Chaos
Chapter 1 - Worldview
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Welcome to the Chaos page
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Your relationship with chaos
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As the global economy and technology continue to evolve at an unprecedented pace, your understanding and adaptation to this change is crucial. The visible chaos is evidence of this transformation, a stark reminder of the urgent need for your adaptation and resilience in the face of change.
Different ways to describe this 'social feeling' are:
- VUCA is an acronym that stands for volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity
- BANI is an acronym made up of the words 'brittle', 'anxious', 'nonlinear' and 'incomprehensible'
- TINA is an acronym for "there is no alternative"
All of these acronyms shape your emotions towards the chaotic situations you experience. It may feel contradictory, but a chaotic world is less 'lively' than these acronyms imply.
In a chaotic situation, you may lack faith that you can accomplish your purpose, seemingly fixated on structures in the grip of entropy.
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Key take-aways from the deep dive
- Society and business tend towards chaos because of the entropy they experience
- Chaos is the PASSIVE end stage of an entropic situation
- When you find ourselves in a chaotic situation, you feel like you can't see the forest for the trees. Each tree is like the others; together, they provide no path to escape the forest
- In a chaotic situation everything seems 'equally bad', which leads to letargy because we can no longer make distinctions
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Deep dive
Chaos theory
Chaos theory is a scientific principle describing the unpredictability of systems. When systems become dislodged from a stable state, they oscillate, swinging back and forth between order and chaos. "Chaos is the final stage in a system's movement away from order." When a system does reach that point, its parts manifest as turbulence, totally lacking in direction or meaning.
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Chaos as an end state
Chaos is the end stage of an entropic situation.
The basic tenets of chaos that relate to entropy is the idea that any system leans towards "disorder". This means you can find anything anywhere, which has a strange consequence.
- On the one hand, when you look at the bigger picture, you see an almost perfectly distributed 'grey mass' in which you can no longer see any distinction.
- On the other hand, we cannot guarantee that you will find something in a particular place. The improbability of this is enormous.
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Stepping back from chaos in your organisation
An arena within which chaos theory is practical is that of organisations. Applying chaos theory to organisational behaviour allows you to step back from managing day-to-day activities and see how your organisation functions as a unified system. An organisation is a classic example of a nonlinear system (i.e., a system in which minor events have the potential to set off grave consequences or chain reactions, and significant changes may have little or no effect on the system whatsoever).
To exploit an organisation's chaotic quality, one must try to see the organisational shape that emerges from a distance.
According to chaos theory, instead of pinpointing causes for organisational problems, your company is better served by looking for patterns that lead to specific life-giving behaviours within your organisation.
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Next page: Free Energy Principle
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