong sense of déjà vu. At the turn of the century there was a brief fad for complexity science in management consulting. For a few years, it seemed, no airport bookstore was complete without its shelf of books - a few good, most dreadful - offering a complexity take on management by authors who'd got the jargon but not the science. Thankfully, the fad passed - just as earlier ones retailing the wonders of catastrophe theory and chaos theory.

Although the CIT story suggests there's a flicker of life in the ol' fad yet.

That is not to say that complexity and systems thinking can't help us understand the world. Complex systems scientists look at the overall behaviour of collections of things, each of them with their own individual behaviours - people in a society, businesses in an economy, nerves in a brain - and they have made great strides in the last half century, even as their technical jargon, like "tipping points", has percolated (another piece of technical jargon) into the outside world.

There are now major scientific research institutes across the world working on such problems, including the Santa Fe Institute in Santa Fe, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Vienna, the New England Complex Systems Institute in Boston, and the Centre for Complex Systems at the University of Sydney. Such institutes have significantly increased our understanding of pandemics, war, economic crashes, climate change, the recovery of landscapes after fire, and more.

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And when such thinking is turned to the problems of enterprises - their management, growth, and transformation - they have also been successful. Both the Santa Fe Institute and the New England Complex Systems Institute, for example, have specific outreach programs for enterprises.

The Santa Fe Institute is, perhaps, the oldest complex systems shop. It has had, for many years, an Applied Complexity Network to help organisations apply complexity and systems thinking to their problems - all without the jargon. It runs continuing seminars and events for the leaders of enterprises focusing on complex problems in very diverse domains. These include R&D, regulation, technology change, operations, organisational structure, IT, strategy, security, marketing, politics, and international relations.

The New England Complex Systems Institute is the new kid on the complexity block, offering jargon-free support for business. For example, it offers new insights into the networks of communication in organisations and how those networks are well or poorly suited to the tasks they perform. And its fundamental research on negotiation helps organisations identify specific protocols that enable negotiators to achieve the best possible outcomes.

In a more formal teaching environment, the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has for years taught complexity and systems thinking for business - in crystal-clear plain English.

All these resources are out there for the asking. And they are pitched to non-specialists - in plain words.

That, it seems to me, is the crux of CIT's problem. They may well need complexity and systems thinking to help make their enterprise match-fit for the coming decades. Many organisations do. But what they don't need is incomprehensible gobbledygook to get them there.