Life at the Edge of Chaos:
Creating the Quantum Organization

Mark D. Youngblood (Perceval, 1997)

James Gleick, in his landmark book Chaos, argues that, at least in the view of some scientists, twentieth-century science will be remembered for just three things: relativity, quantum mechanics and chaos. He goes on to argue that of the three, only chaos theory appuos to the world we can see and touch—the universe of objects at a human scale.

In a vibrant, almost evangelical new book, Mark D. Youngblood draws on a combination of insights from complexity science (a branch of chaos theory) and the experiences of a vast number of business practitioners to create a new framework for analyzing and understanding the problems involved with organizational change. Youngblood’s book is ambitious, and he describes himself as something on the order of a businessman’s Joseph Campbell. He attempts to tackle the issues of organizational change not merely within the business organization, or even within certain specific types of organization, but instead venturing across the entire spectrum of human endeavor. His analysis ranges from the individual and the family through the business enterprise to society as a whole and its major issues of public policy.

The book is easily accessible to the lay reader, and while it does not contain much in the way of actual science, it is nonetheless a valuable new look at organizational change for the average manager. Where Youngblood really draws his intellectual roots is not so much from chaos theory or complexity studies, as from the philosophical school of thought which evolved out of Henry Sheffer’s study of symbolic logic at Harvard

University in the 1920s. Youngblood explicitly acknowledges Sheffer’s student Suzanne Langer in the opening section of his book. However, his approach to the scientific revolutions of the twentieth century and his attempt to break organizations and managers out of their old “Newtonian” paradigms owes far more to the work of another Sheffer student, FS.C. Northrop, formerly Sterling Professor of Philosophy and Law at Yale University. Those familiar with Northrop’s work (particularly Logic in the Sciences and the Humanities and The Meeting of East and West) will recognize the recapitulation of many of Northrop’s best arguments in Youngblood’s new book, albeit supplemented by analogies from chaos theory and a few pages of simplified metaphors to quantum mechanics.

To those not familiar with the more technical work of his predecessors, Youngblood’s book should offer a long overdue breath of fresh air. In this regard, the book will probably be particularly helpful for organizational consultants as well as line managers whose educational roots and conceptual problem-solving mechanisms lie far removed from the new physics and the applied mathematical and scientific branches of chaos and complexity.

Even though the “quantum organization” is merely a metaphorical title whose connection to quantum mechanics is tenuous at best, the concept of this new organizational form does draw in some very meaningful ways on insights from population biology to highlight a variety of subjects in organizational behavior, including leadership, personal growth, and managing change in corporate culture. Moreover, as suggested above, while the concepts Youngblood elucidates may be “old hat” to physical scientists and applied mathematicians, judging from his numerous interviews and examples from industry (the real strength of this book), there is a profound need to spread this kind of message to all kinds of managers, particularly those facing the ever-increasing stresses of organizational change.

Youngblood’s central argument is simply that facing modern organizational change is too difficult for traditional managerial structures to handle. More importantly, while the managers of the future are only going to face more change and at an increasing rate, Youngblood explains how and why most managers have not yet understood the inadequacy of their current repertoire of managerial tools. He highlights the scientific weaknesses of the organizational forms pioneered in the 1930s (particularly divisional management structures), and then goes on to demonstrate how inappropriate these forms are for managers and organizations who will have to cope with change in the twenty-first century. In proposing the “quantum organization,” Youngblood does managers a distinct service. Not only does he offer guidance in helping to provide solutions to the immediate problems of change, but more importantly he underscores the absolutely necessity of adopting new, modern, scientifically based paradigms for coping with change in the future.

To those of us who have followed the development of chaos theory and complexity studies for an extended period of time, it is all too easy to assume that just because the war between the traditionalists and the chaoticists has been won in physics and applied mathematics, the same war has been won in other fields, when in fact many of the initial battles have not even been fought. Youngblood brings an important new book to the field of organizational behavior by launching the opening salvos of this battle in a much-needed attack on outmoded organizational forms. Rational choice theorists (particularly those who have followed the work of Jack Knott and Gary Miller—Reforming Bureaucracy, etc.) should likewise rejoice at an approach that transcends the old organizational para-digms that by and large evolved out of a reaction to nineteenth-century problems of corruption and lack of professional expertise.

In pointing to chaos theory and complexity studies, Youngblood offers hope for a new kind of learning organization better suited to coping with complex change and unfettered by the outmoded paradigms of the past. While this is not a technical work, it deserves to be read by line managers in any field where rapid change is taking place, and not just by organizational consultants and specialists.

PHILIP VOS FELLMAN