It's Chaos Turtles All the Way Down

"It's chaos turtles all the way down," says Wendy Schultz, one of the world's leading futurists, in a presentation she shared with me last week and that I want to share with you now.

Change has never been simple and straightforward, she argues. Looking at a famous rational map of systems change, she says "none of these straight lines should be here, none of these boundaries should be clean."

And so, as we work to change the world, a simple, instrumental theory of change (goals, gaps, and actions to close the gaps) will not serve us well, she argues. We'd be much better served by looking out for "all emergence, all the time."

"What we actually work our way through daily is more of a dance between multiple chaotic situations," she says - and her advice is that futurists (and all of us) would be wise to get much better at surfing chaos.

"Chaos does have a negative connotation the way it's commonly used," she acknowledges. "But in systems thinking chaos is actually a form of loosely structured deterministic but non-linear change....So it's not like true disorder and true disorder is what people usually think of if you just casually say 'well life is so chaotic right now.'"

"We need to rehabilitate it in people's minds to emphasize some of the creative and generative qualities that it brings to life and the world around us...Chaos is the call of the unconscious and the unconscious is very often the springboard of creativity, especially in our dreams...Divine panic, literally being in inspired by the great god Pan who was very creative and a little demented, divine panic opens new paths. Life flourishes on that boundary where order meets chaos."

[The key is] "maintaining a dynamic balance between the chaotic and the purposeful between the creativity that chaos can generate and the purposeful and orderly that basically helps us maintain our sanity in the midst of all this dynamic change."

Finally, in Q&A, Wendy drops the line that "The lesson of systems thinking is that everything is connected.” (Yes! You have permission from one of the most influential thinkers on earth to say that.)

And on that note, I'm going to go catch some of a punk music festival happening in the park near my home. Who knows what might happen?