Donna FitzgeraldThere’s something seductively attractive about the concept of a strange attractor, that force that causes a random, unpredictable system to stay within observable boundaries without becoming either nonrandom or predictable. Margret Wheatley, in her book Leadership and the New Science, talks about the fact that strange attractors reveal the order that is inherent in certain kinds of chaotic systems. This order only appears over a long process of observation, looking at the system on a moment to moment basis will only show chaos.
When I read LNS this concept was the one that I was most fascinated with because it has an almost instinctive resonance with the observable phenomenon in corporations. Something holds these crazy dysfunctional organizations together. Something unobservable even allows them to thrive (based on employment growth and stock market valuation). Wheatley postulates that the strange attractor present in corporations is a sense of SELF. It’s the authentically shared vision of what the corporation is and why it exists rather than the words printed in the company’s vision statement.
Concepts like Senge’s Shared Vision (from a 5th Discipline) take on concrete importance when looked at through the lens of the science that Wheatley holds out to us. Our vision is what holds us together, it’s what we live every day in our corporations and it is only at the level of SELF that we can change who were are and how we interact with the world.
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Category: Book Reviews Tags: CAS, Chaos Theory, Complex Adaptive Systems Theory, Strange Attractor
