The Dominant Metaphor of Chaoplexity

(H/T Bruce Sterling) A press release from a IT consulting company:

Organizations will need to plan for increasingly chaotic environments that are out of their direct control, and adaptation must involve adjusting to all 10 of the trends. “Work will become less routine, characterized by increased volatility, hyperconnectedness, 'swarming' and more,” said Tom Austin, vice president and Gartner fellow. By 2015, 40 percent or more of an organization’s work will be ‘non-routine’, up from 25 percent in 2010. “People will swarm more often and work solo less. They’ll work with others with whom they have few links, and teams will include people outside the control of the organization,” he added.

Now, all of this might be true, and worth examining. In the actual detailed overview of work trends in this executive summary, Gartner does make some sound observations about thing such as the challenges of working in less compact groupings and the challenge of a work/life balance in which boundaries are steadily disappearing. But it's striking how the rhetoric of chaoplexity has become so prominent over the last twenty years that people almost unconsciously employ it in their writings and everyday speech.

It is, in short, both a useful concept and a parroted meme. The words "complex adaptive," "swarming," and "unpredictable" sound pleasing to our ears even if they may not be the most appropriate terms for the situation at hand. The devil, however, is always in the details. The stronger analysts who looked at aspects of chaoplexity in organizations have very measured comments about the strengths and weaknesses it entails. But the most valuable analysts were mainly writing at a time when the ideas behind networks and complexity were not entirely accepted. Now, there is little that has been written on the subject that hasn't been explored during the 1990s.

We also have to remember, as per Antoine Bousquet, that as revelatory as chaoplexic concepts are, they are still just a manifestation of a scientific way of viewing the world---and one that has just as many flaws as cybernetics did in its day. My question is what paradigm (or in Bousquet's word, techno-regime) will eventually replace chaoplexity in science (in a broad way, not just technical sciences). It's inevitable, but part of being in one era is that it's largely impossible to see into the next with any kind of clear vision.

Comments

[Joseph Fouche]

Coming from IT, nothing says "jumped the shark a decade ago" more than Gartner, Forrester, and their ilk using something in one of their "forecasts". They're usually five years behind the cool IT kids' consensus.

I'm not 100% sure who their intended audience is. IT forecasts seemed to be calculated to anger 1337 hax04r wannabes on slashdot and that's not that hard. I would be frightened to meet an IT professional who was shocked by a IT consulting group's forecast.

Of course such people exist. They're the ones still forcing people to use IE6 at work.

[A.E.]

IE6? Dang!

[Alex]

...and one day, long after your mum starts using the word "chaoplexic", some obscure thinker is going to define it.

Regarding IT forecasting, it's all utterly worthless, and there is a wonderful Harvard Business Review piece out there about the impressively consistent fact that business forecasts are wrong: http://web.hbr.org/email/archive/dailystat.php?date=051710

Specifically, over the years 1985-2010, consensus forecasts for S&P500 corporates were always wrong. They were wrong in being overoptimistic - in fact, on average they were only hit twice, at the peak of the housing bubble and in the mid 90s. In fact, the average forecast foresaw growth of 13%, about 4 times as fast as GDP. Further, they hugely underestimated volatility - the average forecast is nice and smooth, the out-turns have enormous variance.

If you see anyone with a projected CAGR, run!

[A.E.]

I think I was being a bit too kind with Gartner's report, to be honest, which basically seemed to be a description of the last ten years than anything else.

[YNSN]

The study of chaoplexity despite all its mathematical rigor is like studying an animal in a zoo. It's not really a science in that we lack a way of testing the theories. We can only make observations that are not real-time because of our analytical abilities.

That is the next step I think, to quit theorizing and observing, and set to coming up with ways to experiment with these systems. Additionally, a more significant bridge between the agent and their system is a good way forward. I know the term has already been used for another field of study. But, calling it metapsychology resonates with me. Especially in the sense of a S.A.C.