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Companies at the edge of chaos are like our brains

by Amit Kothari
30 June 2009
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One of the key fears of people that manage knowledge workers is that losing control might mean losing authority and standing. Perhaps they fear that conceptualizing innovation plans might lose the power of processes, quality guidelines or other built-up best practice that is impressionable to the company as essential knowledge. 
Much of this is simply a lack of trust, or a tendency to be highly conservative about what appears to be valuable. The reality as I see it is that all processes and knowledge are only contextually valuable. In my opinion, the largest fallacy of all is that corporate knowledge is a discrete asset. It is instead – a set of avalanches within people that have become known in the status quo.
The truth about how our brains operate tells us a clear story about how a company that depends on smart people should operate in practice. This understanding is not a radical change, it’s an empowerment culture that respects what human beings do best when faced with challenge and incentives.
The physical concept that may describe how our brains work is self-organised criticality. It may help to shed light into the truly effective forces that set people off into highly productive, creative and fruitful endeavors – from a theoretical perspective. The theory can apply to piles of sand, to the edge of cliffs, and even to sociology. The following is quoted from a recent article in the New Scientist:

In reality, your brain operates on the edge of chaos. Though much of the time it runs in an orderly and stable way, every now and again it suddenly and unpredictably lurches into a blizzard of noise. Neuroscientists have long suspected as much. Only recently, however, have they come up with proof that brains work this way. Now they are trying to work out why. Some believe that near-chaotic states may be crucial to memory, and could explain why some people are smarter than others. In technical terms, systems on the edge of chaos are said to be in a state of “self-organised criticality”. These systems are right on the boundary between stable, orderly behaviour – such as a swinging pendulum – and the unpredictable world of chaos, as exemplified by turbulence. The quintessential example of self-organised criticality is a growing sand pile. As grains build up, the pile grows in a predictable way until, suddenly and without warning, it hits a critical point and collapses. These sand avalanches occur spontaneously and are almost impossible to predict, so the system is said to be both critical and self-organising. Earthquakes, avalanches and wildfires are also thought to behave like this, with periods of stability followed by catastrophic periods of instability that rearrange the system into a new, temporarily stable state. Self-organised criticality has another defining feature: even though individual sand avalanches are impossible to predict, their overall distribution is regular. The avalanches are “scale invariant”, which means that avalanches of all possible sizes occur. They also follow a “power law” distribution, which means bigger avalanches happen less often than smaller avalanches, according to a strict mathematical ratio. Earthquakes offer the best real-world example. Quakes of magnitude 5.0 on the Richter scale happen 10 times as often as quakes of magnitude 6.0, and 100 times as often as quakes of magnitude 7.0.

Based on evidence about how the human brain works – we human beings are perpetually in a state of self-organised criticality. That is why we’re so good at what we do. In sharp contrast, the systems we design to service ourselves and other entities are linear and process-driven. Their origins are strewn with the weeds of one snapshot in time – when they used to apply. 
It might seem precarious to have a brain that plunges randomly into periods of instability, but the disorder is actually essential to the brain’s ability to transmit information and solve problems. “Lying at the critical point allows the brain to rapidly adapt to new circumstances,” says Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg from the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, Germany. Disorder is essential to the brain’s ability to transmit information and solve problems.

Some initial thoughts occured to me in relation to enterprises that are taking approaches to innovate or maintain a culture that fosters growth through their human capital.
  • How quickly can an idea to innovate or incrementally improve any aspect of business – small or large – be embraced, evaluated and even executed – exactly when the fire under its reasoning is hot? 
  • How can this evaluation happen without any dampening?
  • How do you change the rules about how you work so that you can achieve the desired outcome from your avalanche? Remember the power laws for the sand experiment above had avalanches of all different sizes possible.
  • How can this evaluation become amplified through participation, rather than lost in a mess of people and attitudes?
  • How can an idea, comment, innocent question or a spark be directed straight to whom/where it belongs – without friction? In this context, social software tells us to “enable” a network of people and throw out the friction.
  • What opportunity do innovation managers have to provide tools for employees to self-organise and execute on their convictions – by incubating an idea? Think about what doing work means – and what doing research means. Ideas let an employee step away and produce their avalanche. What fosters this spirit and makes it natural?
Our memory and creativity rely on being in a state of organised chaos. Is there a difference between how our brains work, and how certain enterprises should work?
Make sure you tweak your avalanches. In the sand example, each grain of sand has extremely simple rules. It is not chaos. It can be determined – inputs and outputs can be calibrated to stabilise on a new equilibrium basis. The coarseness of the grains, the friction between them are all analogies that are relevant.
The comfortable way is to continue on the well-trodden course, with average productivity that delivers average returns, with average people that do average work in an average culture of average innovation. Losing this comfort to semi-chaos may be the defining moment of the future enterprise – when corporate culture becomes comfortable with chaotic workers having open conversations. 

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