BOOK REVIEW: Surfing The Edge of Chaos

Pascale, Richard T., Mark Millemann, and Linda Gioja. Surfing The Edge of Chaos: The Laws of Nature and the Laws of Business. New York: Random House, Inc., 2000.

Ibidem KW: future; living systems; chaos; business; complexity; church renewal


Several years ago, I was sitting in a hotel room in Colorado Springs with some good friends and colleagues. One of them mentioned a new book called Surfing the Edge of Chaos. I was taking notes on my laptop and there was a wireless hookup in the room. I logged on to Amazon.com, found the book, and ordered 6 copies to be delivered to everyone in the room at their home address. It only took 5 minutes. No trip to Barnes and Nobles, no wondering around to find the book. Welcome to the digital age.

I recently found the book under a pile of ‘books to read’ in my office. Another author I have been reading refers to livings systems and chaos theory and frequently drew from the case studies presented in Surfing. So…last week I finally began to read it (hey, better late than never!).

Surfing the Edge of Chaos presents recent research into Complex Adaptive Systems, a broad based inquiry into the common properties of living things—beehives, ant colonies, networks, enterprises, ecologies and economies. The authors find parallels between living systems or ecological systems and modern business organizations. They focus on conversion from the Newtonian “mechanical” view of the universe to the Einstein ‘relativity’ and quantum paradigm in which complexity, uncertainty and chaos are significant factors. Because of the success of the modern American business model in the twentieth century, business has been slow to adapt to the new scientific paradigms. The authors affirm that nature favors adaptation and fleet-footedness (Pascale, Millemann and Gioja:3), and believe that 21st century markets do the same thing.

Rapid rates of change, an explosion of new insights from the life sciences, and the insufficiency of the machine model have created a critical mass for a revolution in management thinking (Pascale, Millemann and Gioja:5).

The authors use the termite mounds in Africa as a stunning example of a complex adaptive system. The human immune system is a complex adaptive system. This book describes a new management model based on the nature of nature (Pascale, Millemann and Gioja:5).

This book distills four bedrock principles from the living sciences and demonstrates their managerial relevance in a time of disruptive change.

Four Laws of Nature

Equilibrium is a Precursor to Death
When a living system is in a state of equilibrium, it is less responsive to changes occurring around it. This places it at maximum risk. This jibes with a well proven law of cybernetics—Requisite Variety—which states that when a system fails to cultivate (not just tolerate) variety in its internal operations, it will fail to deal with variety that challenges it externally.

The Edge of Chaos is Where Adaptive Change Happens
In the face of threat, or when galvanized by a compelling opportunity, living things move toward the edge of chaos. This condition evokes higher levels of mutation and experimentation, and fresh new solutions are more likely to be found.

Emergence and Spontaneous Self Organization
When the right kind of excitation takes place, independent agents move toward what has been popularized as the “tipping point.” As a result of this disturbance, the components of living systems will self-organize and new adaptive patterns emerge from the turmoil.

Unintended Consequences are an Inescapable Byproduct
Living systems cannot be directed along a linear path. Unforeseen consequences are inevitable. The challenge is to disturb them in a manner that approximates the desired outcome. Traditional enterprises that are faced with discontinuous change are declining. Adapt or die: the choice is that simple and that stark (Pascale, Millemann and Gioja:6).


The authors of Surfing the Edge of Chaos bridge theory and practice through six in-depth case studies of living systems in the business and organizational worlds: British Petroleum, Hewlett-Packard, Monsanto, Royal Dutch/Shell, Sears and the U.S. Army. The authors believe that a “fresh and unorthodox brand of leadership” is necessary in any organization to initiate and “shepherd” an adaptive journey (Pascale, Millemann and Gioja:7-8).

In 1982, Tom Peters wrote In Search of Excellence with an emphasis on the importance of “organizational fit” and top down strategic planning. Peters and Waterman (the co-author) focused on the success of forty-three excellent companies. Within five years after the book’s publication, half of the forty-three companies were in trouble. At present, all but five have fallen from grace. IBM, one of the companies featured, “saw it coming”...but could not change or do anything about the rapidly changing market in computer technology (Pascale, Millemann and Gioja:23).

The authors of Surfing the Edge of Chaos show that a primary reason for business failure is the outmoded “social engineering paradigm” that has more to do with the Newtonian mechanical model than current living systems thinking. Besides IBM, Sears provides a case study in the negative consequences of equilibrium.

Here is their description of the traditional social engineering paradigm (see any applications for the church here?).


Social engineering paradigm:

1) Leaders as Head, Organization as Body. Intelligence is centralized near those at the top of the organization--or those who advise them.

2) The Premise of Predictable Change. Implementation plans are scripted on the assumption of a reasonable degree of predictability and control during the time span of the change effort.

3) An Assumption of Cascading Intention. Once a course of action is determined, initiative flows from the top down. When a program is defined, it is communicated and rolled out through the ranks. Often, this includes a veneer of participation to engender buy-in. That these familiar tenets of social engineering are not compatible with the way living systems works is probably self-evidents.

Social engineering as a context is obsolete--Period (Pascale, Millemann and Gioja:13).

The authors are advocating a change of thinking like mechanics or engineers to gardening. In the church world, I suppose this is reflected in the gradual change of terminology from ‘building’ churches, to ‘planting’ churches which began happening in the 1990s. Natural Church Development by Christian Schwarz in 1996 represented one of the early attempts to apply biological (or as Schwarz called it, ‘biotic’) principles to raising the quality of church life. Recent books like the Organic Church by Neil Cole (2005) and The Forgotten Ways by Alan Hirsch (2006) represents further steps toward the application of livings systems principles to church life. I have to blow my own horn here, and mention that I wrote a 50 page research paper in 2003 called "Organic Church Planting" based on quasi-inductive study of the “Jesus and the twelve” model and exploring some of the ideas that Cole and Hirsch have carried much further since. To bad I didn’t publish it! It has provided the philosophy of ministry that has guided my outreach and gardening efforts in Miami since then.


http://c-far.blogspot.com/2007_04_29_archive.html

The authors of Surfing emphasize a Hebrew model of praxis (even though they don’t realize it): “As a general rule, adults are much more likely to act their way into a new way of thinking than to think their way into a new way of acting.” This accurately describes my last four years of experimenting with house churches, relational networks and redemptive light reflecting in academia. The authors assert that it is “Better to be a beehive than a bureaucracy”

How do we know that the old Newtonian model is giving way to the natural one? Two reasons. The marketplace leaves no choice, and the natural model is closer to the way we as humans really function (Pascale, Millemann and Gioja:14).

Many would say that the American church world is facing an adaptive situation today. Others would probably concur with a stronger word like “the edge of chaos.” How do we adapt? Do we change nothing and just keep doing what we have been doing? It was Albert Einstein who defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

Some are advocating radical change while others believe that the answer requires a return to the historical legacy of the church, creeds and liturgy. Even in the radical change camp, there are a dozen different kinds of change from structure (house churches), style (pomo), politics and theology (emerging), and DNA and living systems (Hirsch and Cole). There are those who are reacting to the reactors and retreating into a sort of anti-emerging simplistic “I love Jesus” fundamentalism. Sounds like chaos to me!

To conclude this review of Surfing the Edge of Chaos: “living systems isn’t a metaphor. It is the way it is” (Pascale, Millemann and Gioja:15).

Although I have not completely finished the book yet, I highly recommend Surfing the Edge of Chaos for anyone involved in organizational leadership, whether in business or in the church world: after all, it is all the kingdom! I will probably send out a summary of each of the 4 major sections in the book and invite comments on my blog http://c-far.blogspot.com/.