Chaos in Emergency Management and the Proposal of a Terminal Domain
Laying Down a Path Through Chaos Leading to a Proposed Final Domain Known as Deep Chaos. Moving into the Unknown. A NoiseBox Publication.
Note: This post is experimental, including the language, delivery, and length. In many places, the writing may be as strange as the notion of deep chaos being presented. The design of the post is also a first. It is the first time this blog has used video and multiple pictures. Pictures are leveraged heavily to create the important feeling of falling into and dwelling in deep chaos. Motivating the first part of this post are repeated observations that the significance of the term “chaos” has become scattered when, in fact, the term holds established meanings in different narratives. This post walks down through some of the resulting chaotic domains. It then moves into part two to what is intended to be the final domain in the downward movement through chaos, known as deep chaos, situated at the outer right-hand boundary of the chaotic domain. greg@gregoryvig.com for contact.
Introduction
Chaos.
Chaos.
Chaos.
In the words of Wheatley (2006), “A system is defined as chaotic when it is impossible to know what it will do next” (p.22). The term chaos has become popular within the emergency management community, even finding its way onto the name of a popular podcast where it is advertised as something that should be embraced. Chaos is used widely on social media to describe any organization or situation where the norm has been negatively deviated from, and the pathway forward is not indicated. At the same time, the situation is destabilized and disorderly; there are breakdowns in coordination, communication, processes, routine, and control, and the accumulation of unknowns causing complicated decision-making. At the same time, there is uncertainty and an ongoing struggle to gain a workable understanding of the situation. Emotions ranging from awe to confusion and strangeness may permeate each moment. It seems members of the emergency management community often find themselves in chaos, given the prevalence of the term on social media.
But are they? Does the above not describe what it is like to lose control of a system due to a sudden and overwhelming context shift triggering a system to have breakdowns, become unruly, erode, lose work focus, not know what style of management to adopt, and lose organizational qualities, coherence, cohesiveness, and order in a present that is hard to describe, explain, and develop a strategy to move forward? All of this can occur while staying in the same domain or entering partially into an unplanned phase transition. This post endeavors to answer this question by descending through interpretations of chaos organized by their implications for systems before arriving at a new domain at the extreme, unnerving edge of shared understandings of chaos, dubbed “deep chaos.” This more severe notion is hoped to position deep chaos relative to other narratives to support the navigation of the chaotic landscape and establish an endpoint opposite of chaos theory.
Chaos champions or enthusiasts may find this post affronting or divisive due to its selection of narratives, its resulting understanding of chaos, and what it regards as a misuse of the phrase “We are in chaos!” This is not the intent. The intent is to make a meaningful map of some of the existing chaotic domains, including a new one. The following post aims to bring valuable organization to ideas around chaos and their meaning and walk down through the domains. The rest of the post introduces a final proposed chaotic domain that will serve as a waypoint for navigating the uneven terrain of chaos. Should this idea be developed further, there is room for additional domains between the two possible bookends: chaos theory and deep chaos. It should be noted this is merely a blog post and not an exhaustive survey of chaos in any way. Instead, it is a selective overview of some popular narratives and the addition of a new one.
Part 1: The Common Tongue
There are three types of systems in the natural world: Ordered, an ice cube with its social form of a hierarchy; complex, a liquid and its social form of a fluid and dynamic complex system; and lastly, chaos, a cloud of gas (Waldrop, 1992). They can be seen as subjective states. Imagined as three circles moving from order to chaos, spaces between the systems can be considered to be filled with some form of gelatin. These gelatin-filled gaps (Snowden might call them liminal spaces, but a more experiential and sensory-based approach is preferred) are where one system transitions into another. In these spaces, a system slowly resembles the domain it is moving toward (Keen, 2008). If a system has a lot of energy, it might quickly pass through the phase transition space and chew through the gelatin. It may also move slowly. In other cases, a system might partially enter the transitionary space before pulling back once enough energy has been amassed. The three systems and phase transitions can be analyzed and understood naturally, mathematically, and philosophically.
Chaos Theory and the Theory of Deterministic Systems
It is not as much a chaotic domain as a means for making sense of chaos, but chaos theory is an excellent place to begin exploring the subject. Mathematical and resulting forms of chaos theory might be identified as “true blue chaos,” given their history and grounding in mathematics. This approach appears to date back, at the very least, to the work of Henri Poincaré in the late 1800s to the early 1900s when his research on the three-body problem pointed toward chaos. Later, Lorenz became a prominent figure in chaos and his famed “Lorenz Attractor.” In popular literature, Lorenz is known for stating how the flap of a butterfly’s wings in one distant location can cause a hurricane in another. Indeed, the butterfly wings notion has been abstracted away from mathematics, which is critical to grasping and working with this approach to chaos (Capra & Luisi, 2015)
The video below gets somewhere near chaos theory and its sensitivity to initial conditions, phase space, attractors, and unexpected outcomes. First, the chaotic principle of sensitivity to initial conditions comes into view. What is the nature of the articulating hinge attached presumably to the ceiling? How much friction is present? What is its range of motion, and what possibilities does the hinge give the pendulum? How long is the rope? How much sand is in the container? How much force and over what distance did a human hand propel the container along the table? How quickly is the sand being dispersed? How quickly is it being filled? How much friction is the container picking up as it moves around the table? Did the user introduce the first pattern from which the chaotic phase space arose, or did they just let it go? How did the sand interact with the table? Did it disperse upon contact or stay in ordered lines (Capra & Luisi, 2015)?
