Defence of chaos
Just think about things which have made you happy and look for the reasons that let them arise. Think about your best friends and remember how you met them. Contemplate your surroundings and look carefully at those elements that attract your attention. How many of them do you find there just because you looked for them until you found them? How did they become so? How did they get here? How did you get here? Was all this predictable?
We can interpret life as an interaction between our present, our expectations and our surroundings. Such an interaction is influenced by unpredictable doses of inspiration, intuition, chance, coincidence, fortune... We can react against hazard and pretend to design perfect plans to lead us to perfect objectives. However, chaos will not stop altering our surroundings and our own consciousness.
In a grid regulated system chaos is usually a source of problems. In an open and free system chaos contributes to fertilize spontaneity, improvisation, imagination, creativity.
By definition chaos can generate disorder. Disorder can generate superfluous movements, shocks, conflicts and exhaustion of energies. However, it does not necessarily have to be this way. Even order is not free of such risks. In addition, circumstances initially valued as negative can lead to new realities, which can be so unexpected as positive.
Chaos that makes sense
Just as there are different types of
order, there are as well different types of chaos. For instance, there is
chaos that makes sense.
Fractals,
viruses and a multitude of natural
phenomena are examples of this type of chaos. These structures - just to call them somehow - are formed by risky elements which make them have a chaotic
existence ground, as well as to produce chaotic actions. Nevertheless, the perception of the sum of their interactions as a whole makes sense to us.
This suggests to us the possibility that also between different people relation and action systems can be run. That is people who do not only consider chaos as a problem but who can also take advantage of it. We mean chaos which does make sense. To make sense means here that all members of such a system follow common values and behaviors.
In such a context, each individual not only could but should act at any moment according to his/her own values and yearnings. This would constitute a coherent act by itself, which would also make sense at a group level. It would not be necessary to have directives or objectives, nor centralized coordination to guide coherently the group as a whole.
In order to reach such a common coherence it would only be required to follow a common ethical ground and a consequent individual action for every movement. Moreover, if every individual were guided by the best one of his/her intentions when taking every step, the group as whole could evolve from a form which is chaotically structured.
It is quite tempting to try the validity of this hypothesis in an environment resistant to planning as it is Internet. To try to apply an order to network structures can appear to be like trying to maintain curly hair smooth. Let's hair down, then.
Chaos management
Interactors considers chaos like an assumed,
intrinsic and
productive factor. How good projects will run will depend on how good chaos management will be. By "chaos management" we do not mean its rationalization or its ordering, but solely taking the maximum advantage of it.
A management free of complexes because of the existence of chaos may have already some advantages, such as:
- A project is started by the mere fact to provoke the desire of motion. It is not essential to have objectives or a strategy.
- The modification of objectives throughout a project is foreseen and it does not generate traumas. The present time is assumed to be changing and future expectations are designed flexible.
- Discussion and action meet each other. Projects do not have a first phase of planning (without production) or a second phase of production (without planning). It is possible to prove a first step, to correct it, to improve on the second step, on the third one and so on. Until the infinite.
- Only who wants to be delayed is actually delayed. Only those projects which follow a calendar can be delayed. A project which is dreamt about but never started undergoes the worst delay possible.
- Only who wants to feel a failure, feels it. A project can be considered successful just by the simple fact to exist. Only those projects which success is based on their final objective can fail.
Let's not remain at the realm of words. While you read these lines we keep on working and observing if these hypotheses are applicable. We keep on acting according to our values and expectations and enjoying each passage of the results accomplished, as well as the questions which might arise about the future.
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