Creating Chaos

[6155GUASTELL@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

From: Colin Danby, U.Mass/Amherst danby@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

>The whole point of doing nonlinear modeling is NOT to generate chaos, but to
>generate large-scale regularities of some kind despite the chaos.  Chaos
>theory advocates appear to inhabit a world which is deterministic and
>predictable in large changes -- no ice age next year -- but unpredictable
>(though still deterministic) in small ones -- rain tomorrow.  Uncertainty is
>tamed.

>From the vantage point of governments making policies, I would generally
agree. There are times when the opposite is true, however.

1. An organization wishes to foil its competitor, and might try to
do so by engaging some untrackable and instability-producing behavior
into its competitor's environment. Ralph Stacey (Managing the Unknowable,
Jossey-Bass, 1992) has some stories about that; my favorite is Kodak vs.
Fuji Film.

2. More generally, creativity is chaos-inducing. To develop an innovative
organization, one must be prepared to induce a little. This principle
was presented metaphorically by Stacey, but I found it to be true
numerically as well.

3. There is an interesting way of controlling chaos by first increasing
it, so that the control point expands to the full space of its attractor.
Then a clipping, filtering, or related process is applied.

--Stephen Guastello