Chaos theory — what’s your butterfly effect?
Lorenzo Attractor
My first exposure to chaos theory and the butterfly effect happened back in the mid-1990s around the time of the original Jurassic Park film release. I’d been working in high-tech for over a decade. After three life-enriching pregnancies and three visionary product cancellations, I longed for a reset. I needed a pause to re-energize and regroup from my engineering and marketing positions. I needed a bit less chaos. And I don’t mean with the kids. But that's not how it works. Chaos is all around us. All the time.
One of my favorite scenes in Jurassic Park shows Dr. Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) flirting with Dr. Sattler (Laura Dern) while explaining Chaos Theory on the guided tour.
Chaos theory is the science of surprises. Science teaches us to expect the unexpected with the weather, stock markets, brain states, corporate organizations, and maybe most importantly within family ecosystems.
For my engineering and marketing pause, a friend in human resources casually suggested over lunch I do a stint in Learning Services. In partnership with other high-tech companies, I ended up focusing on identifying best practices for the software engineering community. All of a sudden, all my management-mental-health-office-hours for various engineers and marketing people became free time for me to explore. I consumed a lot of books.
Several captured my imagination: Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in Chaotic World by Margaret Wheatley, Self-Organizing Systems, and The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of Learning Organizations by Peter Senge. That may sound like a lot of gobbledygook, but I was hungry for a shift in how I interacted with the world. Not to mention the role-modeling and legacy I wanted to leave for my daughters.
There had to be a better way to make a difference in the world than the corporate competitor-domination mode. Instead, I wanted to find a more collaborative-partnership mode to enhance innovation.
by Margaret Wheatley
Margaret Wheatley’s book pulled me in with “Chaos and the Strange Attractor of Meaning.”
* Relationships are what matters–even at the subatomic level
* Life’s a vast web of interconnections where cooperation & participation are required
* Chaos & change are the only route to transformation
“We live in a time of chaos, rich in potential for new possibilities. A new world is being born. We need new ideas, new ways of seeing, and new relationships to help us now. New science–the new discoveries in biology, chaos theory, and quantum physics that are changing our understanding of how the world works.”
— Margaret Wheatley
During my in-work sabbatical, I had an opportunity to interact with people and organizations I never would have if I’d only stayed in product development. Thanks to my friend’s suggestion.
I remember volunteering to explain the world wide web (WWW) to the human resources department in 1993 when computers and email were new to them.
In a windowless conference room full of disinterested, soft-skills experts, I threw a bag of M&Ms as a prize when someone answered a question. Each computer terminal in front of them displayed Mosaic, a precursor to the WWW. They half listened to my description of this new portal to information used by their engineering and marketing customers. I wanted to help us become a learning organization.
When I said, “See all the underlined blue words and phrases?” All their terminals were preloaded with the Mosaic webpage.
Some shook their heads yes, others munched their M&Ms or sipped soda out of those wax-coated vending machine cups.
“Click on one of them, doesn’t matter which one. Just click.”
Loud single-finger, click-clacks echoed off the corporate white walls with framed posters of Tom Peter’s inspirational In Search of Excellence quotes.
I expected a ripple effect from the lightbulb-like epiphanies they would experience as they realized the power at their fingertips to access all the information previously kept in hardcopy in libraries. Crickets. I ate some M&Ms waiting for inspiration.
“See the empty search bar at the top of the screen?” I used a red laser light pointer on the overhead projector slide (remember this is 1993).
“Type in any subject you want. Pick a hobby or something you’re interested in.”
Faces perked up. Heads tilted. Eyebrows furled. The click-clacking got louder and they all started talking at once. I popped more M&Ms in my mouth smiling. Their searches were the strange attractors of meaning in the chaos of information swimming on the web.
Ironically, corporate IT pulled Mosaic off the network because too many people “might” use it. Until we showed how it could benefit the company by keeping people up to date on project status, plus researching and communicating online. Innovation gets a boost.
The Lorenz attractor.
