How often have you heard a keynote speaker or management expert preach how small changes in leadership make a big impact? They're referring to something called the Butterfly Effect: a physics concept that the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil can set off a tornado in Texas.

The wisdom of these “thought leaders” permeate the media. Here are a few I picked up off the web:

• Leaders of the future know that the beat of their wings provides a quantum competitive advantage.
• Leaders need to be intentional about creating the Butterfly Effect to intentionally create positive impacts.
• Life is predictable and you can do something about it if you lead by the Butterfly Effect.
• Small changes in systems and attitudes drive big impacts on productivity and sales.
• Apply the Butterfly Effect to your leadership style and your small change will predictably make a difference in your team’s performance!

It all sounds good except for one small problem.

They are wrong.

AUTOPSY

Butterfly Effect or Butterfly Infection?

Once again, authors, consultants, trainers, coaches, motivational speakers, and thought leaders took a scientific concept and made themselves look like geniuses by popularizing it in the media.

All of a sudden everyone’s an expert in a new physics concept, and we have another case of “Charlatitis”.

Charlatitis: An inflammatory condition that infects ordinary people causing them to believe they possess genuine knowledge. Typically diagnosed by measuring the level of ego inflammation, hot-air expelled, and hallucinations of confidence in a topic they never researched. Highly contagious. People in close contact with a Charlatan may breathe in what they heard and become carriers spreading the virus to others. Areas of possible high infections include business conferences, management meetings, and pubs. There is no known cure.

The infection became so bad that the concept was used in the movie Havana in which Robert Redford played a gambler who says, “a butterfly can flutter its wings over a flower in China and cause a hurricane in the Caribbean.”

Busted

Sadly, none of these experts researched the Butterfly Effect. What they’re referring to is a question an MIT meteorology professor, Edward Lorenz, posed to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) over 50 years ago: “Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?”

Lorenz postulated a concept that small, miniscule changes in initial conditions can lead to large differences in the outcomes of more complex systems. But he never meant it the way “experts” are teaching it.

It was never meant to be taken literally. It was never supposed to be a metaphor for how a small change will lead to a much larger change somewhere else. Lorenz merely posed the Butterfly Effect as a metaphor to show that “complex dynamical systems exhibit unpredictable behaviors such that small variances in the initial conditions could have profound and widely divergent effects on the system’s outcomes.” He wanted to illustrate the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in chaotic systems. Given how human imprecision in measuring physical phenomena prevents predictability, Lorenz simply wanted to highlight the idea that small changes in the starting conditions could lead to significant differences in the outcomes.

The Butterfly Effect means the opposite

of what your management experts are telling you.

So, contrary to pop culture and the media, the Butterfly Effect means that small changes at the beginning DO NOT predict dramatic outcomes. The Butterfly Effect is not about predicting outcomes from a small event, but that some outcomes of complex systems are NOT predictable! What you do may or may not lead to dramatic outcomes. The outcome could be as significant as a tornado, or as trivial as if nothing happened!

General Stanley McChrystal refers in his book Team of Teams, that popular culture almost always misuses the term “Butterfly Effect”. We think that if a small thing can have a big impact we can manipulate a small thing to do just that. He says this misses the point of Lorenz’s insight: that small things in a complex system may have no effect or a massive one. It’s impossible to know which will happen.

Lorenz was amazed at how people ended up misinterpreting all this. The esteemed journal, American Scientist[1], documented that Lorenz “never intended for it to be applied in this way. Indeed, he meant to convey the opposite point.”

But why did he do it? Simply to challenge the laws of physics established by Isaac Newton and Pierre-Simon Laplace. They felt that nature was predictable.

Lorenz said No.

Was it worth it?

Umm, yeah! It generated a new branch of mathematics known as "Chaos Theory" which allows approximation of the most likely outcomes for complex systems; such as weather patterns used today for daily weather forecast

What to do?

Always be aware of Charlatitis. When you hear a thought leader or management expert declare their brilliance about how a new physics or medical breakthrough can grow your sales or leadership performance, ask them which peer-reviewed, evidence-based scientific publication they are referring to.

Something magical happens when you do that.

They shut up.

CASE STUDY: An example of a real Butterfly Effect, unpredicted!

I’m not saying we don’t have some incredible, wonderful stories of Butterfly Effects happening. There are hundreds. What I’m saying is the outcomes of those effects were unpredictable and incapable of being planned. So, if you think your love affair will start a World War, I’d say stop that. Maybe it will, or maybe not.

 . . . and, yes, it did happen.

I loved Allen Lobo’s review of this. Allen, a former physician & research physicist who studied Molecular Physics at the University of Pennsylvania, answered this question with a great example of the Butterfly Effect in history. Here’s his answer on Quora referencing the role that a beautiful, virtually unknown, and completely innocent woman would have in putting into motion the two World Wars of the 20th century.

This is Sophie Chotek. Duchess of Hohenberg.

And I bet that virtually none of you has ever heard of her.

She was the woman that the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire, fell in love with and then married.

So what?

She wasn’t royalty. A mere Duchess.

Which meant that in the unbelievably snobbish norms of the day, even the future monarch of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, could not have her, his own wife, accompany him in official royal ceremonies. And he hated that. Can you blame him?

The Archduke was an autocrat, but he had one redeeming quality— he loved his wife deeply.

There was but one exception to that stupid rule. Which is that she could be by his side in public while he was acting in his military capacity as Inspector-General of the Austro-Hungarian Army.

Which was the main reason why the Archduke decided to go inspect the army in Bosnia (an entirely unnecessary and optional choice), so that his wife could ride by his side in public.

And he rode quite foolishly in an open car so that everyone could see the two of them together.

And he then got assassinated by a Serbian nationalist, Gavrilo Princip who literally ran up to the open-top car and shot both of them at point blank range, killing them instantly.

Austria demanded an unconditional apology from Serbia and was determined to humiliate her.

Serbia considered the assassination to be awful, but had no real official hand in it. So she refused to apologize.

Austria then declared war on Serbia.

Russia as Serbia’s biggest ally, then declared war on Austria.

Germany then as Austria’s ally declared war on Russia.

France and Great Britain then as Russia’s allies declared war on Germany.

It is imperative to note here that except for Austria declaring war on tiny Serbia (which she never imagined would spiral completely out of hand in such spectacular fashion!)…

All of these other declarations of war between these nations weren't “choices” — they were bound by security treaties to come to the rescue of each other in the event of an aggression against their allies.

Great Britain, France, and Russia on the one hand as the Triple Entente, Germany and Austria-Hungary on the other as the Central Powers.

Talk about a chain reaction!

And then ladies and gentlemen, you had World War 1.

Followed by the collapse of the German economy. (No, the Treaty of Versailles was not as punitive as people think.)

The collapse of the German economy brought that lovely SOB, Adolf Hitler to power.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

Arguably one of the greatest instances of the “butterfly effect” in all of history. Try topping that.

And it all started with the marriage of an emperor to a relative commoner.

For the sake of love.

Conclusion

After training and learning from over 30,000 CEOs, I’ve found that small AND large decisions can drive higher competitive advantage. But it’s a journey of unpredictability, adaptation, and maybe a little luck.

Predictability is an illusion.

Adaptability is a requirement.

Thanks for reading.

Keep climbing higher and digging deeper until the thrill of discovery overcomes the fear of death.

Best,

Don Schmincke
researcher, explorer, author

For a speech or workshop, email: [email protected]

Footnotes:

[1] https://www.americanscientist.org/article/understanding-the-butterfly-effect