The above demonstrates phase space in a close approximation and stays out of the quicksand of chaos theory mathematics. Bloom (2023) explains, “We can understand the pendulum as being probabilistically within this phase space. It will not be outside of this phase space; it will be within this phase space…. Chaos systems create phase space; they don’t create a specific endpoint.” This is represented by the sand pendulum and the patterns left on the table, which constitute its phase space.
Capra and Luisi (2015) distinguish between erratic and random motion and the type of chaotic behavior discussed here.
The authors note that “with the help of strange attractors a distinction can be made between mere randomness, or ‘noise,’ and chaos. Chaotic behavior is deterministic and patterned, and strange attractors allow us to transform the seemingly random data into distinct visible shapes” (p.113). They explain an “attractor is a mathematical representation of a dynamic (the system’s long-term behavior ) that is intrinsic to the system (p.112). One such attractor they provide is the Ueda attractor. Capra and Luisi (2015) explain “an attractor represents the system’s long-term dynamics” (p.112).
Using patterns that emerge out of phase space and attractors gives emergency managers something to embrace within the context of chaos theory. Emergency managers can operate off of these patterns and shapes, provided they are sensitive enough to context to let go of them when they have become outdated. This has been quite a succinct account of chaos theory, the theory of deterministic systems covering initial conditions, phase space, and attractors. Books dedicated to teaching this variety of chaos through mathematical equations are included in this domain. It seems unlikely this is the version of chaos theory that the emergency management community works with most routinely. The resulting phase space and attractors must be translated into a workable direction. Using chaos theory to generate phase space and use attractors to make sense of it at the scale of an incident would involve mathematics being done by multiple people in lockstep with the emergency’s operational pace. If deployed during an incident, an incredible amount of data would be needed to create something supportive of decision-making, not to mention the time spent removing extraneous data points creating noise. If chaos theory does dominate emergency management practice, and it is being worked through mathematically longhand, then that is a feat in and of itself worthy of mention. Concealing the mathematical difficulty with computer programs is an excellent way to leverage chaos theory, but it does not indicate the user understands chaos.
Softer Now
The study of chaos moves from the mathematical mire towards a more philosophical approach. Margaret Wheatley has written extensively on chaos. Out of the domains presented here, Wheatley’s work (1993; 2006; 2012) is most disposed toward finding immediately available meaning in chaos. In her book So Far from Home: Lost and Found in Our Brave New World, Wheatley (2012) aligns with the idea that chaos, complexity, and order are all subjective states of affairs.
When we no longer rely on reason and analysis, when we react but don’t think, the world becomes chaotic, unpredictable, random. It seems as if there’s no order, no predictability, only chaos, but what we fail to notice is that we’re projecting our own irrational behavior onto the world. Events seem to come out of nowhere and, just as fast, recede into nowhere. Life feels ever more unpredictable and, in the face of so much uncertainty, thinking seems a waste of time. Why bother, it’s all so random” (Wheatley, 2012, p.99)
Wheatley (1993) describes how order can be observed in chaos.
If you look moment to moment, you will not see a pattern. You will see what looks like a system out of control because the behavior jumps all over the place. But, if you stand back far enough, if you wait over time, scale or distance, you will] observe the order that's in chaos. If we do that, then we can see the pattern (p.5)
Wheatley (1993) advocates for a qualitative, anecdotal approach that begins by taking a step back from the incident, whether a flood or a wildfire, taking a tactical pause, possibly a long pause (if one has time), and waiting for patterns to emerge. Patterns indicate order in chaos and give emergency managers something to embrace, which is not found in the following domains. In a related argument, Phlean (1999) states any system observed to have significant complexity can incorrectly be classified as chaotic. Phelan explains testing for chaos “in high-dimensionality (many-variable) systems requires large amounts of data (thousands of observations) that are typically not available to those in the social sciences” (p.243). Using Phelan’s logic, one should wonder how many data points would need to be established and at what level of accuracy, how much observation would be involved, and how much time would be spent doing the painstaking work of separating valuable data points from noise and transforming them into physical patterns. A considerable amount of computing and cognitive power would be dedicated to finding patterns in chaos. Still, Phelan’s work was completed in the late 1990s, which leaves two decades of computational and data-processing capabilities unaccounted for. Finding patterns in chaos may be a much easier task in 2024, but they may still be outdated by the time they are prepared, given the velocity of the emergency. Real-time sensing and modeling to see patterns in chaos would provide a substantial tactical advantage. Or, one could follow Wheatley (1993), wait patiently for patterns to emerge, and then do something about them without a data-based approach.
A potential issue with Wheatley’s (1993) approach is the entrance of the guru or the High Priest, which introduces weak spots. In the original quote, Wheatley takes an entire observation, qualitative-based approach to seeking patterns and finding order in chaos. At a local level, within the incident, on the fireground, for example, skilled firefighters overlooking their crew, the fire, the weather, vegetation changes, and the crews working towards their own may detect local patterns that drive their decision-making. At the global level of an emergency, pattern detection will be much more of a task. Emergency managers must be aware of any stability in the ongoing swirling and intermixing of communications, data points, resources, observations, context shifts, conditions, plans, objectives, needs, and community members, no matter how ephemeral. Emergency managers must think deeply about the present while considering how things might turn out in the future. They must remain vigilant to even the slightest repetition that could scale into a larger pattern. These patterns can be embraced if only for the minute that they persist. To depart from Wheatley (1993), the cognitive load of observing patterns on a global scale on a large and complex emergency is too much for anyone, whether a High Priest or a guru, without the aid of technology. As said earlier, this does not mean one understands chaos just because they use tools that do. The success of gurus or High Priests may be found in the simple subjective fact drawn from experience that they are not actually looking at Chaos but Complexity, if not Order. This is the difference between first and thirty-year firefighters. The first-year firefighter might feel sensations they label as “chaos.” In contrast, thirty-year firefighters observe the same ordered system they have seen repeatedly and can function efficiently within the environment to seek process improvement. There is no swirling or intermixing. The situation of gurus or High Priests is more of a matter of the subjectivity of systems than a deception of their abilities with chaos.
