Jurassic Park and the Fallacy of Control: Lessons for Change Management

Change Management is an Illusion

I appreciate the subtitle is a little provocative, but let’s use this blog post to understand why there might be some validity in this statement. Over the past few weeks, I have delved back into the rabbit hole that is complexity science. I was initially introduced to this in my MSc with Roffey Park, but frankly, at the time I was not able to fully comprehend the so what, outside of understanding why Jurassic Park was always doomed to fail.

“See, here I’m now by myself, uh, talking to myself. That’s, that’s chaos theory”

(Dr Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park, 1993).

So, what has Jurassic Park got to do with Change Management? Jurassic Park was a great story about trying to manage a complex system. Large organisations, working in global markets are, complex systems, but as Dr Ian Malcolm (played by Jeff Goldblum) points out a difference -

“But, John, If the Pirates of the Caribbean breaks down, The Pirates don’t eat the tourists”.

Although failure to manage change does not result in anyone getting eaten, change does cause stress, and can lead to the loss of jobs and in some cases the loss of life.

Complexity science arrived around the same time as globalisation. Mainly as a result of traditional physics, which had done so well at predicting the movement of other planets, not being able to predict the weather on this one. Edward Lorenz in trying to answer the question, will it rain tomorrow discovered what came to be known as The Butterfly Effect. He discovered that the starting point of weather conditions was not sufficient in predicting the subsequent conditions. Lorenz discovered this one day by entering an input into a weather machine incorrectly by the smallest amount. After coming back he found significantly different outcomes in prior weather patterns, all from rounding .506127 to .506.

Businesses whether at a global or even a local level have become more complex. With competing divisions, political hard and soft power wielding an invisible hand and diverse workforces both employed, contracted or outsourced all connected by a web of elastic bands, pulling, pushing and storing energy, ready to be released at random intervals. Traditional Change Management has several flaws in these environments, it believes the change can be created, planned and managed. It can use programme management approaches that rely on episodic, linear and end goal-orientated methods (Bushe & Marshak, 2009).

This works great in simple and complicated environments, like manufacturing. Toyota used these methods to great effect. These sat well with the dominant Taylorism beliefs of Scientific Management in advanced economies. But transferring these approaches to complex or chaotic environments is what the writers of Jurassic Park were telling us.

What defines Complex or Chaotic environments? There are many, but there are 4 primary ones (Favela, 2024)-

Emergence

Definition- Emergence refers to unexpected system properties (outcomes) that arise from interactions among individual components, even though those properties are not explicitly present in any one of those subsystems.

An example of this is the flock of birds. The coordinated movement of the entire flock emerges from the interactions between individual birds (subsystems), leading to a collective behaviour that cannot be predicted by studying each bird in isolation and then building back up in an additive way. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Nonlinearity

Definition- Nonlinearity refers to the behaviour where the relationship between cause and effect is not proportional. Small changes in input can lead to disproportionately large or unpredictable outcomes. This means adding X1.506 may lead to Y6 or X1.506127 to Y-53

This is what Lorenz discovered in his weather simulator, small changes can yield hugely disproportionate effects, making predictions almost impossible.

Self-Organisation

Definition- Self-organisation occurs when a system spontaneously arranges itself into a more ordered state without external control or central coordination. Simple rules at the local level give rise to complex behaviour at the global level.

Examples include the patterns sand dunes make, there is no central coordinator organising, and no master sand dune dictating the order.

Universality

Definition- Universality refers to the idea that certain patterns or behaviours are common across diverse complex systems, regardless of their specific details. These universal features transcend the specifics of individual systems

Examples of this are phased transitions like water turning into Ice or Rainbows. No matter how many or the size of droplets, rainbows are a universal phenomenon. Nature reuses this pattern in multiple systems.

Organisations are more and more shifting from complicated systems to complex and chaotic ones. The illusion of managing change through identifying the output, breaking down all the inputs controlling them at subsystem levels, and then rebuilding them back up is fruitless in complex systems where outputs emerge, inputs are nonlinear, and their outputs emerge from no central command and control body.

“Change looks like death. You don’t know what it looks like until you’re standing at the gates” (Dr Ian Malcolm, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, 2018).

This is not to say that there is no point, all change is futile, and we should just give up. But equipping ourselves with the right tools, methodologies and understandings for these complex and chaotic environments is key. These can be found in more Dialogic approaches found in branches of Organisation Development (Bushe & Marshak, 2009). OD at its heart is around changing complex systems. In future blogs, I’ll explore this more. For now, I am still trying to grapple with a thing called Fractals…..

Bushe, G. R., & Marshak, R. J. (2009). Revisioning organization development: Diagnostic and dialogic premises and patterns of practice. Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 45(3), 348–368. https://doi.org/10.1177/0021886309335070

Favela, L. (2024). The Ecological Brain. Routledge.