Complexity Theory offers a particularly rich way of looking at our world, at sociosystems and at organisations. For example, complexity science reveals that a beat-to-beat record of a healthy heart shows an irregular, wrinkly appearance - not a smooth, regular pattern. An equally detailed heart rate time-trace of a patient just before suffering a cardiac arrest would normally reveal consistency and regularity. So, predictable and regular activity precede (and probably contribute to) heart attack; unpredictability and variability are associated with health and stability. This pattern can also be seen in other biological systems.
The lesson is that an organism that finds itself in an unstable environment will be more alert and quicker to learn, adapt and change.
This is broadly true of any Complex Adaptive System and goes hand in hand with the notion that if a system is designed with too much rigidity, it will eventually cease to exist. But if it lacks structure and form altogether, it will cease to function.
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| Graphic: www.noop.nl |
Applying this approach to organisations, one Triarchy author (Lesley Kuhn) says about The Edge of Chaos:
“In complexity science, the ‘edge of chaos’ describes a specific phenomenon thought to be fundamental to all of nature – to all organic, living entities. In the early 1980s Chris Langton and Norman Packard each separately discovered that complex adaptive systems naturally move towards a narrow region between fixed behaviour and chaotic behaviour, and that it is in this region that there is maximum capacity for information computation. By translating this revelation to people and their organisations, we can understand that being in this zone of the edge of chaos maximises potentiality...
If we are too far from the edge of chaos, we are doomed to repeat ourselves. There is an organisational colloquialism for this: ‘we have a way of doing things round here’. If we are too close to the edge, we are fearful and may even come to experience the uncontrolled cascading of events that follow when we cross the edge of chaos. Let us then aspire to operate within the zone, near the edge of chaos!”
