One of the legacies of Isaac Newton was a vision of the world operating with "clockwork" precision, set in motion at the creation and running in the prescribed groove defined by the creator. It was an image of a deterministic world - leaving no room for chance. A world whose future was determine by the present.
Pierre-Simon de Laplace put the description of this world into words in 1812...
An intellect which at any given moment knew all the forces that animate Nature and the mutual positions of the beings that comprise it, if this intellect were vast enough to submit its data to analysis, could condense into a single formula the movement of the greatest bodies of the universe and that of the lightest atom: for such an intellect nothing could be uncertain, and the future just like the past would be present before our eyes - Analytic Theory of Probabilities, Laplace, 1812.
The idea of a well planned future is not only common in Laplace's description of the universe but in the Planning as Management approach to projects.
Predictability versus Determinism
In our daily life Laplacian determinism fails miserably. After walking safely down 1000's of steps we trip and fall. The tennis match is rained out by a random storm. Our favorite horse after winning two races of the triple crown, fails to finish in the top 5 at Belmont.
Our best laid plan for our project turns out to be a poor representation of the actual outcome.
If Laplace was right, why does our experience indicate he was wrong?
This is the domain of chaos theory. But much of the popular understanding of chaos theory is poorly understood. Emergent system, self organizing systems, agile and adaptive management process all have descriptions of chaos as the underlying process. But what is chaos and how can it be reconciled with the determinism we see in other parts of our world - the orbits of planets, the cause and effect of natural processes and even human created process.
A Simple Explanation of Unpredictability versus Determinism
Why is Laplace wrong? If you look at a household example of a deterministic system - water flowing from a faucet, you discover that the deterministic aspects of the faucet - the water pressure and flow rate are steady and uniform, with the water emerging from the faucet end in a totally prescribed manner. Yet as the pressure is changed the drops landing in the sink behave unpredictably. This water drop system follows a random behavior, with short term predictability, but long term randomness.
What's missing from the water drop example and all other examples of Laplace's solutions that turn into chaos is the inability to define the initial starting conditions to an infinite resolution. The mathematics behind this outcome is beyond this short Blog, but once understood that errors in starting conditions are cumulative, the source of chaos is found.
Projects and Unpredictability
When it comes to projects, the initial starting conditions are unlikely to have high resolution. We're talking resolution of dozens of decimal places in simple physics problems like the dripping faucet. At each step in the process - whether faucets or projects - the errors in predictability grow preventing the future from being know in any useful form. This amplification of error is the crack through which Laplace's perfect determinism disappears.
A system that displays sensitivity to initial conditions is said to be chaotic. Chaotic behavior obeys deterministic laws, but it is SO irregular that it appears random. Chaos is not only complicated, it is patternless - and this is the source of the appearance of randomness. This apparent complicated behavior and the apparent patternless behavior actually has a simple deterministic explanation.
Controlling Chaos
If we switch to the project management domain (the point of this Blog), then several actions need to be taken in the presence of the behaviors of chaos:
- Fine grained feedback to reset to the future prediction problem
- Multiple decision paths in any plan to be with uncertainty
- Recognition that variance is part of the system
