Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World

Whatever your personal beliefs and experiences, I invite you to consider that we need a new worldview to navigate this chaotic time. We cannot hope to make sense using our old maps. It won’t help to dust them off or reprint them in bold colors. The more we rely on them, the more disoriented we become. They cause us to focus on the wrong things and blind us to what’s significant. Using them, we will journey only to greater chaos.

We have created trouble for ourselves in organizations by confusing control with order. This is no surprise, given that for most of its written history, leadership has been defined in terms of its control functions.

In Yellowstone National Park, human-imposed stability thwarted for many years the natural process of small fires, which regularly clean out brush and dead trees. The result was a fragile equilibrium completely vulnerable to the cataclysm of fire that destroyed large areas of the park. The attempt to manage for stability and to enforce an unnatural equilibrium always leads to far-reaching destruction. The

In this way, dissipative structures demonstrate that disorder can be a source of new order, and that growth appears from disequilibrium, not balance.