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The Professional Development for the Future Project, undertaken in 2003-04 within the Australian Flexible Learning Framework Professional Development Program, investigated professional development for the future, taking into account the way people maintain and upgrade their professional skills within a knowledge economy. Individual and team processes of knowledge workers were investigated along with ways in which these processes can be informed by contemporary theories on learning networks, chaos and complexity, knowledge management and systems thinking. The project had six research phases. Phase three, 'Contemporary theories and thinking: implications of thought pieces', involved four external theorists in the knowledge work/knowledge management field. These theorists were Ranulph Glanville, Robert Poell, Karl-Erik Sveiby and Robert Woog, with Poell, Sveiby and Woog each being invited to write a thought piece describing groundbreaking approaches to professional development in the knowledge era. This paper by Woog makes three assumptions: (1) that theory may usefully support an inquiry being used to adjust assumptions, advance possibilities for improvement, make knowledge explicit, make links with other theories and so build improved or new forms of understanding and that using theory in this way to support inquiry is recognised as 'praxis', or 'theoretically informed practice'; (2) that complexity theory provides an appropriate theoretical framework for inquiry into organisational knowledge management; and (3) that we assume that human knowing is complex and multidimensional, encompassing many forms such as explicit, tacit, tangible and intangible and we subscribe to the view that 'managing knowledge is more akin to managing a complex ecology of interdependence, unpredictable and fluid entities than it is to designing and maintaining a sophisticated machine'.