Watch out for the ‘strange attractor’

Most organizations are complex systems. This isn’t a new idea, I’m pulling this from decades of theory and research. So I’ve been looking to chaos theory and complexity science as a grounded reference point for how to lead and how to make things happen.

Today I want to talk about the mathematical concept of the “attractor” and its variant the “strange attractor”. I think these concepts are useful for understanding how organizations end up doing things that may seem surprising or irrational.

So the attractor (regular flavor, not strange) is a thing, let’s call it an entity, toward which complex systems evolve. It’s sort of like, you know when the CEO has a favorite leader who seems to have outsize power in the organization? And that person really wants something to happen—let’s say it’s a product change or an org change, maybe a specific marketing message. If you work at that company and you’re paying attention, you know that thing is going to happen. You don’t know exactly how or when, but it’s going to happen. That person, the one the CEO really likes, and that thing they want is like an attractor. The system, the company, will move toward it.

The strange attractor is a variant of the attractor. It’s still an entity that is acting as an attractor, meaning the system will move toward it, but it acts in a way that is chaotic and seemingly random. So you see the system moving toward something, but you have no idea what it is or what is going to happen. Because in mathematical terms, strange attractors can be nearly ergodic, meaning almost anything could happen.

I’m sure you can think of people or groups you’ve experienced who seem to be acting like strange attractors, but I’ll flag that this is a force that isn’t necessarily easy to spot. It’s like a warp in the system that you can’t quite explain.

The example I’ll give is this: Let’s say you have an organization that seems to have lost its way in terms of the company direction or overall culture. No one can quite explain why or quite put it into words, but things seem to have drifted in a way that doesn’t seem aligned with the intentions of the company. And some people don’t even see it, they think everything is normal. So things are moving in some direction, it’s happening in a relatively uneven way, it seems like no one set out for it to happen, and no one can quite predict what’s going to happen next. This is what it can look like inside an organization when you have a strange attractor in play.

Now the impact that a strange attractor has on a system is not necessarily bad or destructive, it just is. And while it is influenced by what the system does, by what happens around it, it’s ultimately not able to be either controlled or predicted. Which means, like so many other things in business, it’s both a risk and an opportunity. But it’s one that may be invisible until you understand that it exists.

So my takeaways here are this: First, be intentional about your attractors because they will shape the organization and second, be aware of the potential existence of your strange attractors. Thanks for listening.