Every so often something appears on the tv at Different River Towers which fires the Corporate Imagination, and is self evidently Something To Think About.Last night BBC4 offered up 'The Secret Life of Chaos', a chase through the history of chaos and complexity theory hosted by Professor Jim Al-Khalili. It starred luminaries like Alan Turing (who, it seems, as well as inventing the modern computer, and saving Britain from the Nazi hordes with his code breaking prowess - after which he was moreorless murdered by the British establishment for being gay - came up with some stunning mathematical thinking which set the ball rolling on Chaos). Edward Lorenz (he of the Butterfly Effect) and the gorgeously named Benoit Mandlebrot - for whom we have to thank for Fractal geometry - also featured.
Chaos is wonderful. The world is chaotic, governed by physical (and social, and economic) systems which never - ever - ultimately act as the maths says they should. Or as deterministic Newtonian physics - the act of faith (as it turns out to be) - says they should. From the errant weather, which just won't behave, to Stock markets which collapse unexpectedly, to the migrations of birds or the activities of undersea currents, to the shrinking of the ice caps or population growth, all are stubbornly resistant to being fully and accurately modelled, no much how data we endlessly push into the business end of ever bigger computers.
And yet, patterns emerge. Patterns which are derived from feedback loops which are absorbed by these emerging systems (they are in fact called 'emergent' because no-one really knows exactly what they are going to do once they get going). The action of the waves creates feedback on rocks, which influences the creation of shapes - and self repeating pattens. Feedback in markets influences share prices, and regularities appear. Feedback from the environment influences evolution. The arrogance of the human race may be in the belief that we can capture and isolate those myriad factors which create the feedback, and in our blind selectivity in picking out the factors which we believe are critical and ignoring the rest.
It's a fascinating area. About 15 years ago, I tried to get some thinking off the ground which took it somewhere (having read James Gleick's 'Chaos') - in the setting of markets, brands and research. Some stuff was going on in economics at the time - still is I'm sure - which suggested there was a story to tell. Gleick's book spoke of this fabulous inter disciplinary place called The Santa Fe Institute, where Theoretical Physicists were chewing the fat with Population Scientists, Agronomists with Evolutionary Biologists, and so on. And everywhere seeing chaos and complexity...
At the heart of the thinking I was doing at the time was, however, an awful truth. It was one I felt I knew already, one that many Planners in many agencies knew, though we didn't know why we knew. It was that any pretensions to prediction claimed by market research were - had to be - hogwash. And that the seemingless endless quest for the ultimate algorithm, the Perfect Model, was completely misguided.
I recall some correspondence with a researcher in the US at the time. He was working in the multi billion dollar quantititative research industry, so fond of testing to destruction - or at least coming up with an answer, any answer. Clients were, still are - both there and here - paying big money to have someone show up with some PowerPoint slides to tell them that the top box scores indicated future success, or failure.
To his great credit, and not without some professional courage, he had written something around chaos and complexity, and got it published. It was a thorough, well thought through piece, scholarly and well argued. And it moreorless said his entire industry was doomed.
He told me that the response was...well, the term 'cup of cold sick' comes to mind. He wrote back like a man shortly to be tied to a stake and burned in the town square.
Back then, it was hard to avoid a picture of turkeys standing in the polling booths looking at a ballot form with 'Christmas' written on it from coming to mind. I was surrounded by the increasingly trendy econometricians agencies were hiring, and seeing growing numbers of quant researchers - with their black boxes and their normative scores - troop through my clients' offices. I felt discouraged, deferential, and let it drop.
Yet those turkeys might just have another choice open to them. Feedback Loops in complex systems means that there is a role for research. It is how brands and markets - systems both - receive information, and it is the fuel they need with which to mount a response. A response based on something may be better than lying prone as circumstances play merry hell with your brand or your business.
But don't imagine you can actually shape the future. You can do some smart, timely things, perhaps. But don't imagine you are God.
Time to get those old papers out I think...
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If you're in the UK, catch the programme here.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00pv1c3/The_Secret_Life_of_Chaos/
(If you're outside the UK, get your laptop to connect to the net via a Proxy server, in the UK (search the web to find one). That gives you a UK IP address. That tells the BBC you are watching it in the UK...and off you go. Though it may not stream that well, so you may need to download...)
