Butterfly Effect
Simple things can, and have yielded big results. For example, a simple note passing in class can turn into two strangers fighting in the parking lot after school; making a culturally sensitive gesture to another colleague can turn into a long, drawn-out lawsuit; and accidentally shooting an innocent bystander in a foreign country can thrust an already politically sensitive environment into conflict.
Complexity Science is a study of how general and basic pre-existing rules and laws can be discovered to explain and even control that of which creates a complex environment (Phelan, 2001), and ..."shows an inherent and underlying simplicity of a self-organizing nature" (Obolensky, 2014, p. 54). Science uses formulas and equations to help explain mathematics and physics, are quantifiable and provable. Why not utilize this behavior to explain a complex organizational environment. From a distance, becoming aware of all activity and their interactivity with other associated elements throughout an organization can be determined to be overwhelmingly complex, and even complicated. However, is it feasible to consider where decision points are located, can, up close, be adjusted so as to alter the second and third order effects, if the results from a macro perspective are undesirable? Ultimately, Obolensky proposes that even though older, more traditionally accepted theories of leadership may be suitable for certain environments, must give way to more polyarchal types in order to explain, clarify, understand and control more complex organizational environments and their contextual domains whose results of uncertainty, paradoxes and non-deterministic results find themselves on the other end of the equal sign (Obolensky, 2014).
In my organization, currently a joint military special forces environment, numerous occurrences display a butterfly effect, a phenomenon by Lorenz known as 'sensitive dependence on initial conditions', (Bradley, 2010). Under a similar dynamic, people in my environment often uses policies, guideline, standard operating procedures, operational directives, executive orders, concepts of operations, memorandums of agreement, and so on, throughout the day. Unfortunately, there has never been a repository for all these references, leaving people at their own behest to search and locate, if possible, the relative reference needed, wasting tens to hundreds of man hours. Approximately four months ago, our knowledge manager, simply collected in a very organized and accessible format, all the references for operations in a single location without ever telling anyone. When one person discovered this, they told another person who had asked about how to go about locating a particular reference. This passing of information over time change the way business was conducted at our command due to all the time saved.
In another example, when I arrived at my command, people tend to dress the same way everyday, in casual civilian clothing. New to me, I arrived in business casual clothing. Knowing that I could never go wrong looking professional, I remained dressing as such even though everyone else dressed in their 'street clothes'. Over a period of eight months, members of my directorate slowly added collared shirts, sweaters, khaki pants and dress shoes. Today 85% of my directorate dresses in business casual on a regular basis. It appears that the introduction of a flutter of casual wear sparked a small change over time creating a whole new, unforeseen change in our dress code. Since then, we have increased our inter-agency partner relationship 200-fold since May of 2016, which in turn is reporting positive brief-backs to our Commanding General once a week on operational developments.
Where I am concerned with respect to my organization, complexity theory can be utilized where multiple leadership styles and strategies intermingle generating uncertain results on multiple levels. Understanding who all the stakeholders are, their interests and strategies in a complex domain, provides location inside the complex perspective where self-organizing and evolving mechanisms can be modified over time in order to provide rudder steerage towards an organization's vision. Anderson (1999), offers, "Strategic direction of complex organizations consists of establishing and modifying environments within which effective, improvised, self-organized solutions can evolve". Where my organization exists at the higher echelon levels of the military, these self-corrected measures can be established at identified system nodes at each directorate level (gateway) that has a given effect as decisions move forward up and down the chain of command, as well as laterally and across interagency domains clarifying what once was a complex environment without known nodes of influence.
References:
Anderson, P. (1999, June 1). Perspective: Complexity theory and organization science. Organization Science, 10(3), 216-232. http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/orsc.10.3.216
Bradley, L. (2010). Chaos and fractals: The butterfly effect. Retrieved from http://www.stsci.edu/~lbradley/seminar/butterfly.html
Obolensky, N. (2014). Complex adaptive leadership: Embracing paradox and uncertainty (2nd Ed.). Burlington, VT: Gower Publishing Company.
Phelan, S. E. (2001). What is complexity science, really? Emergence, 3(1), 120-136. Retrieved from https://faculty.unlv.edu/phelan/Phelan_What%20is%20complexity%20science.pdf
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