Heading Further Down Into Hostile Lands
Moving forward, there is nothing for emergency managers to embrace or celebrate. The overarching sentiment is “Leave.” In Cynefin’s chaotic domain, cause-and-effect relationships are not apparent to the observer because they are constantly in flux. In the ordered domain, cause and effect repeat themselves so that one can hang their hat on these relationships. Therefore, Cynefin’s chaos is not somewhere a system would want to dwell; any system that arrives here is instantly immersed in an environment where cause and effect cannot be linked, producing uncertainty. Compared to Wheatley’s (1993) work, in Cynefin’s chaos, no patterns can be managed, nor is there time to wait around and see if they appear (Kurtz & Snowden, 2003; Snowden & Boone, 2007). There is no correct answer to be found in Cynefin’s chaos. The management strategy is to act expediently and decidedly to reduce instability (Snowden & Bone, 2007). Snowden and Boone (2007) explain that the first step to escaping chaos is acting to produce order. The order they write about does not appear to be what Wheatley (1993) suggests is possible to find in chaos. Instead, it seems to entail bringing order to the situation potentially through its imposition (Kurtz & Snowden, 2003). After establishing order, managers should identify where there is stability and where there is not and move the situation from chaos to complexity sometimes by developing new patterns to move back. In the Cynefin sense, and like Langton below, chaos is a domain to be left quickly. Kurtz and Snowden (2003) and Snowden and Boone (2007) write that chaos can be a domain visited intentionally to create conditions conducive to innovation. Still, one would not want to submerge their system in it until after an emergency.
As cited in Waldrop (1992), Langton uses computational rules and achieves insight into chaos as the journey descends further.
They produced so much activity that the screen seemed to be boiling. Nothing was stable and nothing was predictable: structures would break up almost as soon as they formed. ln the language of dynamical systems, these rules corresponded to "strange" attractors-more commonly known as chaos. They were like a marble rolling around inside that cereal bowl so fast and so hard that it could never settle down' (As cited in Waldrop, 1992, p.226).
In Langton’s chaos, nothing was sustained or foreseeable; as soon as something took form, it dissolved. There may have been something perceivable, but it was gone as quickly as it appeared. There is nothing to benefit from dwelling in this form of chaos. There is no value in dragging a system into Langton’s chaos, where there is no stability, repeatability, or predictability, and anything new would break up as soon as it formed. These are not conditions conducive to maintaining and managing a system, as nothing stays stable long enough to be managed. Experientially, Langton’s chaos is like observing blips on a radar monitor or old computer screen. Langton, like Kurtz and Snowden (2003) and Snowden and Boone (2007), and Maturana to follow, this type of chaos is not one where an observer finds meaning, beauty, or patterns, finding the eye of the hurricane, embracing chaos or celebrating a system’s arrival in it, or adopting the disposition that life is not about waiting for the storm to pass, it is about learning to dance in the rain. All of these ideas are contextually appropriate, have value, and are possibly even useful in Wheatley’s chaos or related texts, but not in the path of descending into a deeper, more severe sense of chaos.
Evaluating Chaos
Returning to the introductory paragraph, where the general experience of chaos was first described in everyday terms, chaos is grouped with dysfunction, disorder, degradation, and breakdowns. An ordered or complex system may become increasingly turbulent or deteriorate as it moves unexpectedly into a phase transition, especially toward chaos. In either case, the system is starting to fray, uncertainty and disorder are waist-deep, and decisions are difficult to make, leading to decision and system paralysis. Gaining a stable image of what is happening is difficult and usually short-lived, and emotions range from doubt to awe. At the same time, everything feels destabilized and, sometimes, inverted, spinning and looping around, while traditional lines of control in the case of an ordered system are functioning intermittently or the lines of interaction between actors in a complex system becoming increasingly random and faint. However, there is still minimal coherence and cohesiveness in both systems.
In everyday use, chaos seems to mean challenges, trouble making sense of a situation, deterioration, difficulty with order, metabolizing disorder, maintaining function, and holding together images of an organization specifying how it should function. There may be a flavor of chaos here. However, as has been seen, chaos has more to do with chaos theory and the theory of deterministic systems, Wheatley’s work and their definition in the introduction, and Cynefin and Langton’s work on chaos (Waldrop, 1992). While it may sometimes be the case a fraction of the time, it seems unlikely that all instances of declaring “chaos!” actually mean a system has descended into any of the domains above (and the one below). Furthermore, it does not seem probable that so many emergency management systems are experiencing cascading or massive, sudden failures or a drift that causes their systems to become chaotic. As frequently as chaos is used to describe an event, it is curious how often that might mean emergency managers find themselves in some state of system destabilization or dwelling even partially in the gelatin field, a phase transition where one thing becomes another versus chaos in the sense of any of the domains provided here. One should find it interesting and concerning if emergency management systems are regularly in chaos as defined above, though there are other interpretations. It is not prudent for these systems to be in chaos. If it is the case that emergency managers find themselves in something that feels (subjective) chaotic, but no phase transition has occurred that would put them there, the term is misused. This is even the case if there is evidence the ongoing emergency is destabilizing the organization, straining the management system, and decreasing coherence. There is also difficulty in attaining an organizational operating picture. It is not “ops normal,” but it is not chaos either. This problem requires the teaching of a different set of strategies.
