This is a fork off of the Developmental Spaces thread. @Asimong and I have been going back and forth about Dave Snowden, chaos, and the relationship of research to direct action. In digging for references, I just now found the fairly recent one below.
Some standout points:
Chaos is … “ state with no practical constraints“
“Chaos has no effective constraints, so it’s a type of randomness”
“Here, Cynefin departs from the Hobbsian … and argues that the role of a leader is to create constraints that allow solutions to emerge, not to solve the problem.”
”in accidental chaos, someone will impose order quickly. And you want to be the one doing that.”
Being that I am a literal student of Dave Snowden, please do use all those quotes above as a sort of Rosetta Stone for understanding many of my other posts in this forum.
Interesting question, @Martin — my initial guess is that it depends on your perspective; or on the dimensions that you take into account. “The current state of the world” isn’t exactly a well-defined thing!
I see the carpe diem in this. Again, I see a trade-off between speed and accuracy. A quick but ineffective attempt to impose order is worse than a less hasty but more insightful way that is successful. First mover advantage exists in some scenarios; second mover advantage in others.
I would follow Peter Pogany’s analysis and say the world is in “chaotic transition”. Specifically, the US is actively undermining the post-WWII order the US itself erected: UN, NATO, free trade, etc. US political institutions are crumbling. There are knock-on effects all over the world. No one can trust the US anymore. It puts all sorts of things in motion.
The “accidental chaos” scenario is for situations such right after an earthquake, etc. In those scenarios, moving immediately this way or that is generally more advisable than having a long ponder. Metaphorically, because Donald Trump creates chaos on purpose to create tactical advantages for himself, his political impact is very analogous to such a natural disaster. Post-Trumpian progressivism will thus benefit from a disaster recover model.
I’m going for a first mover advantage in my local milieu, largely because the rest of the system is so back on its heals and utterly wrong-footed by the thorough route of DEI by the Trump administration. I want to set the tone for the future (because I never swallowed DEI whole and had a different direction in mind anyway), and Trumpian chaos gives me many degrees of freedom that would not otherwise be possible. This is all Clausewitz 101 - not especially original - but it works.
