Order within Chaos

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“There is no logical way to the discovery of these elemental laws. There is only the way of intuition, which is helped by a feeling for the order lying behind the appearance.” — Albert Einstein

The interactions and flows between “two bodies” or between “n bodies” (or attractors or systems) bring or creates chaos within such multi-dimensional dynamic system.

Even though a body or system might look as in order, the reality is that even such order is chaos all in itself — order within chaos. This repetition of chaos within chaos is recursive, and very fractal in nature.

The thing that I love the most when I come into a new group or organisation is seeing and understanding such chaos, and the order within. In my case interactions and flow between between “n bodies” are people, processes and software systems. Once such chaos is understood, my job is simplifying, by separating and abstracting into an overall flow and order that at the end of the day, is still chaos. And the process repeats itself. It is order within chaos and it is a beautiful thing.

/ceo

Source of images: Wikipedia.

2 thoughts on “Order within Chaos”

  1. Viewed through the lens of Human System Dynamics, I think you’re talking about attractor patterns that shape and are shaped by behaviour (see this paper for a catalog: http://s3.amazonaws.com/hsd.herokuapp.com/contents/69/original/eoyang_PIQ_on_attractors.pdf?1344892034 )

    I personally see nothing strictly ordered *or* chaotic the two-body-animation you show, just strange attractors. And those are likely to be found in the Complex Cynefin domain (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynefin_framework)

    Following Cynefin dynamics as taught by Dave Snowden, I would argue that chaos cannot be understood, establishing order from it is not a worthwhile goal. What one can do, however, is *act* in the chaos and quickly establish new attractors, which gives you room to exploit that structure to move forward. At that point, the system would no longer be in a chaotic state, and not in a simple state either.

    If you’re fascinated by this, I recommend checking out Snowdens Cynefin Dynamics http://cognitive-edge.com/blog/cynefin-dynamics/ Have fun going down that rabbit hole ;)

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