“Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons.”

Max Ehrman (1927) Desiderata.

The start of a new year is often a good starting point for reflection, planning, goal setting, and for establishing the tone for the year ahead. Whether you are a leader continuing in their role in the new year or one commencing in the role for the first time, the almost 100 years of sage-like advice from Max Ehrman’s Desiderata is worth taking on board.

December and January are often thought of as festive months. Around the world, different religions and different cultures have an array of reasons to be festive. Typically they focus on light or joy or peace or goodwill to all. Around the world, in every major city or town, there will be fireworks to light up the night sky as the clock ticks to midnight and the new year begins. For organizations and their leaders, the pertinent question to ask is straightforward. How will you bring light, life, and prosperity not just to your organization but to your team, individually and collectively, amidst the chaos?

This chaos, of course, was highlighted throughout the pandemic. Oddly enough, the starting point to this answer is found in Physics, in particular, the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the notion of ‘Entropy.’ The well-known Physicist, Cosmologist, and Natural Philosopher, Professor Paul Davies, explains it this way.

“The Second Law of Thermodynamics is often phrased by saying that every closed system tends towards a state of total disorder or chaos. One measure of the remorseless rise of chaos uses a quantity called ‘entropy,’ which is defined to be, roughly speaking, the degree of disorder in a system. The second law then states that in a closed system, the total entropy can never decrease; at best, it remains the same. Almost all natural changes tend to increase the entropy, and we see the second law at work all around us in nature.”

Davies, Paul. (1995). About Time: Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution. London: Penguin Books. p34.

Davies makes some very important points in this quote from his groundbreaking work. Entropy is, in effect, a mathematical measurement in degrees, of chaos. The opposite of chaos is order. Entropy in a closed system, free of interference, “can never decrease, at best it remains the same.” That said, the last part of the quote suggests that Entropy is also found in nature or natural systems. Think of the human body. Each day, cells within our bodies age and ultimately die. In many cases, those cells regenerate and there are things we can do, to ensure our life span is extended and maximized as much as possible. By and large this involves keeping the Entropy within the body in check. You can’t get rid of it. The reality is though, that the day will come when the cells die and with it the human body they were living in. Too much chaos measured as a high degree of Entropy, is ultimately destructive to life.

For organizations this could have massive implications, especially when thought of as an open or natural system. Whilst it is true that Entropy cannot reduce, “at best it remains the same” in a closed system, in open and natural systems, it might be conceived as being on a continuum between total disorder (chaos) and total order. Both Sociologist Peter Berger (1969) and Anthropologist Gerard Arbuckle (1988) refer to this notion of order and chaos as ‘nomos’ (order) and ‘anomy (chaos).’

“Nomos is an area of meaning carved out of a vast mass of meaninglessness, a small clearing of lucidity in a formless, dark, almost ominous jungle.”

Berger. Peter. (1969). The Sacred Canoy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. New York (NY): Doubleday. p23.

“Nomos protects us from the awesome insecurities of chaos (anomy).”

Arbuckle. Gerald. A. (1988). Out of Chaos. New Jersey: Paulist Press. p14.

What these two thinkers reveal is that chaos/anomy is where everything is devoid of meaning. In its purest form, anomy or chaos is a vast wasteland of meaninglessness. Can a certain amount or degree of Entropy be useful or purposeful, or is Entropy a synonym for meaninglessness? Two scientists have already answered this question. Physicist Stephen Wolfram (1984), in his groundbreaking research paper ‘Universality and Complexity in Cellular Automata’, identified four universality classes that described the behavior of ‘cellular automata.’ According to Wolfram, “cellular automata are discrete dynamical systems with simple construction but complex self-organizing behavior.”

Computer Scientist and founder of Artificial Life, Chris Langton, explored the work on ‘Cellula Automata’. According to M. Mitchell Waldrop (1992) in his excellent book, ‘Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos’, Chris Langton was specifically looking at the question that Wolfram’s work raised. “How were Wolfram’s classes related to one another, and what determined the class a given rule belonged to?” Langton found that Universality Class IV sat between Universality Class II (Order) and III (Chaos).

In Waldrop’s explanation of the four Universality Classes, he uses the idea of blobs on a computer screen, drawing on the work of Chris Langton. His explanation of Universality Class IV is insightful.

“Finally, there were Wolfram’s Class IV rules. Included here were those rare, impossible-to-pigeonhole rules that didn’t produce frozen blobs but that didn’t produce total chaos, either. What they did produce were coherent structures that propagated, grew, split apart, and recombined in a wonderfully complex way. They essentially never settled down. In that sense, they were all very much like the most famous member of Class IV, the Game of Life.” 

*See: Waldrop. M. Mitchell. (1992) Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos. London: Penguin Books pp225-228

There are a number of takeaways from the work of Stephen Wolfram, Chris Langton, Peter Berger, Gerard Arbuckle, and the work of Paul Davies, who explored the work of Albert Einstein. Fundamentally, Entropy brings varying degrees of chaos/disorder, which sociologically and anthropologically fits the description of anomy, creating a vast abyss of meaninglessness. Such an abyss would not be conducive to trust, hope, to feeling valued, or having some sense of belonging, as these require the ability on the part of staff, to make meaning from their work, their colleagues and environment. If there is hope, it will be born from fear and despair, best described as ‘hope to be somewhere better anytime soon!’ What is telling from the  research of these scholars, is that life needs a small degree of Entropy to stay interesting, to allow things to combine, separate and regenerate. Universality Class IV is in fact a description of what a life-giving organization and work place would look like. Too much order, as in Universality Classes I and II, means that there are no significant decisions for the employees to make, as they’ve already been made. Universality Class III, on the other hand, is so chaotic, operating with such a high degree of Entropy, it becomes nearly impossible to make any decisions. Decisions would be voided as soon as they have been made, as circumstances would have changed in that length of time. Hence Universality Class IV, is the only description that suggests enough creativity exists between the order and the chaos, for life to flourish, have meaning and to fulfill a purpose.