Chaos Theory and Chaotics

Week Six Learning Summary – February 9 – 15, 2014

Overall, this has been another week of success for our course!   Thank you.  You continue to provide thoughtful, thorough, insightful, creative assignment submissions, from which your humble servant continues to select and share some of the many “gems” from your assignment submissions.  Thank you!  What strikes this writer as he reviews your work and your assignments is the power of the new paradigm for management, “Chaotics,” to add dimension, understanding, insight to your work. 

Chaos Theory, based on Quantum Physics, argues the universe and systems in it are in effect “self-organizing.”  In fact, we do damage when we try to intervene with this “self-organization.”  In effect, you have made the case of “Chaos Theory” in your assignments by arguing that reform at our case study school cannot work unless all subsystems in the overall system have freedom, flexibility to work out their fixes on their own terms.  This is pure “Chaotics.” 

As Total Quality Management, or TQM, puts it, “Let those who do the work design the work.”   Do not impose a blueprint from the top down, in the old factory-command fashion, model, structure. 

Let energy (Quantum Physics talks about energy flows as the key to grasping how our physical universe works) find its “levels.” 

To use an example from alcoholism, a drunk will not get sober until she or he decides to get sober.  Our interventions achieve nothing unless the system, the alcoholic, itself agrees to self-organize, get sober.  As you can tell, your humble servant here is a big fan of Chaos Theory and “Chaotics” as an approach to management, leadership, OD, and common sense!