A633.5.3.RB
Reflections
on chaos
Chaos. What is it?
It’s confusion. It is a one
thousand piece puzzle and every piece has the same shape. I live in chaos. My wife doesn’t understand me and my dogs are
crazy. Things are never in the same
place. I open the refrigerator to a
different landscape every time. I
continuously tell my wife that I need things put back exactly as I ask. My claim is, “If I am ever struck blind, I’ll
still be able to cook.”
I am
so reminded of the 1993 movie “Jurassic Park”.
Especially a certain character…Dr. Ian Malcolm portrayed by Jeff
Goldblum. Dr. Malcolm was a chaos
mathematician. He explains the “butterfly
effect” to his fellow scientists, “God creates dinosaurs. God destroys
dinosaurs. God creates man. Man destroys God. Man creates dinosaurs. Gee, the lack of humility before nature
that's being displayed here, uh... staggers me.
If I may... Um, I'll tell you the problem with the scientific power that
you're using here, it didn't require any discipline to attain it. You read what
others had done and you took the next step. You didn't earn the knowledge for
yourselves, so you don't take any responsibility for it. You stood on the
shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could, and before
you even knew what you had, you patented it, and packaged it, and slapped it on
a plastic lunchbox, and now…No, hold on. This isn't some species that was
obliterated by deforestation, or the building of a dam. Dinosaurs had their
shot, and nature selected them for extinction.
John, the kind of control you're attempting simply is... it's not
possible. If there is one thing the history of evolution has taught us it's
that life will not be contained. Life breaks free, it expands to new
territories and crashes through barriers, painfully, maybe even dangerously,
but, uh... well, there it is. Dr.
Sattler, Dr. Grant, you've heard of chaos theory? No? Non-linear equations? Strange
attractions? Dr. Sattler, I refuse to believe that you aren't familiar with the
concept of attraction. God creates
dinosaur. God destroys dinosaur. God creates man. Man destroys God. Man creates
dinosaur. You see a Tyrannosaur doesn't
follow a set pattern or park schedules, the essence of chaos.” (IMDb, 1993)
I
opted to watch the video instead of actually playing the chaos game because I
couldn’t get my wife or three dogs to participate. In the YouTube video, Obolensky (Obolensky,
2008) instructs a group of men to pick two other people at random but they cannot
indicate who they have chosen and they cannot change who they have chosen. Next, they were instructed to slowly move and
position themselves at equal distance from the two people. This took about a minute and a half. Now, from what I know about chaos, I was
expecting this to last a significant period of time. The reason?
Each person has picked two people who have also picked two people who
have picked two people who have picked two people…I imagined as one individual would
gravitate towards the other two, the other two would individually gravitate
towards their chosen people. Obolensky
explains this as “Discretion and freedom of action. Each person is free to act
without having to wait for ‘permission’, or needing guidance on which way to
go. This takes both an organizational culture and a personal attitude which
encompasses Stuart’s Law of Retroaction (it is easier to seek forgiveness than
obtain permission). Having discretion and freedom of action within well-defined
boundaries is critical for complexity to work. And people need to feel confident
in taking risks and using initiative and Ambiguity and uncertainty. Within the
exercise there is a degree of chaos, and the situation is far from equilibrium.
Whilst for some, if not all, there may be an uncomfortable feeling that things
are looking chaotic, and that the exercise may be impossible, people still
enter into the flow. This ‘far from equilibrium’ and uncertainty is the very
essence of life itself, is therefore natural and something to be embraced
rather than avoided, even if we prefer order and control. And the paradox is
that we should not abandon order and control either!” (Obolensky, 2014)
Chaos
can have a great impact on strategy.
With chaos, there is nothing clearly defined. There may be simple instructions or
directions but if you give individuals too much autonomy and do not manage
their actions, chaos will ensue.
References
IMDb. (1993). Jurassic
Park quotes. Retrieved from http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107290/quotes
Obolensky, N. (2008, April 12). Who needs leaders? [video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41QKeKQ2O3E
Obolensky, N. (2014). Complex adaptive leadership:
Embracing paradox and uncertainty. (2d ed.). Gower Publishing: Burlington, VT
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