A deeper, final, and more extreme version of chaos finds its roots in Humberto Maturana's biological work, which is proposed as the current endstate domain of chaos in emergency management. A domain that might be considered the end helps navigate the chaotic landscape and gain understanding. There is nothing past deep chaos; there is only what is in front of it, and it is the last domain, a system, and its actors would ever want to be in.
Part 2: Maturana’s Deep Chaos
The downward path from chaos theory to Wheatley, Cynefin, and Langton has led to Humberto Maturana. Maturana’s relationship with chaos is through two changes a system can experience. In this case, Maturana is concerned with systems that respond to stimuli based on their structure. Labeled as structure determined systems, external stimuli do not dictate how a system reacts; only its internal structure is responsible for reactions. To go one step further, the system’s mode of being at the time of the stimuli also contributes to how it responds. Both the social structures associated with complexity and order fit into this category.
Maturana specifies four changes that can occur, but only two concern chaos: disintegrations and destructive interactions. Disintegrations occur through internal events, while destructive interactions happen through external agents impinging on a system. Both have their role in this deep conception of chaos, and only one is survivable from a system standpoint. Once entered, there is no way out of deep chaos by one’s own devices.
Maturana began his academic life experimenting on pigeons, frogs, and salamanders at Harvard, MIT, and the University of Chile, where he made tremendous, field-shifting advancements in biology. He also discovered an incredible amount about systems. While the following pages may read as philosophy, and surely there is a strong element of that, along with devising what the domain would be like, Maturana maintained till his death that he was a biologist (and although he would not say it, one of the most important of his time) and that the following core ideas are biological insights. To Maturana, at least to some degree, the following is grounded squarely in biology (Maturana & Poerksen, 2011; Maturana & Verden-Zöller, 2008).
Before embarking on this literary approach to deep chaos, where great lengths are taken to describe this new domain, it is worthwhile to state that admittance is a system on the brink of death brought there by internal or external factors, disintegrations, or destructive interactions. There may be a feeble struggle once at the threshold of deep chaos. Although heroic escapes are possible, the system is almost certain to succumb to the domain where nothing but the actors will survive. Deep chaos houses destruction.
This is not the first instance where the term “deep chaos” has been used. It was used in an academic paper recently in 2020 and a few texts, most prominently in the 2014 Chaos Theory in Psychology and the Life Sciences. There does not appear to be any similar usage of the term.
Disintegrations: Moving into Deep Chaos
Disintegration is one of the two types of change a system can experience and one of the pathways to deep chaos from whatever domain it started in. Disintegration occurs through factors inside the system when the system’s internal tolerance for change is exceeded. After the system’s internal structure’s capacity to bend is surpassed, the features responsible for defining the system as the type of system it is become undermined and eventually collapse. Following the collapse of the system, it disintegrates. In earlier writings (Maturana, 1983; Maturana & Varela, 1987), disintegrations marked the end of the system. A new idea about disintegrations appeared in a lesser-known book, The Origin of Humanness in the Biology of Love published in 2008.
In Maturana and Verden-Zöller (2008), the above pathway to disintegration remains the same. The authors explain that as the system disintegrates, it does so while maintaining a specific system type that will also be lost. After the loss of a system, Maturana and Verden-Zöller (2008) explain that “something else appears in its place” (p.165) that is not of the same type as the system that existed before. Looking ahead, although the constraint system that replaces the disintegrated system is of a different type, it has a chance to phase transition into another kind of system later. At the same time, being a different type does not exclude the system from performing the former system’s function. However, it will do so in entirely new ways. In the words of Wheatley (2006), “The destruction of chaos is necessary for the creation of anything new” (p.119). As it is used in this context of deep chaos, destruction in the form of the loss of a system is necessary for the arrival of a new one, if even by constraints first (Morin, 1992).
Depending on how energetically the system began disintegrating, understood as a form of destruction from within it, it may enter deep chaos at varying velocities. Focusing on complex systems as a system type, a system may enter the domain with a high degree of energy if preceded by a catastrophic event, such as a drastic shift in how the system is composed due to actors feeling threatened or dumbstruck, producing an acentric self-organized system structure (Morin, 1992). This instigates further disintegration and leads to the near-total disappearance of coherence and cohesion, with pathways of interactions visible only after they flare up and fade away. The disappearance of emergent properties following the actors' dispersal is caused by an absence of interactions hampered partly by the need to trudge through deep disorder and noise to decide what pattern to self-organize into. The actors need to interact more for emergence to take place. At the same time, actors must decide how to repair the system and prevent further disintegration. Interaction is needed for system complexity, emergence, and metabolizing the massive accumulation of disorder and noise beyond what is generally useful. The lower level of complexity may leave the system with fewer means to manage whatever internal threats are a problem for it. The system's internal structure cannot manage all of these variables, mainly due to their sudden onset. Instead, the internal structure breaks down further, threatening the overarching system type and sending it toward deep chaos.
An acentric self-organized system structure may not be as richly entangled and interactive as a polycentric or centric structure. Pictured below is a functional-centric complex system as visualized by Magdalena Fernández.
