You may have heard that Edward Lorenz died. James Gleick's description in "Chaos" of Lorenz's work on chaos theory sent me on an almost 10 year odyssey in the 90's of reading a wide range of books and research on chaos theory (& mathematics), complex adaptive systems, emergence, and other related topics.
It is one of the few things that has fundamentally shaped the way I view the world. We live in a culture that is saturated with the legacy of scientific naturalism and the reductionism that empowers it, with the knowledge discovered using the scientific method continuing to astound us.
All ways of knowing have been influenced by this revolution, including how organizations and individuals know what they know, and create new capabilities. Both engineering and managing have become professions in a reductionist matrix, and have a core concept of using deterministic models to drive decision making. As with the scientific revolution, the resulting explosion of knowledge and capabilities has been amazing.
However, a richer understanding has begun to emerge over the past hundred years. This understanding includes the chaos of Poincare & Lorenz, the death of positivism (as the result of discoveries like quantum theory and Godel's Incompleteness Theorem), and the need for new ways of exploring domains that are more Complex than Known/Knowable.
The death of Edward Lorenz is reminder that perhaps we are near the end of the beginning of our journey toward understanding how to effectively engage complexity.
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