Three professionals — an architect, an accountant, and a human resource professional —were contemplating a profound existential question. What, besides the obvious, was the oldest profession?
The architect spoke first: “God created the world in six days, and that took a master design. So, obviously, architecture is the oldest profession.”
“Not at all,” replied the accountant. “You misunderstand what God really did. What He did in those six days was to create order out of chaos. And that is what accountants do, so accountancy is obviously the oldest profession.”
But the human resource professional had the last word: “And who do you think created the chaos?”
I would like to suggest that organizations need more chaos, at least the kind of patterned chaos that is described by the new science of that name. And further, most human resource professionals do not create enough of it.
I am not a mathematician, and I do not understand much about the underpinnings of the science of chaos. It is hard for me to imagine how scientists deal with such complex phenomena. But what has been written for the layman and portrayed on TV is quite compelling. Take, for example, the description given by the physicist Joseph Ford of the Georgia Institute of Technology, who was an early proponent and contributor to chaos theory. He talked about “dynamics freed at last from the... To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.
Get a premium subscription today to read this and all MIT Sloan Managmeent Review articles.
More Info.
Buy this article. Purchase one or more copies of this article as a PDF.
Subscribe today to read the most recent articles and the current issue of MIT Sloan Management Review.
Upgrade to premium
Current Subscribers: Do you subscribe to MIT Sloan Management Review? Register for online access.
- Register for free access to recent articles and the current issue of MIT Sloan Management Review.
- Subscribe and read articles from the past three years online.
- Premium subscription—access to the entire archive of articles.
