The Seventh Feature of a Flourishing School
Life is complicated. So nature makes it simple(r) . . .
Four months ago, just four days into this new year, I published the first in a seven-part series about the central design principles of Mother Nature – and how we might learn from her to reimagine the ways we live and learn together.
You can access the other six articles in that series here – or, if you want to get them all in a fancy (free) digital book, you can request it here.
But now, in the final installment of that series, we end where we would usually begin: with the things that surround us – the things we can actually see.
At least that’s where Edward Lorenz began, when, in 1960, he tried to turn his MIT computer lab into a place that could complete man’s mastery of the natural world by dependably predicting the most elusive entity of all: the weather.
All day, Lorenz’s computer printed out row upon row of numbers based on equations that expressed the relationship between every conceivable variable, from temperature to air pressure to wind speed. Then, from the printouts, Lorenz and his colleagues would make educated predictions about what the weather would do.
Sometimes they got it right. Sometimes they got it wrong. Yet nothing ever happened the same way twice.
This last fact challenged the Newtonian worldview every scientist had always been taught to revere. Understand the laws of physics, they’d been assured, and you can eventually unlock the secret structures of the universe itself. As mathematician Pierre-Simon LaPlace once put it, classical physics promised a world that would “embrace in the same formula the movements of the greatest bodies in the universe and those of the lightest atom; for it, nothing would be uncertain and the future, as the past, would be present to its eyes.”
But Lorenz’s work exposed a fundamental problem which undercut those foundational beliefs. As one theoretician liked to tell his students: “The basic idea of Western science is that you don’t have to take into account the falling of a leaf on some planet in another galaxy when you’re trying to account for the motion of a billiard ball on a pool table on earth. Very small influences can be neglected. There’s a convergence in the way things work, and arbitrarily small influences don’t blow up to have arbitrarily large effects.”
Lorenz’s research, albeit unintentionally, demonstrated that the opposite is true.
One afternoon, instead of running the same group of numbers through the system from the start, he restarted the process halfway through, and then left to get a cup of coffee. The new run should have mirrored the old, but when he returned an hour later, he found a weather pattern that had completely diverged from its previous course.
Eventually, he discovered the difference in the two experiments: in the computer’s memory, six decimal places were stored. Yet on the printout, Lorenz had only entered the first three, assuming the one-part-in-a-thousand difference was inconsequential.
It wasn’t.
The implications were clear:
Measuring complex systems will always be imprecise.
Certitude is a chimera.
And the Butterfly Effect -- or the notion that a butterfly’s wings in Beijing today could shape next month’s weather patterns in New York City -- was more than just idle chatter; it was the natural order of our natural world.
In time, Lorenz’s accidental discovery helped launch an entirely new scientific field: Chaos Theory, or the idea that simple systems can create extraordinarily difficult problems of predictability -- and still give rise to a spontaneous sort of order.
Structure, in other words, is a prerequisite to freedom -- but only when it is a function of engendering order, as opposed to ensuring control.
This feels like a vital insight for a modern world torn asunder by a seemingly endless list of things to fear, and a similarly desperate effort by all of us to keep the various boogeymen at bay.
“We seem hypnotized by structures,” writes Margaret Wheatley, “and we build them strong and complex because they must, we believe, hold back the dark forces that threaten to destroy us.”
Yet even in this digital age, one in which the meaning of ‘social network’ has taken on both new and added meaning, there can be great comfort in recognizing the ways a well-calibrated living system actually works.
“The observation that the bio-logic, or pattern of organization of a simple cell, is the same as that of an entire social structure is highly nontrivial,” Fritjof Capra explains. “It suggests a fundamental unity of life, and hence also the need to study and understand all living structures from such a unifying perspective.”
This notion of unity, James Gleick adds, reveals a universe that is “rough, not rounded, scabrous, not smooth. It is a geometry of the pitted, pocked, and broken up, the twisted, tangled and intertwined.” And yet “the pits and tangles are more than blemishes distorting the classic shapes of Euclidian geometry. They are often the keys to the essence of the thing.”
These sea changes in scientific thinking illuminate an enduring truth of the natural world -- one that we, too, can heed in the human realm:
It is identity, not structure, that must drive our designs.
“What occurs in living systems,” Margaret Wheatley explains, “is contrary to our normal way of thinking. Openness to the environment over time spawns a stronger system, one that is less susceptible to externally induced change. What comes to dominate over time is not outside influences, but the self-organizing dynamics of the system itself. Because it partners with its environment, the system develops increasing autonomy from the environment and also develops new capacities that make it increasingly resourceful.
“We usually act from the reverse belief. We believe that in order to maintain ourselves and protect our individual freedom, we must defend ourselves from external forces.”
Indeed, this is the surprising twist of it all – that the primary role of structure in the natural world is not to be eternal, but temporary; and not to guard, but to share.
Using nature as a model, therefore, means doing almost everything differently in our schools and our organizations.
To be healthy ecosystems, we must carefully tend our notions of individual and collective identity, our methods for receiving and reacting to information, and the quality and quantity of our relationships with one another.
We must allow these systems we inhabit to naturally evolve, change and emerge.
And then, once these seeds for growth and change have been established, a living system becomes self-generating by paying close attention to the patterns that reveal its overall health, choosing the processes that support the ongoing process of self-regulation, and erecting whatever temporary structures it needs in order to flourish.
This, then, is the work.
And this is how we can build a better world -- by ensuring that all living systems, from our schools to our companies to our homes and communities, are designed to affirm each person’s inner spark, not dim it.
THE (FINAL) CHALLENGE
Your final challenge is to (re)design a current physical space of your school in a way that embodies your most aspirational future.
Use the seven principles of a living system as your design drivers, and then draw a picture or make a collage of the space itself:
IDENTITY: How can I create a space that helps reinforce who -- and why -- our school is what it is?
INFORMATION: In what ways can my space invite people to pay close attention to what matters most?
RELATIONSHIPS: How does my space encourage people to relate to one another? How does it help trust build and flow?
EMERGENCE: What behaviors ought to form the atomic units of this space? What is seeking to emerge?
PATTERNS: What norms ought to govern our behaviors in this space? Which patterns do we want to see showing up over time?
PROCESSES: What rituals, routines, decisions, and rewards is this space for?
STRUCTURES: How does this space place human beings at the center of the experience?
Curious about the last bit of the prompt: are you saying humans should be placed at the center? That surprises me...would love to hear more on that.
Speaking of chaos theory, an interesting take on it appears in Einstein's Violin: A Conductor's Notes on Music, Physics and Social Change by Joseph Eger. While not agreeing with the author's politics, his insights into the interconnectedness of things including music is fascinating.