This is an extract from a DDB Worldwide paper called ‘Unleash the Future’ written by Daan de Raaf.
The focus was on ‘The current environment. Chaos, complexity and theend of certainty”
The introduction of probabilities and statistics in natural sciences offers a solution for the problems of quantum physics and helps to understand dissipative, chaotic processes in nature. And it gives us back time in natural sciences.
We move from a science of laws and certainties, to a science of possibilities and opportunities.
Biebracher, Nicolis and Schuster in their address to the European Communities
(1995) phrase it beautifully:
“The maintenance of organisation in nature is not-and can not be-achieved by central management; order can only be maintained by self-organisation. Self-organizing systems
allow adaptation to the prevailing environment, i.e., they react to changes in the environment with a thermodynamic response which makes the systems extraordinarily flexible and robust against perturbations from outside conditions.
We want to point out the superiority of self-organizing systems over conventional human technology which carefully avoids complexity and hierarchically manages nearly all technical processes.”
Prigogine (1996) states that this notion has far reaching consequences and that the concept of bifurcations and self-organisation can help to understand innovation, renewal and diversification in other areas than physics and chemistry. This concept can as easily be applied to biology, sociology and economics.
When we enter the scope of human sciences, specifically marketing and organisational science, we know that this is in no way a static and predictable world. As stated earlier, the current business environment seems far from equilibrium and can be seen as dynamic open complex adaptive systems.
In this world we discover fluctuations, bifurcations and instabilities wherever we go, as is the case in nature.
End of extract
My comment
The work we have done with ai agents has been around the states of bifurcations and trifurcations – it is the latter that has an unbelievable impact upon everything. For example: a bifurcation could be ‘yes’ or ‘no’. A trifurcation perspective would add the third state of ‘not sure’.
