In November 2016, I delivered a 4-hour lecture in Guadalajara Mexico to a business group
about Chaos Theory. How does one explain Chaos Theory and, even before answering that, we
ask: why should anyone even bother with Chaos Theory? The reason we go to the trouble to
explain such concepts is that Chaos Theory offers a road to corporate riches by the way it
simplifies the approach to issues, especially business concerns such as hiring, employing,
selling, and problem-solving. Amazingly, Chaos Theory assures us of guaranteed results in
problem solving, every time. Since business is nothing but a huge set of problems, it behooves
us all to learn better ways to address those problems.
The reader is probably not ready to engage in a 4-hour dissertation about Chaos Theory;
so, what can we do in a 2-page paper to get the Chaos idea across? It so happens that the
9 premises we associate with Chaos Theory can be explained using a Scrabble game for our
example, as illustrated in the table below.
Description of 9 Chaos Premises of CCCC |
Scrabble Equivalent | Real-Life Examples |
---|---|---|
1. Small initiators lead to dramatic results later. |
Word “sew” vs. word “see” at the second word of a game leads to an entirely different result. |
Bill, on an impulse, while in Arizona, visits Mexico for 2 days, meets a lady, falls in love, marries and has 2 children. |
2. Chaos must occur before the return to re-building. Chaos is part of every cycle. |
All the chips are mixed in a bag in a chaotic manner with no system of words formed before the next game can begin. |
A plague of locusts expands and then collapses to nothing. 5 or 10 years later, it all happens again. |
3. Chaos theory provides answers where conventional mathematics tends to bog down. |
When playing Scrabble, you create and learn new words you never knew before. |
Mathematical fractals create same formula for a shoreline no matter how much it is microscoped (or macro-scoped). |
4. The incidence of coincidence is high as long as constraints are minimal. |
You find words you know in other languages even though you are playing the game in English. |
Bill keeps meeting people he knows all over the world: London, Hartford, Banff, Baie St. Paul, Los Angeles, etc. |
5. Simple local choices result in a beneficial global solution. |
Choose only one word at a time but the final result is a mosaic of many correct English words. |
The Harvest Ant has 2 choices, to forage or to build a nest. From that simple binary choice comes the organized ant colony. |
6. The detailed result is never the same, but the global general result is. |
Two finished Scrabble games have the same ‘global’ the appearance of a finished Scrabble game, but no two sets of games are identical. |
Although no two maple leaves are identical, all the maple leafs look like maple leaves (same idea for oak leaves or snowflakes). |
7. Chaos-driven evolution is slow and deliberate as it is based on very simple decisions by simple organisms along the way. |
The player focuses on one word only at one time, and even though many such words may be just 2 or 3 letters long, the board evolves to a full set of interconnecting words. |
A small town like New York of the 1700s builds bit by bit with simple deliberations to locate the next street, house, or shop to become a major metropolis in the year 2000. |
8. Chaos builds from the answers provided before. |
In Scrabble, you can build only on words provided before. |
The brain evolved to have its logic processor dispersed all over the brain, finding a spot wherever there was space. |
9. Chaos crafts elegant solutions; they can be superior to those created by human planned, topdown approaches. |
A Scrabble-game result will always be superior to a human trying to lay out a full Scrabble game in advance, (ensuring to use only the same chips available in the same order) |
– Results include the beehive, evolution of the human being, blood cells, the eye, etc. – CCCC’s resolution of more than 1,000 ‘impossible’ problems. – CCI locating dream jobs for 200 unemployable. |
In summary, engage in the Chaos approach just by doing, to achieve your ends – even when
you cannot foretell how you will get the results. That is, keep shooting the puck at the net even
though you don’t know how it will actually go in. But the more you shoot, the more likely you are
to get the result you want, namely, the scoring of a goal. Yet, we do not abandon organized
planning; we judiciously choose the Chaos or planned approach as appropriate to serve the situation
we are facing.
Bill