LAST SUMMER MY EMPLOYERS ASKED ME, AND quite a few other people at the company that owns this magazine, to attend a one-day management-training seminar given by a management consultant in a conference center high above Wall Street. Our activities included the parlor-game-like exercise of answering a long list of questions to find out the personality type of each of us, followed by some serious reflection about how every personality type is important in an organization, but before all that we were introduced to the importance of up-to-date management skills with a lecture about how the world has changed lately.

Our brisk, cheerful instructor informed us that from the 1700s until very recently, Newtonian science was the underpinning of civilization, and it led us to make our organizations above all stable. The future was usually fairly predictable, so the smart way for a company to prepare was to send its managers on a retreat to formulate a five-year plan. In the last twenty years, she went on, that has been overturned—all because of technology. We have entered a new “information age” where “chaos” has become the operational model, where the future is completely unpredictable, and “changes are discontinuous and happening at a geometric rate.” In sum, “Whereas a Newtonian view of the world imposes structure on an organization from above, the biological model, represented by chaos theory, views the organization as a living, self-organizing system.” So we’d better keep on our toes at the office.

Full Story >>