At this point, I may have bored many readers by quoting repeatedly from Batman movies, but I believe this one is good, too. In “The Dark Knight”, Bruce Wayne and Albert discuss the Joker. Bruce is interested in finding out the motive behind Joker’s actions. Albert shares a story with Bruce from his life and summarizes the story with this:

“Because some men aren’t looking for anything logical. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.” – Albert Pennyworth (The Movie “The Dark Knight”)

Some men, just want chaos.

This scene repeatedly comes to mind as I observe the events unfolding in the Middle East. When Hamas attacked Israel, my wife asked why they did what they did, knowing that Israel, and specifically the current leadership there, would retaliate severely. My answer was, “Well, they are banking on that.” Because like Albert said: ” some men want to watch the world burn”.

What we are seeing now is a trap that Hamas wanted Israel and the world to walk into. Organizations like Hamas are not friends to any country or people. As Albert stated, they can’t be reasoned or negotiated with. They just want to see the whole world burn. Unfortunately, the world is doing exactly that. The resulting actions mean that Hamas will have a pipeline of recruits for the next decade or so. Footage of civilians from both sides dying and suffering floods my feed, even on professional channels like LinkedIn. Anger festers on both sides. Religious hate has spiked across the world. We are in a vicious cycle.

Why is all this relevant to the title of this article? Because what we are seeing is chaos.

And we can manage this chaos strategically with the power of foresight, leveraging chaos theory powered by AI. Both in the world of geopolitics as well as business. We can leverage AI, using it as an advisor, to understand what are the various scenarios of chaos that may originate from an event. While gaslighters would have loved it, AI did not cause this but can help manage chaotic situations better. Because AI does not have emotions. Emotions are the root of both strengths and weaknesses.

Chaos theory has existed for decades but in my opinion, has not been leveraged to its full potential. In 2020, I wrote an article on my blog on how the butterfly effect is relevant in technology. The butterfly effect is one of the many underlying principles of the dynamics of chaos. The word chaos is used in a very colloquial way in English, but there is a formal definition of chaos, postulated by Edward Lorenz:

“When the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future.”

Before I delve deeper into how AI will come into the current discussion, let me provide some details on Lorenz’s background. That will give you some hints. Lorenz, the founder of chaos theory, was an American mathematician and meteorologist. Lorenz established the theoretical basis of weather and climate predictability (hint hint).

The primary postulate behind Lorenz’s chaos theory was that you can leverage mathematics to predict the future behavior of dynamic systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions (the butterfly effect). Two additional criteria, postulated by Robert Delaney, must be satisfied to classify a dynamic system as chaotic but a bit technically dense. I will cover them in a simple format in the second part of the article, but you can read more about them in the references quoted at the end.

In the second and final part of this article, we will discuss how system dynamics, though a technical topic, is a great tool to map uncertainties in the world around us, its flavors in chaos theory, the basic methodology of chaos theory (highly simplified), and how AI can help leaders make sense out of chaos.

The second part of this article will be published on 11/2/2023.

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References:

• Chaos Engineering (Manning Publication)- Mikolaj Powlikowski
• Chaotic systems in digital communications (CRC press) -Marcio et al
• Creative management of complex systems (Wiley) -Heraud et al
• Market Entropy (Business Expert Press)- Rajagopal