If you asked someone what the Butterfly Effect is I would
guess there would be two distinct answers. For a millennial like me I would
have told you it is the movie starring Ashton Kutcher that came out in 2004.
While the entire plot and outcome is a little shaky for me, the gist is that
the main character wanted to change his life and the lives of those he cared
about once they grew up because some of the things they either chose to do or
endured set them on a course that left them with terrible lives. Kutcher’s
character was able to go back in time and change one small event. The movie
then flashed forward years later to their college years and he would see how
one small change affected everything. Most of the time going back and
pinpointing what went wrong changed things for the better for mostly everyone,
but there would always be a flaw of something else that went wrong. For
instance, once he stopped his friend from blowing up a mailbox with
firecrackers and he ended up with severe life altering injuries. I believe the
take away here is that it is the small choices can have a large impact.
Now that I have spent some time researching complexity
science and theory I would put my money on it that the movie was inspired by
Lorenz’s Strange Attractor which also became known as the Butterfly Effect
based on the name he selected for his paper: Predictability: Does the Flap of a
Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas. It turns out that when
graphing pressure, temperature, and wind speed that the simultaneous non-linear
differential equations have an infinite number of possibilities. The graph
itself looks like a butterfly which is why it earned the more common nickname
(Obolensky, 2014). “In other words, when a situation has a great sensitivity to
initial conditions a small change can have a
disproportionate effect” (Obolensky, 2014, p. 70). Examining the name of
the paper, it is an interesting thought if something like the flap of a
butterfly’s wings or even the absence of it would have such an impact. Previously
I would have scoffed and said how ludicrous the notion is but I have learned
that with the absence of bees humans would struggle to survive and eat after
about five years. Earthquakes can produce tsunamis and even the Cynefin
framework when discussing complexity notes that one change in a rainforest can
drastically change the landscape and function due to the interrelatedness of
the ecosystem (Snowden & Boone, 2007).
So, what if we bottled up this idea and started making small
changes? Obolensky drew the conclusion that within complex organizations small
changes can yield large results. He referenced several companies who have
proven this idea. Even better I have seen this at work within my organization.
The first example was set in motion several months before I started my
position. Every term we would make announcements that students could enroll and
some would pick their classes. It was odd that someone was pursuing a degree
but not all that actively engaged throughout the year. Such is the plight of
distance learners. Our leadership thought it would make a difference to do an
outreach to each individual that was actively enrolled in the term to give them
course suggestions and offer to assist with enrollment for the next term. We
call this the term to term outreach. Sure enough we are still doing this
because our retention made leaps and bounds of improvement. This is wonderful
for our students because they are reaching their goal to graduate within a
timely manner.
A second example is something that our team had not realized
we could do! We thought the Procedures
Manual still noted that method of payment must be taken at the time of
registration. We were enforcing that tuition assistance forms and payment
already be made to register. While this kept our records tidy, it was not a
great way to do business with our students. For lack of better analogy it was like
holding the class they wanted over people’s heads and asking them to jump
through the hoop to get it. That is not exactly encouraging if you examined the
message… we want you to be a part of our institution and we are going to show
you by making it difficult! It turns out the undergraduate team was not doing
this and it made doing business with our students much easier. It was a breath
of fresh air for the graduate advising team that we could enroll students and have
the method of payment was in place by the first day of the term. Sure enough this
also improved getting students into their classes.
Very recently we have seen a lot of changes. We have changed
our Learning Management System from Blackboard to Canvas. To support our new
LMS we have created what we are calling ERNIE 2.0 to support the new platform. If
you were a student a year ago and came back to classes it would basically be
unrecognizable. In a lot of ways it does create chaos at first. However, once
everyone has acclimated to the changes it should be easier and better, thus
allowing for more order than there was before. Hopefully this will make way for
more growth. The implication of the first two examples of change is that you
can use small strategic changes that can drive improvements, neither of which
cost our department anything additional in the budget. It was not essential to
throw globs of money at the problem to do something better, we took what we
already had to work with and did it a little smarter. The lesson here is start
with what you have to make small changes and watch what happens before deciding
what big changes need to be implemented. You might end up surprised.
References:
Obolensky, N. (2014). Complex
Adaptive Leadership: Embracing Paradox and Uncertainty (2nd
ed.). Gower
Snowden, D. & Boone, M. (2007). A leader’s
framework for decision making. Harvard Business Review,
85(11), Retrieved from: https://hbr.org/2007/11/a-leaders-framework-for-decision-making%20
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