The above complex system would disintegrate when its internal structure’s tolerance for change was exceeded: when the actors and their possibilities for interaction were surpassed, perceived, or otherwise. Due to disturbance, the system responded by self-organizing into a widely dispersed structure. The result was an acentric form of loosely connected actors not interacting in rich, complex ways misaligned with the normative structure of a complex system. This led to the precarity of the particular system type and made its subsequent disintegration more likely. Self-organizing into a dispersed acentric pattern may sometimes be a productive movement as every actor is working on their task, or distance is required to cover the most ground. In this situation and the one above, the dispersed acentric organization is a product of too much disorder and noise, leading to actors moving independently. There is a desire to re-self-organize, but the actors are unsure what pattern to form, resulting from unproductive amounts of disorder and noise.
The above takes place as a catastrophe; the events take place all at once or in such close succession with one another it feels instantaneous, producing an amount of energy that sends the system catapulting through the gelatin-filled space between the complex into chaotic, effortlessly carving a pathway through the gelatin field. The ongoing disintegration of the system sends it hurtling past the other chaotic domains and right to the edge of the lightless chasm of deep chaos.
Catastrophe is not the only way to enter deep chaos. There is a lower-energy way known as “drift.” In this scenario, the system drifts toward chaos, slowly burning its way through the phase transition's gelatin field from complex. Like boiled frogs, the drift to chaos goes undetected. If detected, it may be possible for the system to retreat from its travel toward chaos through a sudden, concerted, energetic move back across the phase transition.
The retreat is unlikely as detection of the drift never occurs. Energy accumulates to fuel the drift into chaos and inevitably toward deep chaos through the accumulation of errors. System internal factors, including poor decision-making, mistakes made by management, generating exposure, vulnerability, and risk, overly or under-constraining the complex system, and missing weak signals, are early errors causing drift. The outcome of these errors is addressed while continuing to overlook the system’s current trajectory. Making internal matters worse, concerns are dismissed over hazards that the system has no direct experience with and are beyond the system’s imaginaries, futures, expectations, and knowledge. With management committing the system to engage with these unknown hazards, the system self-organizes into a polycentric pattern to focus clusters of actors where needed. Feelings of trust and safety disappear with management’s desire to produce a positive outcome despite challenging unknowns (Morin, 1992). The above begins consuming the system from within, and the noise becomes thicker than is helpful as actors speculate over what they are dealing with. The system's structure is beginning to shift to counter-address the moves by management, but the directives make it hard for the structure to move where there used to be distributed authority.
Authority is distributed throughout a complex system. The manager most involved with this endeavor chooses to design constraints that are destructive of the liberty of the actors so they will be focused exclusively on the unknown hazards, and the previously distributed authority falls by the wayside, making it nearly impossible for the structure to respond to the inner perturbations constructively (Morin, 1992). The only option the system has left is to use informal structural elements that have circumvented rigid constraints in the past, but they need to be at the scale required to slow disintegration. With the manager’s overly rigid constraints in place, the system drifts unknowingly further toward deep chaos, with actors unable to take proactive measures. Although late in the system’s travel toward the final chaotic domain, some actors raise the alarm, but it is disregarded. Compounding the ongoing internal disintegration, management decides unilaterally that due to the unknowns and the inexperience of the system in dealing with them, a hierarchy should be imposed to sustain order and leverage the decision-making abilities and knowledge of management at the top.
Traditionally, managing a complex system follows ideas such as dipping an oar into the liquid of the complex system periodically to guide it or tune a constraint. A temporary hierarchy might help the system escape chaos, as noted in the discussion of chaos in Cynefin. However, that is different from what it is being used for here. In this situation, chaos still needs to be recognized, and the hierarchy is used to isolate decision-making authority. This is the death knell to the internal structure. The system’s capacity to change and maintain the system type is exceeded in this scenario by the presence of a hierarchy, which is an artifact of the ordered domain and cannot be worked around to the extent needed. A hierarchy will completely destabilize and sterilize the system. Poor decision-making and mistakes by management threaten trust and cohesiveness within the system, introducing further disorder and noise and complicating the ability of actors to work with each other. The incoming hierarchy worsening the already overconstrained system, the engagement with unknowns that stress the system as a whole, and the lack of trust leading to disorder, noise, and uncertainty will surpass the ability of the system to adapt to the array of internal changes and turbulence and nearly cause disintegration and following loss of system type. Total disintegration occurs only when the system enters deep chaos.
As mentioned earlier, a system that is almost dead, meaning nearly disintegrated or just suffered from a destructive interaction, is the pathway to the chasm of deep chaos. Depending on its movement from complex to chaos and how far and quickly it went into chaos, the system may suddenly tumble over the other chaotic domains toward deep chaos. Velocity depends on how nearly dead it is.
It is more than likely that a system already moving in the direction of deep chaos, passing Wheatley, Cynefin, and Langton, will end up there unless a last attempt at a retreat is mounted. A retreat would be difficult after all the energy expended to manage the disintegration. Actors exhaust themselves, trying to repair it as the internal structure deteriorates. There are a couple of dynamics: The ideal is a move back up through the path of chaotic domains and through the gelatin-filled phase transition at whatever velocity can be managed to complex. Even being stuck in the phase transition is preferable to deep chaos. Rather than head further toward deep chaos, it would also be safer to exert any remaining energy to stay in whatever domain the ragged system is currently traveling over in a last-ditch effort to prevent entering the destruction of deep chaos. Even Langton’s cereal bowl would be better (Waldrop, 1992).
