Chapter 2 - Alphabet Soup

Chaos and complexity. Positive deviance.

Memes and swarm intelligence.

Fitness landscapes.

Criticality, self-organizing behavior, tipping points, and red queen phenomena.

OODA loops, delta loops and fruit loops (sorry about that last one, just checking to see if you’re awake)

Emergence. Coherence and information cascades.

Complex adaptive systems.

Every one of these terms and many more like them have recently made their way into the language of management.

What’s up with all this stuff anyway? Aren’t these scientific terms? What do they have to do with management?

And how is any of this useful to me?

Leaving specific definitions aside for the moment, you can generally say that each of these is an attempt to explain complex behavior patterns in nature, in society, and in business.