Chaos And Order In Management

© Richard Bolstad

Business is Chaos (As Managers Know!)

This is a brief article about creating order in organisations. There are many theories about management. And new managers often hope that if they find the right theory, it will all suddenly make sense. This is comparable to the hope that weather forecasters had earlier this century. They thought that if they had good enough satellites and monitors, they could one day predict the weather perfectly. The work of Edward Lorenz, in 1961 (Gleick, 1987, p 11 to 31) finally proved that this dream would never be fulfilled. The weather is so complex, that to monitor it well enough would require us to monitor every square inch of air every second of the day, not to mention knowing what every person on the planet was about to do! Just measuring it could change the whole pattern. Weather forecasters are up the creek without a paddle! The weather, it turns out, is a “chaotic” system. That doesn’t mean it’s got no order; it just means that the order is so complex its result cannot, in the real world, be predicted. And management is exactly the same. This article is about how to take advantage of that.

The Snowflake

The new science of Chaos can be very simply understood if we use the example of a snowflake. Every snowflake is unique. Every single one. The process of making a snowflake, then, is not “ordered” in the way we normally use that word. It is Chaotic. And yet, there are similarities between snowflakes. Let me show you a simple way to make one of the millions of possible snowflake patterns (Gleick, 1987, p 99). You take a simple triangle (A below). Then, you add other simple triangles to the middle of each edge of the first one (B). Then you do that again, adding other triangles to the middle of the edge of those ones (C). Then you simply keep doing it again (D). By this time, your picture looks recognisably like those snowflake diagrams you’ve seen in books.

The real snowflake does this itself. As a liquid crystallises, it forms growing tips (like the points of a triangle). The boundaries of these tips become weakened by the process and send tips off them (the next set of triangle points). This happens again and again, so that the result doesn’t even look like a simple “orderly” set of growing tips. It looks chaotic. If you magnify one of these natural shapes, you find that small areas of it look similar to larger areas (in our example case, triangles with triangles on the sides). This kind of shape which is similar at different magnifications is called fractal (see Dilts, 1998), and it looks more “natural” somehow. Why? Because nature has very few orderly geometric shapes, and lots of fractals. Think of trees, fern leaves, or even the little blood capillaries in your body. They are all fractals. A small part of a fern leaf has the same shape as the whole fern leaf.

All snowflakes are different, but all of them have some similarities. For example, all of them have a “six-sided-ness” about them. Six-sided-ness is what is called an attractor for snowflakes. The shapes vary, but they never vary beyond the basic attractor. In the same way, every oak tree is unique, but if you learn what the attractor is like (the “essence” of an oak tree) you can recognise that they are all oaks. Another example is that, in terms of the earth’s climate, there are two known attractors. One is what we have now; a balance that supports life, even when we pour greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere for a century. The other is where the seas freeze, and the land is covered in ice. That too would be a stable attractor. Scientists do not know why the current climatic attractor is holding out; the other state, called the White Earth Equilibrium, is mathematically just as likely (Gleick, 1987, p 170).

The notion of attractors explains why all snowflakes are similar. So what makes a snowflake unique? The answer is in very minute differences in the air conditions at the time the snowflake begins to form. The same is true for the oak tree, and for all other natural, chaotic forms. The sensitivity is so dramatic, that Chaos theorists like to use the analogy that if a butterfly shifted in the air in Beijing, it might alter storm patterns in New York weather next month (called “the butterfly effect”; see Gleick, 1987, p8). Finally, if conditions change too much, the snowflake can break away from its attractor and be “caught” by another attractor. It can become a raindrop.

Letting Go Of Order In Management

The fact that management is a chaotic system is both a challenge and a blessing. It is a blessing because it makes management an adventure that is constantly new and interesting. It is a challenge because managers often seek grand unified theories to reassure them that if they act in a certain way, they will get a certain result. And in a chaotic system the only result that is predictable is unpredictability.

The old idea of “order” in management included a belief that there will be one “correct” way to manage, and one precise set of solutions for all conflicts. In that old model, the manager needed to learn and then impose the precise solution to meet her/his outcomes. In studying the application of chaos theory to business, John Legge (1990, p33-45) points out that salespeople often want to know what is the “correct” sales pitch for a particular market. In reality, the most successful sales pitch for a market often appeals to only 20% of customers (but 20% is better than 19%). This is because the market, like a seminar group or a school class, is a chaotic system. It is not tidily organised into a triangle with three key points to learn. It is more like a unique, complex snowflake. The point for salespeople is that if you are wanting to enter that market, copying the most successful current salesperson may be wasting your energy. It may be easier to find another sizeable group of customers (say 16%) who respond to a totally different pitch. By accepting that the market is more complex; that there is no “one right way”, you open up more possibilities for success. In this article, our aim is to do the same with teaching.

