2025-12-19
The idea is deceptively simple: certain systems, when pushed far from equilibrium, don't collapse. They reorganize. They become more complex.
I've been reading about dissipative structures—a concept that won Ilya Prigogine the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1977. The idea is deceptively simple: certain systems, when pushed far from equilibrium, don't collapse. They reorganize. They become more complex.
This runs counter to everything we're taught about entropy. The second law of thermodynamics tells us that disorder increases over time. Systems decay. Energy dissipates. And yet—living things exist. Organizations exist. Complexity emerges from chaos, again and again.
What Prigogine discovered is that open systems—systems that exchange energy and matter with their environment—can use that flow to create order spontaneously. They don't fight entropy. They ride it.
The language of chaos theory has become so diluted by pop science that it's worth going back to the source.
Don't fight entropy. Ride it.
Every organization, every team, every individual moves through this. Growth creates complexity. Complexity creates friction. Friction creates breakdown—or, if you're paying attention, opportunity.
Edward Lorenz, a meteorologist at MIT, was running weather simulations in 1961 when he noticed something strange. He had re-entered initial conditions for a model, rounding .506127 to .506 to save time. The result was a completely different weather pattern. Tiny differences in starting conditions led to wildly divergent outcomes.
This became known as sensitive dependence on initial conditions—or, more famously, the butterfly effect. It's often misunderstood as randomness. It's not. Chaotic systems are deterministic. Given the same inputs, they produce the same outputs. But because we can never measure inputs with perfect precision, prediction becomes impossible over time.
Stuart Kauffman, a theoretical biologist at the Santa Fe Institute, has spent decades studying what he calls the "edge of chaos."
His research on complex adaptive systems—everything from genetic networks to ecosystems—revealed a pattern. Systems that are too rigid become brittle. Systems that are too fluid never stabilize. But systems that operate at the boundary between order and chaos? They adapt. They evolve. They thrive.
Kauffman's phrase for this: "order for free." Complex systems, given the right conditions, self-organize into higher states of order without anyone directing them.
This is not a metaphor. It's a mathematical property of networks with the right degree of connectivity and the right balance of structure and flexibility.
Prigogine called the moments of breakdown "bifurcation points." These are the places where a system can no longer maintain its current structure. It has to change. And at bifurcation points, small interventions can have enormous effects.
Not in the steady-state. Not in the predictable. In the moments of instability—the phase transitions—where the system is deciding what it will become next.
When disruption comes, the instinct is to restore equilibrium. Go back to what worked. Stabilize. This is natural and often necessary in the short term.
But if every transformation just returns you to the same configuration, you're not growing. You're oscillating. You're expending energy to stay in place.
The opportunity in chaos is hierarchical reorganization—emerging from the disruption at a higher level of order. More capability. More resilience. More complexity that serves rather than burdens.
You have to see when the system is approaching a bifurcation point. The signals are often subtle—increased friction, decreasing returns on familiar tactics, a sense that what used to work doesn't anymore. Leaders who ignore these signals get blindsided. Leaders who attend to them get to choose how to respond.
Transformation cannot be controlled, only guided. The old structure has to be allowed to break down before the new one can emerge. This is terrifying. It requires trust in the process—trust that the system will reorganize, that order will emerge from the apparent chaos.
Someone has to hold the expectation of the higher level. Not the specifics—those emerge—but the direction. The belief that we are moving up, not sideways or down. This is the function of vision. It's not a roadmap. It's a strange attractor, pulling the system toward a new basin of order.
Lorenz discovered something else in his weather simulations: strange attractors. These are patterns that chaotic systems gravitate toward without ever repeating exactly. They're not points of equilibrium. They're regions of possibility—bounded but infinite.
I think vision works this way. It's not a destination you arrive at. It's a shape you're drawn toward. You never land on it precisely, but it gives form to what would otherwise be randomness.
"Disorder can be a source of new order, and... growth appears from disequilibrium, not balance."
— Margaret Wheatley, Leadership and the New Science
This is why belief matters. Not as wishful thinking, but as a force within the system. What you believe about what's possible influences what becomes possible.
This is the part that sounds mystical but isn't. Complex systems respond to expectations. Not in a magical way—in a structural way. The beliefs embedded in a system shape what it pays attention to, what it reinforces, what it allows to emerge.
If the expectation is "survive and return to normal," that's what you'll get.
If the expectation is "use this disruption to become something more capable," that's also what you'll get.
The leader's job, at the edge of chaos, is to hold the higher expectation. Not to control the reorganization, but to influence its direction.
Ralph Stacey, who spent decades applying complexity theory to management, argued that organizations are not machines to be engineered but living processes to be participated in. You cannot stand outside the system and direct it. You are part of the system. Your participation shapes what emerges.
The system is always communicating. Friction, resistance, diminishing returns—these are not problems to solve. They're information about where the system is in its cycle.
Use it. The breakdown of old structures releases energy. That energy can be captured for reorganization—or wasted in futile attempts to restore what's already dissolving.
At bifurcation points, the system is sensitive. Small inputs can shift the entire trajectory. What you believe and communicate about where this is heading matters more than any tactical intervention.
You cannot design emergence. You can only create the conditions for it and then get out of the way. The order that appears will be more robust than anything you could have planned—because it will be adapted to the actual conditions, not your model of them.
Prigogine's insight was that life itself is a far-from-equilibrium phenomenon. We exist because of the flow of energy through us, not in spite of it. The same is true of organizations. They are not static structures to be preserved. They are processes—patterns of activity that persist by continuously reorganizing.
Growth, then, is not the accumulation of stability. It's the capacity to transform—to move through chaos and emerge more capable on the other side.
That capacity can be developed. It can be practiced. It can become a way of operating.
But first, you have to believe it's possible.
— A.H.
This is a Sketchbook entry. Less formal. Still forming. If it sparks something in you, that's the point.
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