A system currently fighting disintegration may balance on the edge of the threshold to the dark chasm that leads to deep chaos while trying to fix itself frantically. But doom is imminent. More of the system's internal structure is lost as the teeth of deep chaos begin to gnaw on it. This is a game of millimeters and energy expenditure. How close is the system to falling into deep chaos as the teeth tear at the system and pull it closer in? How much energy does the system have available to pull itself back out? At this point, it may be possible (but is highly unlikely) for a system to evade deep chaos and limp away, torn and broken. Ultimately, and in all likelihood, the wounded system will stagger a few yards away. It will collapse from exhaustion and dysfunction, with disintegration still ravaging the system. Before long, it is dragged through the dirt back to the opening of deep chaos and down into the dark chasm as if drawn there magnetically. It is falling into the darkness where the disintegration will be finished.
Entering Deep Chaos. System Death. But Something may be Coming.
There were plenty of warning signs that a system was headed for deep chaos, namely that it had first passed through the other domains. There was also a growing feeling that the system was headed over a waterfall despite rowing backward as fervently as possible. The onset of catastrophe may have been warning enough for some. If noticed, the subtle drift out of complexity and into the phase transition toward chaos may have also been a warning if detected. Once the downward trajectory of the system’s movement was recognized (if it was) within the weakened and damaged system, there was a complete absence of communication. No one even knew what they would say. Their fate was already sealed.
Any system that enters the deep chaotic domain will be dramatically lost, barring any situation where a system takes on enormous risk, forays into deep chaos, and retreats quickly through a concerted and rapid energy expulsion (note: this dynamic is of no value). Nearly any disturbing and destructive imagery will suffice to capture and express a system's violent, catastrophic, and unthinkable loss when it stumbles over the threshold and falls down the dark rock chasm of deep chaos. In the case of disintegration, the system had lost its inner coherence, threatening its system type before entering the chasm. The system type may have already been disintegrating. Whether a disintegration or a destructive interaction, they meet their final demise the same way, with the last step being the complete loss of the system type as it falls into the chasm. Regardless of the velocity at which the system enters the chasm, it will become engulfed in flame and completely incinerated before it hits the domain floor.
Managers and actors ejected from the system falling to the domain’s floor may feel dumbfounded and angry and begin mourning the loss of the system. The system was the very thing they had relied on so heavily to perform work, which was currently being burned out of existence before their eyes as it descended the chasm. Managers and other actors watch as it is reduced to ash, accumulating on the domain’s floor before blowing into the endless depths of the deep chaos. The remaining ashes are soon trampled underfoot and smeared across the uneven black floor. The smearing of the system’s ashes is a message from the deep chaotic domain. It signals that the system that entered wreathed in flame with its entangled patterns burning like strands of twine is already a forgotten memory. This is received as an insult to the system’s legacy to managers and actors. As the surrounding darkness one feels they could drown in is recognized and triggers feelings of panic, managers and actors become overwhelmed by a particular emotion: Despair.
In the case of disintegration, the loss of the original system is not entirely negative, though it remains disruptive, frightening, and confusing, with audible longing for whatever will come next. Maturana and Verden-Zöller (2008) do not elaborate on the period between the torching of the system or similar activity, such as the system passing through a threshing machine and the appearance of something new. Actors are left to guess how long they will languish in the deep, chaotic domain and its agony, regret, sorrow, guilt, bewilderment, despair, and the unshakeable impending feeling of danger. The emotional distress that is just beginning to contort the body seems like it will last an eternity.
A system that falls into deep chaos is not desirable to managers. Managers who witness the disintegration and loss of their system would not, even if possible, want that system with its tendencies toward tipping over into deep chaos back. There was a failure; it might have been located among the actors and their interactions, the constraints could have been too tight or loose, the structure pattern needed to be corrected, or management might have been looking across the wrong horizon or taking the wrong action. It is possible the incorrect information could have been circulating and integrated into the actor’s strategies, the self-organized system structure may not have corresponded positively to the hazard, the significant disorder may have been allowed to accumulate without being exported out of the system, or all of the above could have happened at once, and the list goes on. Still, the result is the same: The system ended up in deep chaos, and now the actors and managers have nothing. Ideally, what appears will not have the same tendency to end up in deep chaos. Conceivably, an entirely new system may replace the one lost with a new system with new actors. As this discussion occurs in the social domain, the actors belonging to the initial system will become part of the new one.
Deep chaos is housed in a great hall at the bottom of a long chasm, where light from the world above all but disappears, appearing ever so faintly, as if it were only a memory, as those lost to deep chaos stare upward. The hall is carved jaggedly out of black rock, and its dimensions are unknown. Deep chaos is without precise measurements or architecture. Any light disappears in the blackness only a few feet from where it originated. In addition to the upsetting range of emotions of deep chaos, the discomforting scene of a tremendous irregular, sharp space illuminated only by the occasional combusting systems is experienced with the noises of the domain. Powerful static and a wall of noise ringing in the observer’s ears made up of occasional shouts, industrial sounds, echos, unrhythmic noises, and eerie tones of suspense that build on frightened feelings and cause one to feel paranoid and fearful someone is right behind them at all times or lurking right around every corner waiting to wreak havoc.
The deep chaotic domain’s layout was made from former actors' activity pathways. These actors, like the ones before them, were frantic and desperate in the near total darkness of the domain to find anything useable, anything of meaning, any way to get to somewhere other than the great hall where systems combust and fall to ashes. It is too unbearable to be still and wait. So the frightened actors settle for fleeing to the labyrinth of hallways, illuminated ever so dimly by lights mounted on the walls, shining just enough to barely enough to illuminate the brick walkway beneath. Unaware to those who fled the great hall, the hallways and stairs continually expand and multiply and become more complicated, like a hedge maze growing quickly while one is in it, increasing feelings of being lost, despair, and powerlessness. With each visitor, the hallway and stairs become more intricate, dispersed, and elaborate while making no sense. There is no exit but the one the domain provides, if at all.
