Controlled Chaos - Leader shipped out
My best guess is that Management, Economics and Medicine are fields which use most of the mathematical theories. I think that due to some reason, out of the three, Management lags behind in applying these theories to the fullest. The one that I want to write about for a long time was the Chaos Theory.
Organizations like the idea of control and structure – accountability. Who, what, when, where and how. Maybe this is the reason why the idea of chaos creeps the hell out of organizations.
Am I correct when I say that orgs do not like chaos in functioning? Why is the Chaos Theory treated like a step-child in an otherwise Mathematical-Theory-friendly field of work?
You hear this everywhere. “Proactive”.
Be proactive and do your job? That’s not being proactive, that’s just doing your job!
Be proactive and do more than your job? Take up something that is beyond the usual? That’s not control and that’s definitely not what most Orgs want!
Consider a situation in ABC Company. Their employees are extremely proactive. Each one steps up and does something outside the scope of his or her job. Anyone can take up a leadership role such an action.
Miss A from the Finance Department could start off “Productivity Circle” and lead the initiative herself.
Mr. B from Operations wants to start an initiative which looks at bettering the “Quality and Inspection” process.
These systems are interlinked even though ABC Ltd. wants to have them as separate controlled business units. So as the process gets defined, it becomes tough for Mr. B and Miss A to start up their initiatives, even though ABC Ltd. wants such initiatives.
If, it becomes remotely possible for both these people to start these initiatives, we might have a state of Chaos. Then we might have to look at the initial condition and how much a variation in the initial condition of this linear/ non linear[1] deterministic system will impact the end result.
If a perfectly balanced and controlled organization like ABC Ltd is Chaotic, then the initial conditions will be varying and therefore creating imbalance (I’ll call this the Innovation Paradox)
1) ABC is stable and balanced and hence it can ‘afford’ to take risk and spend resources on innovation and initiatives
2) If ABC is now chaotic (refer Mr. A and Miss B’s actions), how can it be balanced?
Look at companies that have excelled in innovation. Are these balanced? I think organizations that give its employees the freedom to work in an environment of chaos might have an edge over organizations that work on a Punch-In Punch-Out (PIPO) principle. Degrees of freedom might vary but as long as it is not an absolute Zero, an employee will feel empowered.
Processes in the PIPO type of firms are near perfected over a period of time, so much so that each employee is dispensable. Since the processes are so well defined, probability of losing control is very little, hence the chance of having chaos is less and therefore you can never ship the leader out.
Chaos
Before I can move on to a little more detailed rambling of Chaos in Management, I’ll try to give you a crash course in the Chaos theory (from what I think, I know)
Consider a system whose end is defined by its initial condition which, if varied, might lead to large deviation in the end result (more that you would expect)
This system, if dislodged slightly from its stable state might swing between order and chaos for T → ∞ until some form of control is applied to re-stabilize it to its original or a new state with the same or different degree of stability.
Strange Attractors – Somehow, someday every balanced system will fall prey to these attractors, which are, well, strange.
I am not sure if someone has said this before but I strongly believe (without any form of empirical study) that each and every balanced complex system will be pulled into a state of chaos sometime or the other. Why and how remains a question, maybe some mathematics folks have figured that out as well, but trust me I do not have the intelligence to read and understand those formulae, if they exist.
I think what can cause this is competition, human behavior, yearning to grow or any other reason which has no reason at all.
So two things are for sure (as far as I think)
1) Chaos will reign in an organization at one point or the other
2) An organization will retain that state of chaos till it applies control
The question here is….. how to implement controlled chaos??
[1] Even though it is believed that organizations are the best examples of non-linearity (biggest changes might fail, smallest of changes might turn the company around), I still have also used the word linear to describe it, for fear of skeptics :)