Computed in Fractint by Wikimol (Creative Commons Attribution license, public domain)
The most popular principle of chaos theory is the butterfly effect. During an experiment, Edward Lorenz, a meteorologist, found that climatic changes are sensitive to many conditions, so it is difficult to correctly predict them. He concluded that a simple movement like the flapping of a butterfly’s wing could give rise to a tornado somewhere else. The metaphor illustrates that small changes can disproportionately impact something (or someone) very far away.
Another principle of chaos theory is unpredictability. You can never know all the conditions in a complex system, there’s no way to predict all the permutations and different scenarios. That’s why our weather apps can only go so far and why Accuweather.com uses historical data to predict temperatures outside of a week.
When I reflect on small changes in my life, other times the butterfly effect serendipitously swooped in, I can’t help but remember a phone call we received from a stranger. She wanted us to temporarily store a mansion on a lot we owned down the street from where we live. She needed time to find a permanent home for the historic mansion. What?
Who could have predicted a woman would ask us to store a mansion?
Before the call, we’d spent decades remodeling our home and building a duplex next door. My driven-to-build husband needed another property to develop part-time. He’d run out of projects. We both worked full-time and joked as the girls left for college one by one, we needed an empty-nester project.
One night during happy hour I asked, “Where do you want to build next?”
“The parking lot behind the apartment building across the street.”
“How do you buy a parking lot?”
I pursued the Rivermark Credit Union from the time our youngest was in middle school until she left for college to study architecture. We planned to build multi-family living spaces in our growing close-in Portland, Oregon neighborhood where we still live.
The butterfly effect, a seemingly inconsequential random call, set off a cascade of events leading us to save a historic mansion when nobody else could in the timeframe before demolition became inevitable.
Mary Phelps-Montgomery Historic Mansion Move, 2012
We saved the mansion a Missouri Senator’s daughter had built in 1906 after her railroad baron husband died. She would die in that house almost a half-century later. The store-a-mansion woman’s call acted as the strange attractor that triggered a series of events leading to the development on a parking lot. That lot became a microneighborhood for seven apartments housing people from all over the country making their way, like the original owner of the house, to a new home in Portland.
Almost a decade after the original Jurassic Park film and my in-work sabbatical, I opted back into product development exploring new markets for the company’s server technologies. What started from an engineer’s suggestion to work with Hollywood, ended up with me sitting in a leather studio exec chair at Sunset Post, a post-production studio in Burbank, California.
We all wore borrowed Sunset Post promo t-shirts that smelt like fresh cardboard. The engineering team needed to stay overnight for another day to complete digital stitching together of the traditional 20-minute film reels creating the master print for Jurassic Park III. Nobody packed a bag with a change of clothes. One of the studio execs at Universal Studios noticed in a single frame a green blocking artifact in the digital print that needed fixing before the digital world premiere at Universal Studios.
A week later, I sat in the audience all dressed up next to my husband who said, “I hope this works.” I whispered, “Shh, so do I. Jerry from Universal is on our left and Bob Lambert from Disney is on my right.” Sprinkled in the audience, engineers wore suits and hid their walkie-talkies to the engineers in the projection booth in case of any glitches. The film went on without a hitch, despite us holding our breaths at each 20-minute digital film splice. Chalk up a success in the early days of Digital Cinema.
When I reflect on our daughters — what strange attractors pulled them in the various directions they went? There’s Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons attracting one daughter to study Italian. Another daughter’s jay walking ticket in high school triggering a ripple effect ending with studying community and environmental planning and urban development in college. And one daughter’s eventual enticement into architecture and construction from her countless hours helping her dad with remodeling projects.
When I imagine our impact on our daughters, all the grand plans and words of wisdom we want to impart to them. It’s most likely the small actions, ones we’re not aware of, that makes a difference. Positive and negative. I’ll have to ask at our next family dinner.
What butterfly effects have you triggered? What ripple effect have you, as a strange attractor, started?
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