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Meg Wheatley at The Masters ForumPlaying the Chaos GameWant to make a hit at your next board meeting? Announce a major change initiative with the words, "Let's take this organization down the path of total chaos."And say it like you mean it. Your colleagues will spew coffee across the table at the words. People who have known you for years and have every reason to trust you for your experience and usually sage counsel will bolt from their chairs and demand your resignation.
It's the word. Chaos has historically been everything any sensible manager would do anything to avoid. In terms of kneejerk negativity, it is right up there with bolshevism, kryptonite, and Barney the dinosaur. So -- why is organizational theorist Meg Wheatley suggesting we inoculate our organizations with a healthy dose of chaos? Wheatley believes that we way we have been thinking about organizations (indeed, about everything) for the last three hundred years is simply wrong. The modern view of the world, which was formed in the 17th century by such scientific worthies as Newton, Kepler, and Galileo, is predicated upon the geometric symmetries of the ancient Greeks -- pure circles, perfect squares, and absolutely straight lines. The problem with this "scientific" view of the world is that it is not an empirical, observable one. Pure circles, pure squares, or straight lines work elegantly in the abstract realm of mathematics, but in the real universe they are conspicuous by their absence. Twentieth-century science has been gradually correcting the 17th-century view. But to nonscientific ears, the findings of science sound like the complete opposite of science: Relativity has made hash of the what-goes-up-must-come-down common sense of Isaac Newton's physics. Quantum mechanics, the study of the behavior of matter and energy on a small scale, has illuminated a baffling universe of paradoxes and riddles, right at our fingertips. Chaos theory, the discovery of patterns and rhythms within even the most random forms of nature, has found analogous recurring rhythms in our social structure and our economic cycles.
Meg Wheatley: "We are seeing that complex systems have simple origins combining order and randomness."These new ways of looking at the world were the crux of Meg Wheatley's provocative 1992 study Leadership and the New Science. The book was a tour de force that critiqued the Newtonian view, introduced readers to the gamut of 20th-century scientific insight, and then proposed ways in which the new science was relevant to and could be applied to mundane organizations.For her July 19 Masters Forum session, however, she chose to emphasize not subatomic particles and black holes but living biological systems, the ways in which they embody the emerging theory of chaos, and why it is incumbent upon people in management to model their organizations not after Euclidean shapes -- the boxes, circles, and right angles of the organizational flowchart -- but from the naturally occurring, sometimes breathtakingly beautiful structures of living things.
"I was addressing a conference on change at Carnegie Mellon University several years ago," Wheatley said, "and it occurred to me that no one really understands why organizations change -- only that they do. "It was one of those insights that you know is true but you also know is not really helpful. I wanted to come up with something better. "We talk about what kind of organizations we want," Wheatley said. "They should be resilient, learning, intelligent, boundaryless, adaptable, constantly changing. It doesn't occur to us that what are describing is a living system.
"Organizations are not machines, to be engineered or reengineered. They are living systems. If anything, they should be deengineered -- allowed to stop trying to act like machines, and to start acting like human beings."
Chaos does not mean lawlessness, Wheatley said. Indeed, within chaos -- within systems allowed to find their own way -- there is a natural tendency to create repeatable, observable patterns. Thus the meandering of a river, the rhythm of water permitted to find its own path, creates over time, from a distance, an unmistakable ripple pattern. The intricate frond of a fern, Wheatley observed, is really the repetition of a single, simple pattern, repeated many times and at many levels in the structure of the plant, from the very tiny to the systemwide. Clouds are not spheres, Wheatley said. Lightning is not straight. Over and over, we see in nature the signature of chaos, in which a botanical or geological character is repeated, and a pattern is revealed:
Wheatley described a game created by a celebrated "chaologist." Plot the points for the three corners of an equilateral triangle. Do not draw the triangle's sides. Label the three corners with these coordinates: 1,2; 3,4; and 5,6. These numbers correspond to the sides of a six-sided die. To begin the game, put a rule anywhere at all within the triangle -- this is your starting point. Now roll the die, and whatever number you get, draw a line halfway between your starting point and that coordinate. Each time you roll, repeat this process, drawing the line from where the last line stopped. This is a peculiar game. Wheatley says it takes 24 hours of continuous rolling and plotting., and the expectation of most people is that the design drawn inside the triangle will be utter confusion -- a Brillo pad of tangled intersections. But instead, after 24 hours, you will find that you have created a shape resembling the image on this page -- a curious image of a triangle containing many triangles, containing many smaller triangles. The roll of the die represents randomness or chaos. The equilateral triangle and the "halfpoint" rule represents order. Together they create a fascinating image of order within chaos. "This is what happens when we combine chaotic or free expression with specific rules of behavior," Wheatley said.
The organic triangle is a kind of fractal image, a graphic created by mathematical formulas that attempt to create with curves and surfaces the kind of images and surfaces that we see in nature. Fractals are a deliberate effort by the most Euclidean of the sciences, mathematics, to move beyond the Euclidean view to something approximating the "random order" of the way the world really is. The equivalent to the Euclidean ideal in most organizations might be the flowchart. Wheatley showed a slide of a conventional process chart -- rectangles and functional lines. Then she showed a diagram representing a standard chemical reaction -- it was wild, with dynamic action lines, looping circles, and sudden bursts of energy. The two images told trhe audience in a moment what Wheatley's talk was about. What organization, operating from the static posture of the conventional organizational chart, with its rectilinear functional assignments and chickenwired job descriptions, would want to compete with an organization with the explosive performance potential of the chemical reaction?
