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