Journal on Policy & Complex Systems Volume 4, Number 1, Spring 2018 | Page 138

Are We Ready for Complexity ?

In this paper , I will explore three scientific concepts related to complexity and how they have been used ( and misused ) in the world of business and organizations .

In my professional career , I have seen complexity theory from three perspectives : as an evolutionary biologist , as a science educator , and as a researcher in organizational and community narrative . For example , a decade after I applied complexity theory to the evolution of social behavior ( Kurtz , 1991 ), I applied it to organizations ( Kurtz and Snowden , 2003 ). As I kept coming back to complexity theory through new doors , I noticed some surprising things . I pondered them for about a decade , and then I just had to write something down . The result was this paper , which first appeared on my blog in 2010 , and which I have revised for this publication .
The Butterfly and the Underbutterfly

Many know the story of how

meteorologist Edward Lorenz reran his simple weather simulation and for convenience copied the starting values of some variables from a previous printout ( Lorenz , 1963 ). Because of rounding in the printout , he left the last few digits off one of the variables ( instead of 0.506127 , he entered 0.506 ). Lorenz went to get a cup of coffee and returned to find that the repeat simulation had generated a vastly different weather pattern . He called this phenomenon " sensitivity to initial conditions ," meaning that small differences at the start of a process ( one with a particular set of chaotic characteristics ) could be amplified into large differences later on .
The idea of sensitivity to initial conditions was over half a century old when Lorenz wrote about it . Mathematicians such as Maxwell and Poincaré pondered it around the turn of the twentieth century . For example , Maxwell said in an 1873 lecture ( as quoted in Campbell & Garnett , 1882 ):
[ W ] hen an infinitely small variation in the present state may bring about a finite difference in the state of the system in a finite time , the condition of the system is said to be unstable . It is manifest that the existence of unstable conditions renders impossible the prediction of future events , if our knowledge of the present state is only approximate and not accurate . ( p . 440 )
Poincaré ( 1903 ) wrote :
[ S ] mall differences in the initial conditions may generate very large differences in the phenomena . A small error in the former will lead to an enormous error in the latter . Prediction then becomes impossible , and we have the fortuitous phenomenon . ( p . 66 )
While Lorenz did not discover the possibility of sensitivity to initial conditions , he was the first to create it in practice . Maxwell and Poincaré would have been as surprised as Lorenz to find
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