The emotions of the system's actors, including managers, plunged into deep chaos include a strong sense of having no capacity to act in a way that would produce results; it is realized deep chaos strips away agency. No one can comprehend the present, believing that a way out may eventually appear for those who suffered disintegration, disoriented by the grating and static sounds and strange sensations of the deep chaotic domain. The group waits for something to materialize. They wait, wait, and wait. From the reader’s perspective, it may appear that it should be possible for the actors to create conditions a system could emerge out of. The deep, chaotic domain's environment is not conducive to design due to the loudness of powerful noises, eerieness, undescribable darkness, fear, and the growing feeling of despair. It is a room closer to driving one into madness than serving as a place to plan and design.
Maturana and Verden-Zöller (2008) do not specify precisely what emerges from disintegrated systems or when. This is a space that must be filled in. Following Morin’s work, initially published in 1977 in French and made available in English in 1992, as well as comments made by Snowden, a new constraint system may be what appears following the loss of the disintegrated system to enable a new system to come into existence. It is also possible that an ordered system may emerge from the depths of the darkness following the system's disintegration. This is a possibility, but not one that requires serious consideration due to its simplicity. The constraints do not necessarily specify type; other than that, they cannot give way to a complex system because that is what previously existed. Assumingly appearing from the same pitch black nowhere within the dimensionless void the ashes of the last system disappeared into, a constraint system that regulates liberty through influencing “possibilities of action or expression….possibilities of choice, of decision, and of complex development” (Morin, 1992, p.111) appears. Morin notes these constraints can become oppressive and destructive of liberty, seemingly if applied too tightly.
However, suppose a tight constraint system emerges. In that case, it has the makings of an appropriate constraint system to propel a system other than complex out of deep chaos. Constraints define what behaviors are discouraged and encouraged within the system and are populated by the actors and managers of the system. If the constraints are applied tightly to impose order, that may be what is needed to get out of deep chaos (Kurtz & Snowden, 2003). Unlike Snowden and Juarrero, Morin does not overtly offer an inverse to constraints that can constrain liberty, at least not by name. Instead, he explains, “We will see that the development of organization does not necessarily mean increase of constraints; we will even see that the progress of organizational complexity is founded on the "liberties" of the individuals constituting the system” (p.110). Tucked into the prior is the idea that organizational complexity arises through the liberties the system’s actors can take.
Standing in the desolation of deep chaos, a constraint system will eventually appear from a dark corner for actors who have lost systems due to disintegration. The hope of the actors had all but vanished until the appearance of constraints, which were initially unfamiliar but were recognized soon after. As the constraints appear differently than the previous complex type lost to disintegrations, the appearing constraints might be intended to create an ordered system or something else. Upon leaving deep chaos, the system travels upward through the chaotic domains and toward complexity. If constraints are adjusted appropriately and a phase transition occurs, actors may produce a dynamic entanglement characteristic of a complex system and become one again. This entanglement is formed by pathways of physical and virtual interactions of actors of varying degrees of richness and intensity that give the system its complexity. At this point, new constraints can be introduced to control the system in novel ways, with one of the central goals being not ending up in deep chaos at any point through the regulation of liberties. In time, liberties may be less constrained to the benefit of progressing organizational complexity after establishing the complex system (Morin, 1992).
The primary action in Maturana’s deep chaos in the case of disintegrations is to wait for the appearance of a constraint system the actors can populate and use the remaining energy of their exhausted, mentally, and emotionally drained bodies to fend off deep chaos’s sounds and unfathomable dynamics to escape the domain. Aside from the potential appearance of a complete ordered system, new constraints are conceived as the primary way out of the deep, chaotic hall with towering walls where even the light from incinerating systems disappears in the darkness. Situated in the pattern of constraints, actors approach the chasm with fear in their hearts. Without a rope or harness to be found, the group digs their soon-to-be aching fingers into the uneven rock walls of the chasm to progress toward the light in a grueling effort while dodging burning systems and the tumbling of rocks from above from systems making their last stand against the gnawing teeth of deep chaos.
Demise by any Other Name: Destructive Interactions
Maturana also specifies destructive interactions caused by the impingement of external agents such as wildfires, pandemics, floods, droughts, hurricanes, and tornados onto the system. These agents can act in surprising, quick, and overwhelming ways, perturbing the system and triggering a response that overloads it, exceeding its ability to maintain a structure resembling a complex system.
When the agent triggers a response beyond the system’s structure’s capacity to respond adaptively to the stimuli, the ability of the internal structure is quickly outstripped, and the system type begins to erode. In the case of this example, the system falls aggressively into deep chaos without even a pause at the threshold of the chasm with no chance of resuscitation. Following suit, the system is consumed by flame. In certain instances, drift may also occur if it is a slow-onset disaster.
Chaotic Emptiness Beyond Maturana
Deep chaos is horrifying. Deep chaos is taking the system a team depended on to serve communities and throwing it into a masticator or dousing it in gasoline. Deep chaos is violent, depressing, maddening, a place of despair and overwhelming feelings of loss and being lost. As systems from any location are set aflame when they cross into the chasm, ash rains down around groups of observers from various systems. Systems that suffer destructive interactions leave the surviving actors with no way out and stand in deep chaos, huddled together with intense fear and overpowering anxiety already starting to set in. Without the prospect of something appearing like those in the case of disintegrations, the survivors of destructive interactions have no option but to wait and hope for someone to show them mercy and compassion and invite them to be a part of an effort to leave deep chaos. This situation is akin to pilling a few weary souls with ash-smeared faces into the empty seats on a white lifeboat rocking back and forth in black water.
