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CHAOS, COMPLEXITY, AND
FLOCKING BEHAVIOR: METAPHORS FOR LEARNING
by Stephanie Pace Marshall
Sir Isaac Newton saw the universe as an orderly
clock. Today, scientists describe it as a shifting
kaleidoscope. Could this new metaphor hold the secret
for the transformation of learning communities?
As human beings, we always have grounded our institutions,
including our schools, in the science of our times.
How scientists view the natural world always has had
profound implications for how we constructed our world.
As educational leaders, we have worked hard using
our current understandings about teaching and learning
to design systems we believed would enhance the achievement
and creative capacity of students and staff.
While we have been doing this, science has undergone
a revolution--a profound paradigm change that will
forever alter the way we view and make sense of our
universe, ourselves, and our institutions. The application
of this new understanding to our work and our relationships
can inform our role as leaders as we create authentic,
empowered learning communities.
It is fashionable in the 1990s to speak of paradigms
and paradigm shifts. When a paradigm shift occurs
in science, the scientists' conception of the world
changes: this is precisely what has happened. A "new"
physics for a new social order is emerging.
Discoveries in modern physics have caused the scientists'
description of the universe to change from the metaphor
of a clock to the metaphor of a kaleidoscope, and
this metaphor and all that it suggests holds great
promise for transforming our schools into authentic
learning communities.
For three centuries the dominant scientific world
view has been the image of a static, repetitive, predictable,
linear, and clockwork universe. Sir Isaac Newton gave
us classical physics, the laws of gravitation and
mechanics, and the description of a deterministic
world. This Newtonian world view also profoundly influenced
our psyche, our beliefs, our behavior, and consequently,
how we designed our institutions. We have been obsessed
with linear systems and their effect has controlled
almost every dimension of our culture.
We have efficiently managed our world by drawing
lines and boxes around everything and by separating
things into discrete observable, measurable categories.
We created dichotomies, divisions, departments, boundaries,
and closed systems. We focused on predictive cause-and-effect
models of human behavior; we separated knowledge into
disciplines. We designed hierarchies and linear structures.
We divided people into management and labor. We fragmented
ourselves, our beliefs, our behavior, our organizations,
our learning, our schools, and our world. We separated
our bodies from our minds, our minds from our hearts,
and our hearts from each other. We forced compassion
to compete with intellect.
Deriving our insight from Newtonian physics, we behaved
as if we believed that by studying the parts we could
understand the whole, and that analysis inevitably
leads to synthesis. But this shouldn't surprise us.
After all, isn't that the way a predictable and clockwork
universe works?
By design we have constructed and operated our schools
as we have understood our world, and these constructions
have produced learning-disabled institutions, students,
and staff, including us, who have suppressed creativity
and potential to survive. This efficient, orderly,
and linear design of schooling no longer makes any
sense.
It belies what the neurosciences teach us about how
the brain functions and learns. It challenges the
personal, active, volitional, and social dimensions
of learning that are so essential to authentic meaning.
A New Scheme
As complex learning systems, schools are far more
organic and dynamic than linear. We, therefore, must
design them to function less like clocks, and more
like kaleidoscopes, and to do so, we must ground our
educational transformation in the science of our times.
We must understand, however, that the paradigm of
new physics does not replace the paradigm of the old,
and it doesn't explain all phenomena.
Because we now understand that most of nature (weather,
ecological systems, developing embryos, and even the
brain) is not linear, we need a different conceptual
scheme and a different way of viewing and understanding
the universe. Then we need to apply this understanding
to the reinvention and transformation of America's
schools.
The new vision of reality we are discovering is grounded
in the interrelatedness and interdependence of phenomena.
Albert Einstein reminded us that "no problem can be
solved from the same consciousness that created it.
We must learn to see the world anew." The new view
of science reveals a universe of inherent order. It
is, according to Margaret Wheatley, author of Leadership
and the New Science, "a universe rich in processes
that support growth and coherence. Nothing happens
in a quantum world without something encountering
something else. Nothing is independent of the relationships
that occur." Even in the most seemingly chaotic systems,
like the movement of clouds or the swirling motion
of a liquid, an internal structure exists.
Order is created by "strange attractors"--forces
or shapes of probability that seem to prevent the
system from going beyond certain invisible boundaries.
It is self-referencing. One of the most powerful illustrations
of this construct of emergent order is found in the
field of complexity theory, that deals with the structure
and order of complex, dynamic, and adaptive systems,
such as an ecological system.
What is so fascinating about these complex systems
is that the order that emerges does so from a simple
set of rules that govern the interaction of the individual
components of the system to each other, and not the
total system itself. From this interaction of the
individual components, system stability emerges. This
has been simulated in a computer program with interesting
results.
Learning from BOIDS
One of the most intriguing of these simulations is
called "The Experiment of the BOIDS." In this experiment,
the program attempts to capture the essence of emergent
order, in this case the flocking behavior in birds,
by placing a large collection of independent bird-like
agents called BOIDS into an obstacle-filled environment.