First Moves

Legge uses another analogy (1990, p 110-111). He says that interacting in an old style “ordered” system would be like playing a game of poker. Poker is a game of power. You can have a “weak” hand, a “strong” hand, or even an “invincible” hand. In any case, you win in one powerful move, by keeping your position secret, and pushing the other person until they cannot afford to respond. This is the way that many of the teachers you had at school tried to play teaching. By contrast, interacting in a chaotic system is like playing the Japanese game of Go. In Go, each player places a stone at a time on a board. By encircling areas of the board with stones, each player can co-opt the other’s areas. No one stone placement can “overwhelm” the other player, and in fact, the game usually ends at an arbitrary time, when players agree to stop and check who has the most of the board encircled by their stones. Each play is open and obvious. Successful play involves precise (though apparently random) early placements of stones, which shape the entire game in almost mysterious ways.

Stabilising the Group Attractor

So far, we have talked about designing small shifts which generate massive changes (butterfly effects). The other side of working in a chaotic system, though, is that other small shifts are constantly occurring. A team member may come with strongly held beliefs which oppose the manager’s model of the team. Others may then start to consider this other belief system as just as plausible. The change, again, builds up from such small beginnings that the group members will be convinced that “this is the way it had to be”. Such small changes are bound to occur. How do we stop them having disastrous effects?

The answer lies in understanding the notion of attractors. Attractors, remember, are the “limits” that a system keeps itself within. A clock pendulum, when swinging, can be in several different states, but they always fit within a set of points. Even if the pendulum is bumped, it tends to settle back into that tidy set of points. This set of points is a periodic attractor. Your heartbeat, on the other hand, does not swing so regularly at all. And yet it stays within certain limits. Being chaotic, it’s attractor has more apparent randomness; it is called a “strange attractor”.  Actually, if someone’s heart does become unchaotic and periodically “ordered” they are in danger! “What appears to be chaotic behaviour within the heart or brain is characteristic of health, whereas simple, regular heartbeats, for example, presage a heart attack.” (Peat, 1991, p. 105).

Ernest Rossi (1996, p 68-69) suggests that mental life too is intrinsically chaotic, and the conscious mind is a “bubble” of order in the chaotic dynamic of the unconscious. The conscious mind’s job is to give you the illusion of order in the midst of what must remain basically an incomprehensible turbulence. The unconscious mind does not have order (check out your dreams if you don’t believe me yet), but it does follow a strange attractor (sanity). Overcontrol by the conscious mind can disrupt this attractor, just as overcontrol by an electrical pulse can disrupt the heart’s attractor, and overcontrol by human culture can disrupt the attractor of the Earth’s weather.

Creating Team Attractors

I believe the most useful strange attractor for a work team is Rapport. What sanity is for the individual, rapport is for a group. When rapport has been successfully established in a group, the chaotic deviations from the expected pattern are “balanced out” by peoples’ trust in and caring for the manager and the group. As the cliché goes, people don’t care how much you know unless they know how much you care. Like all results in chaotic systems, the creation of rapport begins with certain tiny events in the first moments of the team setup. Warming up to the group process answers two questions that employees have when they come to your team. “Who is here?” is answered by processes which enable employees to introduce themselves to each other. “How will we act?” is answered by the explicit negotiation of a set of guidelines for behaviour in the team. The Win-Win approach to conflict resolution provides the skills to maintain this attractor (see Transforming Communication, by Bolstad 2004).

Bibliography:

• Bolstad, R. Transforming Communication, Addison-Wesley-Longman, Auckland, 2004
• Dilts, R.B. “Fractals and Human Behaviour”, in Anchor Point, October 1998, Vol 12, No 10, p 9-13
• Gleick, J. Chaos, Sphere, London, 1987
• Legge, J. Chaos Theory & Business Planning, Schwartz & Wilkinson, Melbourne, 1990
• Peat, D. The Philosopher’s Stone, Bantam, New York, 1991.
• Rossi, E.L. The Symptom Path To Enlightenment, Palisades Gateway Publishing, Pacific palisades, California, 1996