From order to chaos

In our contribution last week, we suggested that our learning matrix can help you discover strategies to deal with the diversity of learning contexts and objectives. Three dimensions of the matrix can be drawn around what we need to learn, the extent to which their can be a precise answer to our business challenges, and the degree to which learning is a social process. In analyzing a specific business challenge along each these three continuums, we can make reasonable assumptions about what we need to learn, in what context learning can be optimized, and to what extent technology can assist the learning process.

This week’s contribution explores the extent to which there exist precise answers to our business challenges.

Let’s re-use the example of the incident following the airport announcement that the early morning flight out of Lyon would be delayed several hours. To what extent does a “correct” response exist in dealing with the clients’ apparent cynicism in the airline’s explanation? In drawing an analogy with complexity theory, three distinct cases arise. On one end of the continuum the attendant can be expected to “know” the response based upon applying her previous experience. On the other, the attendant will be a total loss to find an appropriate response: nothing in her previous experience has prepared her to deal with situation at hand. Finally, in between the two, the attendant can reframe her experience in seeking better practice to deal with the client challenges.

On one end of the continuum the flight attendant can be expected to “know” the response based upon applying previous experience. Proponents of complexity science argue that organizations represent our mental mindsets of a limited number of pre-determined responses to business challenges. The resulting response can be evaluated as positive if the challenge closely resembles how we’ve ordered past experience, and sorely lacking if creativity or innovation is required. Alan Matcham has suggested, “people, like organizations, are beautifully designed to get the results they are looking for.”

On the other end of the continuum we can suggest that the flight attendant is incapable of understanding the challenge created by the chaos of conditions, events, and interactions at the airport that morning. Huajie Lui has identified five characteristics of chaotic systems: 1) determinism; 2) nonlinearity; 3) sensitive dependence on initial conditions; 4) a-periodicity, and 5) relative tension and stability. If the business challenge is an output of a complex social system, the airline attendant will be at a loss for an appropriate response, nothing in her past experience will allow her to frame an appropriate response to customer requirements. This latter lapse constitutes a fundamental flaw in the dominant control paradigm of management education: the organizations goals are already “known” in advance.

Finally, between the two, we can alternatively suggest that the challenge at hand was neither a carbon copy of the past nor unpredictable, but an example of the complexity associated with most social interaction. Francis Heylighen positions complexity: “in between order and disorder, somewhere ‘on the edge of chaos’ ”. The flight attendant can not “know” precisely which response will be appropriate for a given situation, but can rely on past experience to reframe what she believes (and the conditioned responses she’s learned) in exploring valid responses of customer service. The ability to minimize organizational “truths” and management dictums in favour of enriching the customer experience is at the very heart of true innovation. Optimizing learning requires recognizing that the pertinence of knowledge or innovation is dependent upon how we situate the business challenge in a continuum from order to chaos.

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