Each BOID follows three simple rules, according to
M. Mitchell Waldrop, author of Complexity: The
Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos.
It tries to:
-
Maintain a minimum distance from other objects in
the environment, including other BOIDS;
-
Match its own velocity with the BOIDS in its neighborhood;
and
-
Move toward the perceived center of the mass of
the BOIDS.
This simulation has been run thousands and thousands
of times, and amazingly, with these three simple rules,
a flock forms every time. What is even more surprising,
however, is that not one of the rules given to the
BOIDS said "Form a flock."
Individual Relationships
Four observations in this simulation have profound
implications for us, not because we are trying to
get flocking behavior, but because we are interested
in complex behavior, like learning and teaching, emerging
from individual relationships.
- Rules
that create complex flocking behavior do not relate
to flocking behavior. They relate to what an individual
BOID should do in relation to other BOIDS.
-
Flocks form from the bottom up and not from the
top down.
-
The close interaction of the BOIDS with each other
allowed the flock to adapt to changing conditions
naturally. The focus of each BOID was on ongoing
behavior and not the final result.
-
Complex behavior, like flocking, need not have complex
rules. Simple rules will yield profoundly complex
results. Perhaps this is the most important observation
of all.
Moving to Order
How does something so seemingly remote and unconnected
to our life's work as chaos, complexity theory, and
flocking behavior possibly contribute to our ability
to be leaders in educational transformation? What
these new understandings of the natural world enable
us to do is to challenge and then change the current
context of education by creating a completely new
one. I am not talking about moving boxes on an organizational
chart. Re-invention is not about changing what is,
but about creating what is not.
The current context of education, which is grounded
in unverbalized underlying assumptions and invisible
premises of a linear, predictable, hierarchically
controlled and rigidly structured world, must be discarded
to allow for the emergence of self-organizing systems
that are held together by a compelling and shared
vision of what they can become, by a deep set of core
values, and by a commitment to goals and objectives,
collaboratively established, collectively assessed,
and individually supported.
In short, the paradoxical conditions necessary for
educational transformation are individual freedom
of choice and collective responsibility for the whole--individual
and group autonomy and interconnections.
As we begin to create authentic learning communities,
we must ask several critical questions:
- What
are the sources of the order we wish to create,
and where do they come from?
-
How will we create coherence, integration, and purpose
in our community?
-
What structures can we derive that will support
and celebrate learning, that will enable rather
than deplete, that will evoke rather than direct,
that will be fluid and flexible over time?
-
How do we connect our need for autonomy and freedom
with our organization's and our public's need for
accountability and order? What might that order
look like?
-
What simple rules or parameters will enable complex
learning, creativity, experimentation, and growth
to occur?
-
What are the "strange attractors" of our community?
Are they explicitly known and understood by all?
How can we sustain their power?
-
How can we be sure that we are enabling potential
to flourish?
-
What are the skills we need to discard to enable
our community to find its own identity?
-
How can we remove boundaries and maintain security
and trust?
-
How do we sustain relationships and meaning? How
do we support growth and change?
-
How do we give ourselves permission to fail? What
does failure look like in this place?
-
How will we recognize if the love, faith, and trust
we bring to our community begins to diminish? Will
we be courageous enough to take the risks required
to enable them to emerge once again?
These are difficult questions, but they are essential
if we are to change the context of education. We cannot
change what we do until we change how we think, and
we cannot change how we think until we change who
we are.
One simply cannot transfer as a whole any particular
model or body of knowledge from one system to another.
The models are informative, but knowledge, models,
and expertise are co-created by thoughtful people
working in and with their environment. Because of
this, we need to trust, more than ever before, our
own capacity to re-invent ourselves.
Our world is a non-linear, adaptive, dynamic, and
pattern-seeking world of inherent order, interconnections,
and potentials. It is a world where increasingly complex
behaviors are created by very simple rules--rules
that govern the relationships of individuals to each
other and are established from the bottom up.
It is a world where deep inner creativity and coherence
are woven into the very fabric of nature. What the
world of new science says to us is that if we are
truly going to create learning communities for the
21st century, we must look differently at our classrooms,
our schools, and our work. We must view them as dynamic,
adaptive, self-organizing systems, not only capable
but inherently designed to renew themselves and to
grow and change--not by rules established from the
top, but by relationships created from within.
Stephanie Pace Marshall is executive director of
the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy in Aurora,
Il.
This article was excerpted from The School Administrator,
January, 1995. Used by permission. Copyright 1995,
The School Administrator.
"Re-invention is not about
changing what is, but about creating what is not."
As educational leaders working in collaboration with
others in our neighborhood, we have remarkable opportunities
now to change the face of public education in our
nation by widening the circle of hope and opportunity
and by being the dream catchers for our children's
future.
We cannot restructure a structure that is splintered
at its roots. Adding wings to caterpillars does not
create butterflies--it creates awkward and dysfunctional
caterpillars. Butterflies are created through transformation.
This means that it starts with us.
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