There is a second set of systemic insights that is equally disruptive of the usual way we think about and reason through challenging issues—such as we find in a VUCA-Plus World. These insights come from the emerging interdisciplinary field of study that is often labeled Complexity Theory. This field focuses on systems that are not just complicated (many parts), but also complex (many interdependent parts)—and it is in their complexity that many systems become chaotic (Miller and Page, 2007). While there are many troubling and unanticipated insights emerging from this field, the one that has received the most public attention is the Butterfly Effect.
First offered by Edward Lorenz in his meteorological research, this effect concerns our inability to offer valid predictions regarding the outcome of complex events given that a single (often quite small) event somewhere in the world (the fluttering of a butterfly’s wings) can have a profound, widespread impact. It is because complex systems contain many interdependent parts that one small part can have a major impact on the entire system. It takes only one abuse of individual rights to trigger a demand for major legislative reform. It takes only one fumbling of a new social initiative to provoke a wide-spread demand for defunding of all “welfare” programs (that are inherently “ineffective”).
Jay Forrester, the original architect of System Dynamics, often declared: “don’t just do something—stand there!” One of Forrester’s esteemed students and colleagues, Donella Meadows (2008, p. 171) has put it this way: “[There is a broad-based and compelling tendency] to define a problem not by the systems’ actual behavior, but by the lack of our favorite solution.” Meadows (2008, pp.171-172) goes on to describe a typical decision-making process:
Listen to any discussion in your family or a committee meeting at work or among the pundits in the media, and watch people leap to solutions, usually solutions in “predict, control or impose your will”, without having paid attention to what the system is doing and why it’s doing it.
Forrester, Meadows, and their colleagues strongly suggest that we need to reflect on our assumptions before taking any action. This is quite a challenge when VUCA-Plus confronts us everywhere and when levels of collective anxiety are high—but we do have the modeling tools to engaged in this systemic consideration. But what do we do with the often counter-intuitive outcomes of these considerations? I would suggest that we must slow down our thinking when doing this work.