So far, the discussion of deep chaos has focused on systems, which are abstract entities (there is a more profound discussion to be had here). Humans and the designed environment are not so easily erased or demolished. Yet, they must still exist in deep chaos entangled with systems.
Human beings, whether they belong to single resources, work in Emergency Operations Centers, or are community members, for example, may all reside in deep chaos. When humans reside in deep chaos, they still exist; they remain perceivable and observable, but barely. The distortion of humans in deep chaos makes them unclear and dissolves their content, value, significance, meaning, relationality, and existence. All that remains is a hollow silhouette surrounded by piercing and surging static. Deep chaos destabilizes to the point of uncertainty surrounding what is observed. In deep chaos, the central actor is surrounded by humans who appear as ghosts void of anything of substance. Their outline can be observed, but they mean nothing because no meaning can be made. As part of deep chaos, humans may quickly fall out of the actor’s field of vision. Their rapid movement is likely due to a change in the actor’s focus, even minimally, and trouble reorienting to what was being looked at. Unlike buildings, humans can also move around in unpredictable ways, for example, darting back and forth from ever-expanding hallways, further complicating the task of having any grasp on what is happening in the dark depths of deep chaos.
It is essential to recognize that the chaotic experience an actor is having towards others, others are having right back at them.
Buildings and other artifacts in the design environment are tangible and persistent, more so than humans due to foundations and attachments. At the same time, they similarly lose their importance, relationality, meaning, significance, value, content, and existence. While they can still be observed, they become distorted and blurry, difficult to engage with, and challenging to discern how they make sense independently or in a broader context. They are not understood. Complicating the task of remembering where buildings are is that even though their location is fixed, deep chaos’s disorienting noises, destabilization, uncertainty, and loss of grounding can make finding one’s way back toward a building they were just fixated on difficult. It can seem like an entirely new location. The actor’s field of vision is unclear and blurry, and this exacerbates any other symptoms of being in deep chaos, including distress, despair, and agony.
Finding Somewhere Else to Dwell
The systems that suffered a disintegration and destructive interaction are lost to the world. Their actors are scattered amongst the others who also watched their system burst into flames. Actors without a system due to disintegration sit uneasily with the anticipation of something new appearing and the ever-dwindling of hope when it does not arrive. For systems that suffered a disintegration, a constraint system will appear. It will be an improvement over the system that fell into deep chaos and hopefully not contribute to the same destructive ending of entering the domain in the future. It will ideally avoid the situation altogether. If any element of the built environment were previously involved in the system, it would become part of the constraints and arrangement of actors, leaving deep chaos.
Inspired by Maturana, deep chaos is where systems that experience internal and external events trigger responses so extensive that internal structures give way, and the type of system is nearly lost. The system is not entirely lost; that occurs when it enters deep chaos, a menacing domain. It is a domain at first filled with the overpowering emotions of losing a system, including sadness, distress, disbelief, and terror. It is a void without meaning, with occasional alarming shouts of suffering in the dark, waiting for help to arrive. It is painful, threatening, and unsettling. It is a domain without happiness. Emergency managers value an operational picture. In deep chaos, with its highly unconventional and ever-expanding layout, the domain will continue to expand as long as actors try the tempting tactic of escaping through the hallways, impeding the ability to gain a workable understanding.
There was a long descent into deep chaos, beginning with chaos theory, the theory of deterministic systems, followed by Wheatley’s (1993; 2006; 2012) important perspective on the topic, then Kurtz and Snowden (2003), Snowden and Boone (2007),’s work on Cynefin, and finally Langton (As cited in Waldrop, 1992). This important downward walk through the domains highlighted some of the more prominent ideas in chaos before taking them all one, or maybe two or three, steps further aided by Maturana’s biology as a way to establish deep chaos as a proposed end domain. An ending with the possibility of resuscitation, and if so, into another body. This deep chaos is not something to be toyed with, to look for patterns in, to stimulate innovation with, to bravely enter to study in, to believe a collection of gurus or High Priests can crack the code, to look hard to find meaning in. Deep chaos is terrifying, with high degrees of uncertainty and disorder so deep an observer might get lost just standing still. Everything looks the same: every corner, every dim light, and the outlines of every hollow, haunting person.
The emotions of feeling like there is no way out continue to drive one further into despair, and being unable to piece anything together to help the situation creates a type of stress one has never known, all while feeling lost beyond lost, exposed to a cacophony of overpowering industrial noise, are hallmarks of deep chaos. Suppose chaos theory, the theory of deterministic systems and its phase space, attractors, and initial conditions are one bookend. Deep chaos is the other, which should be avoided at all costs. It is a proposed final domain created to navigate chaos as a reference point. For the chaos champions, there is room between these bookends to add additional narratives and enrich the concept.
Let it be known that while one system might be squarely rested in the complex domain or another looking for patterns in chaos, both are one substantial miscalculated movement away from their system experiencing a disintegration or destructive interaction. In either case, if catastrophic enough, the system may tumble violently over the chaotic domains into the deep chaotic chasm and burst into flames. This is deep chaos. It is destruction, anguish, despair, and inability to think clearly and engage in meaningful sense-making, accompanied by feelings of terror. This domain should be left alone.
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