Organize with Chaos. Introduction p.12

This Post contains selections from Rowley & Roevens, Organize with Chaos, 4th edition, ISBN 1-85252-297-6. As we are always updating our work, we appreciate your comments.

Introduction:

In science, as well as in business, the days of predictability and certainty are over. It can come as a shock for many executives to realise just how far, even a ' hard' science like Physics, has moved away from the static engineering view of reality, which most of us learned at school and which still governs so much managerial thinking. At a ' new-science' executive seminar in Brussels, many of the managers and consultants present were taken aback, especially when scientist and Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine, remarked that in his view of Physics today "...material and physical reality (the very stuff of which we are made) is just one aspect of probability"!

Probability, irreversible luck and random accident has entered the equations of science. In conventional management and organization, we do not welcome such random chaotic factors, because they cannot be determined or controlled, and can wreck our carefully designed strategic plans. However in recent years, for most of us, the experience of business reality itself has totally and fundamentally changed. Our root assumptions about the nature of this reality must also change, if we are to be able to deal with it effectively. Things are no longer static today, nor is change incremental, it is all too often discontinuous and quite unexpected. Adaptive flexibility must somehow be incorporated into modern organization ' design'. The question for any business person today is how can you set up and run an efficient profitable organization and also simultaneously manage to change, to cope with today's uncertainty?

Our research tells us that a lot depends on how you see things, or how you frame such a paradoxical situation. Conventional thinking puts you in an either/or dilemma. It insists, for example, that you either reduce costs, or, you invest for growth; you either organize for tighter efficiency, or you loosen up for creativity and innovation., but not both. New scientific business thinking however is either/and’; it admits paradox. It’s about being able to do both efficiency and innovation simultaneously, and to execute both superbly well. Those kinds of assumptions are rooted in the model of science that guides the way that you were taught to think. Basically, if you think that something is impossible, you are right. For you it is impossible. That’s the trouble with conventional linear organizational thinking, it limits you. In business, there is in fact only one valid either/or scenario. It is simply stated, either you make money, or you will eventually go bust.