Vaughan,
How can I, as a participant in the dialogue, give you a warm welcome and
at the same time use what you say as an example of the confusion arising
from failure to distinguish clearly the domains of complexity and chaos?
I fear I will fail in the welcome and can only assert that it is sincere.
I assume from your bold statement of intention and interest in your
introduction that you are ready, willing and able to step up to the plate
and swing with what you've said. If so, then I expect my comments will be
part of the warm welcome.
Vaughan says (in part),
> I am
> personally interested in applying the emerging concepts of self-organizing
> systems (chaos, etc.) to business change so as to create organizations
> with the potential to self-renew, and to become learning orgs.
Chaos does not produce self-organisation. Chaos provides a mathematical
approach to creating or identifying patterns in what otherwise appears
random. The mathematics of chaos can create patterns that repeat in
particular ways (fractals and mandlebrot). The mathematics of chaos can
be used to analyse self-organising activities - such as marketplaces -
with some interesting results. However, chaos has no more relationship to
self-organising systems than to any other phenomena that can be described
"from outside the system" - that is, pretty much any phenomena.
Complexity - particularly the theories or approaches of complex adaptive
systems - is not an inherently chaotic phenomena. If you consider
complexity to be a term of information - the ability to make patterns and
a measure of the effort to compress information and then to "decompress"
it for future use, chaos is not any significant part of that process. If
you consider complexity to be a matter of "simple principles in interplay
the accidents of action/energy/information from which emerges new patterns
or phenomena" then, although accident has a great deal to do with the
result, chaos does not.
The lack of this distinction will likely render useless your efforts to
apply either chaos or complexity to organisational change concerns. The
clarity of this or similar distinctions has the potential to provide you
with a great deal of influence in organisational change concerns.
I hope that this is a contribution to you and experienced as such in
welcoming you to the dialogue.
--
Mike McMaster <Michael@kbddean.demon.co.uk>
"Intelligence is an underlying organisational principle
of the universe. The 'logos principle' is hidden and
perceptible only to the intelligence." Heraclitus