Chaos and Complexity Theory

Chaos and Complexity Theory by T.J. Titcomb was published in the 1998 Annual ASTD Info-line.

The article provides a brief overview of Chaos and Complexity Theory, then applies it to managing organizations.

She defines Chaos as

"The study of behavior in systems that appears random but reveals orderly
patterns at deeper levels. In a business sense, it describes random,
inherently unpredictable sequences over time in the performance indicators of an
organization."

As I was reading the article, I connected these thoughts back to my thought-experiement "Is Structure Important" and also to a discussion about feedback loops that I had in a graduate Social Psychology course.

Systems with feedback loops are self-balancing. The analogy my professor used was that of a theromstat. If it gets too hot, the heater shuts off. If it gets too cold, the heater turns on. If you contrast that to an open flame on your stove, which does not stop heating food when the temperature exceeds a certain level, but will continue to increase the temperature until the house burns down. Feedback systems are self-organizing and have the potential to "learn."

This made me think of the BugBots at MIT. Instead of writing a huge, complex central governing program, which is preprogrammed for all possible responses to the environment, the scientists/engineers at MIT wrote a bunch of small simple programs for reflex-like actions, then linked them all together with a feedback loop. Essentially the robot "learned" to walk each time it was turned on. It would run random programs and assess its motion. If it was moving forward, it would continue running that series of programs. If it was not moving forward, it would continue to try different random patterns of programs. It was very simple, elegant solution and it allowed the robots to operate in real-world environments. Before, using the central governing program, the robots could only respond in very specific environments to very specific cues. Essentially, the MIT people created a chaotic system that was self-organizing through feedback loops.

Feedback loops also made me think of the Thiagi workshop. Beyond the games and the interactions and the content, the one thing that he emphasized as being absolutely essential was the tests. That was where we were to concentrate everything we knew about instructional design. All of his training courses had the criteria that the students HAD to pass the test to pass the course. So if the tests were instructionally sound and really, truly measured the behavior that we wanted to change, then it didn't matter how the students learned the content: if they passed the test, they were able to do what they needed to do.

That is the key to the Thiagi design methodology and the answer to "Is Structure Important?" Structure is no more important than having a perfectly designed central governing program. Structured designs are efficient, programmer-centric and limited. It's the feedback loops, the tests that count, because that is where students measure and change their behavior.