Mini Project 2: Executive Summary

An Executive Summary: “Chaotics: An Agenda for Business and Society in the 21^st Century” by Georges Anderla, Anthony Dunning and Simon Forge, 1997

The 21^st will be an area of change, where things will be done differently. Chaos and complexity are every day in all our life and in the 21^st it will be even more present. Chaotics: An Agenda for Business and Society in the 21^st Century by Georges Anderla, Anthony Dunning and Simon Forge is an optimist book that explained chaotics concepts. The word chaotics is used when chaos and complexity are occurring together.

The goal of the Anderla, Dunning and Forge is as follow: “We want to look at the world in a new light, and then to focus that understanding, to illuminate alternative solutions that will perhaps be more successful in social, economics and scientific terms than our current ones.” This book will truly help people to have a better understand of the 21^st century, because the way the 20^th century ended it was a total mess: with wars, poverty, etc.

This book is divided into three sections; the first one is about the foundation of chaos. This first part is a good overview of to understand the main features on the theories of chaos and complexity. The second one is about the applications of chaotics in the business world and it introduces the new way of doing business, a way that will eventually substitute the old way; way of increasing production, a new management style. The focus of this section is to discover new perspective into developing material capital, basically to provide us with a starting point for future opportunity. This section is also explaining how chaotics is important for our society and how it can be used as cheap resources which are available to everyone; however the authors reminded us that it “should never be taken as some management gospel of the minute.” That chaotics should be taking seriously as an important management resource. The third part of this book is about applying the knowledge learned in previous sections to global problems that had been previously looked at: unemployment, underdevelopment and ecological disaster. This section also explained another issue, which is more at a personal level: the identity crisis that is growing. This crisis is defined by existential questions that we constantly ask ourselves such as what is our role on earth, our purposes, etc. There is a chapter in this section that look at “space-time trade-off when scaled down to human-size preoccupation.” This trade-off provides a new logical range for a broad range of lifestyle and that the way the economy is developing. There is another chapter that looks fail employment policies by looking at social issue, such as prejudice. There is also a chapter that is focused on unemployment when the theories on chaos and perplexity are involved. Finally the last chapter of this section is about ecological disaster; how to resolve them by looking beyond the conventional rules and by looking at innovation that should be taken.

There are several concepts in this book. However, there are three that I really learned from: the rational of chaotics, convergence between the schools of chaos theory and complex systems, the economic feedback from Professor W. Brian Arthur.

The first concept on the rational of chaotics is important to understand in order to have a better understanding on the book and its many concepts. Chaos is an important concept even though there is not a clear definition associated with the word. Chaos has an effect most of our systems natural or artificial. To explain the behaviour of chaos we have to look deeper at its cause and effect from different perspective such a nuclear physics, weather forecasting, communication theory and genetics. All those perspectives have made up hypothesis and concept on random episodes and series, and basically these create the chaos theory. To form the chaotics theory we have to go beyond the chaos theory in order to understand global disorder. Chaotics is applied to “an everyday problem mocks the fallacy of composition, or the possibility of complete solutions.” Chaotics questions are based the untouchable social protection, as well as many other beliefs and taboos that have their origins in the deterministic thinking. “Looked from a pragmatic, operational point of view, chaotics should provide a fundamental organizing principle.”

The second concept “convergence between the schools of chaos theory and complex systems” is as follow: complex systems are observed in one of three main circumstances either rigid order, order with little flexibility or chaos. However there is a fourth state, which is really important, it is a “poised state”. In the fourth state there is marked of equilibrium, however it is unstable between order with little flexibility and chaos. “Now these two alternatives inherent in the complexity viewpoint can be compared to the so-called bifurcation of chaos theory.” There is also another point of agreement between the two schools of thought which is the eventual outcome of the rigid order in a complex system that we can extend to what the chaos theorists would call a “steady states”. Moreover both schools of thoughts realised that the eventual result between the “forces of order and those pulling in the opposite direction cannot be predicted on a case-by-case basis”. They need to look instead at the global justification of cases. “(…) both (school of thoughts) expect that complex systems or chaos can to some extend be brought under control-or made more efficient-by turning key parameter.” If this statement is true, the repercussions are of major importance for the management field.

The third concept of economic feedback which is based on the work of Professor W. Brian Arthur, who has become a leader in the recent reconsideration of the important role of positive feedback on the economy, which is lead to obvious returns in business. Positive feedback increases sale, once a minimum had been achieved, and when the market had been educated with a minimum of information and promotion on the product. The concept has a stronger effect when the consumers are connected between each other, as example with the internet, when consumers are in a network.

Personally, I think that this book is very interesting; there are many examples, which help to have a better understanding of all the concepts presented. I recommended this book to all managers (future as well); it is a great tools to understand and use chaotics resources in our everyday life and to be successful in your domain.