Termites are a wonderful example from the natural world of the self-organizing capability of communities at home with chaos. Ordinarily, termites are less organized than insect groups like ants, who programmatically build complex structures. Termites are builders, but they usually dwell in simple wood burrows. But periodically in the life of a community of West African macrotermes, something strange occurs. No one is sure what the catalyst is -- a sudden, biochemically realized consensus that they belong together? -- the termites build tall towers, as high as 20 feet tall, replete with queen's quarters and fungus garden. They are cathedrals of intricate latticework and endless tunnel passageways. Proportionate to their size these towers are the world's largest structures, dwarfing the World Trade Center, which did not rely solely on mandibular mastication. "Certain termites," said entomologist E.O. Wilson, "give every appearance of accomplishing their feat by means of what computer scientists call dynamic programming. As each step of the operation is completed its result is assessed, and the precise program for the next step (out of several of many available) is chosen and activated. Thus no termite need serve as overseer with blueprint in hand."
In the past couple of years Wheatley has consulted with the U.S. Army as a kind of change scout. Her job has been to keep an eye out for innovation among Army installations around the world and report back on what she has seen. One finding that struck her, and that has a direct bearing on (of all things) chaos, was the units' attention to history. No other profession wears dress uniforms with all the medals and insignia that the soldier has, she said. "What they are doing is wearing their history on their chest, their r‚sum‚. "History is very intense in the military. In a sense, a unit's history is what it is. I was told of a battalion in World War II in which every member was killed. The Army resurrected the battalion with new people, but new people did not alter the history. People seeing the insignia would say, they still say, 'Oh, you are the battalion that died.'" In searching for an organizational pattern or rhythm or footprint, there may be no vantage as revealing as the wide angle of history.
In civilian life we talk a great deal about team building, Wheatley said. Not so in the military. The training is often the best that soldiers will receive in their lifetimes. The cardinal thing that is taught is that people depend on one another for their lives. This sense of belonging is as ancient as war. General Sherman once wrote in a letter to his great friend General Grant, "I always knew you thought of me. If I am in a tight spot, I know you will come for me, if you are alive." Ponder the depth of love in that soldier's statement, and then ponder, as Wheatley did, what the corporate equivalent of that remark would be today: "I always knew you thought of me, and if I gave you the chance you would stab me in the back."
Several people could be observed heading for the exits during Wheatley's talk. Indeed, the evaluation cards handed in after the presentation showed the broadest range of comments for any speaker this year. According to one's point of view, she was either a prophet of a new way to step outside the traditional corporate maze of boxes and logic -- or she was wasting important people's valuable time with pictures of triangles and far-fetched babble about irrational and irrelevant things. It was interesting that this soft-spoken, low-key woman had such a polarizing effect. To members seeking to break free from traditional ways of thinking and working, she was a breath of very fresh air. To members seeking practical ways to wring greater efficiency from the traditional approach, her ideas were nonsensical. Wheatley herself acknowledged the difficulty of being credible with a new idea. She quoted a remark by reinvention author and speaker Richard Pascale: "This is a good time to be a guru. People want answers so badly they will listen to anything."
Assume that Wheatley is some kind of dangerous lunatic. Or assume that you are Meg Wheatley and you are a dangerous lunatic. But let's also assume you are absolutely right. How do you overcome the suspicions of a world wedded to a flawed way of understanding how things work? It is not as if there is no evidence that the mechanistic worldview has run out of gas (so to speak). Most organizations are absolutely buffaloed on the consistent way in which their carefully laid out plans elude execution. Organizations driven solely by numbers more closely resemble machines than living organisms. Wheatley described an episode she witnessed during a change management presentation at the Frito-Lay headquarters in Plano, Texas, that shed light on the nature of the machine. Frito-Lay has a good reputation in its industry as forward-thinking. But during a question-and-answer session with managers, one young woman looked an executive in the eye and said to him, "You care more here about how many chips fall to the floor than how many people walk out the door." It was one of those moments of abrupt truth that managers encounter too seldom in the course of running an organization. And at some level it had to be true -- all companies in pursuit of a profit care more about potato chips than people. This valuation is inherent in the definition we have of organizations -- that they are money-making contraptions in which people sometimes function as machine parts. Wheatley proposed a new vision -- of the self-organizing organization. One that acknowledges that it, like a pear tree or an anthill, is a living system with its own natural footprint or pattern -- and one that will benefit from understanding that fact and work with its rhythms and contour, instead of against them. A truth like Wheatley's is almost necessarily greeted with denial. The 300-year regime of scientific management (using the term in its broadest possible sense) is built on the bones of a native reality. Deny that its rationality is reasonable -- suggest that people properly outweigh potato chips, say the emperor is walking around in his birthday suit and doesn't realize it -- and you will make a ready enemy of the establishment.
"Every organization, below the surface, is already ordered by a deep shared understanding," Wheatley said. "But we don't trust that underlying order. We seem to regard it in fact as the enemy, and we try to counter it at every opportunity with a host of rules and regulations." The self-organizing organization listens to its own breath and observes its own intermittent rhythms. It may have a policy and procedures manual, but it does not wear one around its neck. It is open to its own creativity, open to its own quirky logic.
"Self-organization lets us feel the quality of the world which gives birth to ever new variety and ever new manifestations of order against a background of constant change."
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Everyone present will shake their heads, close their eyes, and picture an orderly organization pushed off the cliff of all that is reasonable, plummeting, all hands screaming, down, down into the abyss of the unknown.
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