All this talk of Butterflies Flapping is making me uneasy -
mental-modelwise.
The point of the butterfly flapping illustration is to do with
the unpredictability of a chaotic system. The butterfly
flapping may produce a storm, but equally it may produce a dead
calm, a light breeze, sheets of rain, or - most likely by many
orders of magnitude - it may have no noticeable effect.
Expecting a butterfly flapping to produce a particular desired
effect on the weather is like expecting a 0.00005% change in
orders from your smallest customer to generate a transformed
organisation. Not a useful metaphor for organisational
transformation. The good old snowball rolling down the hill may
seem a bit dated as a metaphor, but at least it fits the idea
of big organisational change having small and deliberate
beginnings.
On a more philosophical note, if an organisation can be
regarded as a chaotic system, a small perturbation to its state
(such as a butterfly flapping or a miniscule change in order
volume) will change the exact future path, but will have no
effect on the attractor which constrains the organisation's
behaviour. In fact, any well-conceived attempt to improve the
organisation's behaviour will have to focus on changing the
attractor (which can be interpreted as systematic change)
rather than changing the organisation's state (which can be
interpreted as unsystematic change). This is not a message
which is much different to that of systems thinking.
Hope this stirs some thoughts.
Con
Con Gregg <congregg@iol.ie>