Values Systems are the Strange Attractor in all Living Entities. What does this mean?

In the field view of organisations, clarity about values or vision is important, but it’s only half the task. Creating the field through the dissemination of those ideas is essential. The field must reach all corners of the organisation, involve everyone, and be available everywhere…we need to imagine ourselves as broadcasters, tall radio beacons of information, pulsating out messages everywhere…we must fill all the spaces with the messages we care about. If we do that, fields develop – and with them, their wondrous capacity to bring energy into form. (Margaret Wheatley)

A strange attractor creates a certain form of order within any complex non-linear system be it the weather, a bushfire, society, an organisation, a team or an individual person. For living entities, their values-system is their strange attractor.

Why use the term strange-attractor instead of simply referring to values as attractors? The terminology comes from the study of complex systems which exhibit "order within chaos". Researchers discovered that certain entities behaved in strange ways yet their behaviours were obviously being influenced by a strong attraction to something. Attractors which led to entities behaving in strange and not entirely predictable ways became known as strange attractors. Attractors which lead to predicable behaviours were termed ordinary attractors. Gravity is an example of an ordinary attractor. With ordinary attractors such as gravity, one can mathematicly compute exactly what will happen in the future. For example, if a person drops a ball from 1 metre height, it can be calculated precisely when that ball will land. When an entity's behaviour (motion, actions, path, etc.) is governed instead by a strange attractor, one cannot predict what will happen in the future, however, one can predict the general form or nature of what will unfold. A person with priority values of achievement, competitition, work, financial success, etc. will be attracted by these values to behave in a completely different way to someone who has priority values of expressiveness/freedom, play, intimacy, search/meaning, service, equity/rights. Clearly in both these examples you cannot know what each person will do moment to moment, however, you will know with a fair degree of certainty the general nature of what the will and won't be doing as their life unfolds. For erach person, the values-system (in it's role as a strange attractor) gives order to their life. So it is with teams, organisations and different cultural groups.

To groups and organisations from a strange attractor point of view requires a different way of thinking from what we have been used to over the past few thousand years. Humans have always had a propensity to think in terms of forces and controls. If you exert a force in this way you can control something and make it go where you want. This mode of thinking reached its pinicle with the discoveries of Sir Issac Newton. Newton's world of cause and effect required great effort (forces) to make things happen. Since the emergence of the quantum world, we see that it is possible to accomplish this through manipulating non-material structures – i.e. fields – which are the basic ordering fabric of the universe.

One explanation of the way fields work is to consider fish in an ocean. As the water moves in synchronism with the swell, the fish all appear to move together from side to side or up and down as though connected by some invisible connector-- of course, we know that it is the water of the ocean. However, fields in space behave the same way, we cannot see them and they (unlike the water of the ocean) have no material substance, yet, they link all material objects in space. Physical reality was once considerd to be solely a material reality. The existance of fields has caused us to change our notion of reality since no one will dispute that fields are real, but they have no material substance.

The Newtonian Science Organisation	The Quantum Science Organisation
An organisation is a collection of choices looking for problems, issues and feelings looking for decision situations in which they might be aired, solutions looking for issues to which there might be an answer, and decision makers looking for work.	Organisational order is provided by fields. These fields are conceptual controls – people's ideas and beliefs are creating the order, not some manager with authority. The strongest fields emanate from shared meaning – the source of the organisation's values-system – the strange-attractor which creates and maintains its culture.

Inspired by Tosey and Smith (1999), we have developed a Cultural Field Map to facilitate the understanding of values-systems from an energy field perspective. Each dimension of the chart is a field of motivational energy emanating from the underlying values.

Cultural Field Map

The pattern in the centre of the hexagon above maps the value priorities, for an example group, on each of eight motivational energy field dimensions.

Key questions for group members to ask are:

• Which are the strongest fields in our group?
• Which are weakest or non-existent?
• What does this mean for us?
• How do our clients experience us, given this is the motivational energy we are 'radiating' to those around us? What would they see us doing? What would they hear us saying? How would they feel in our presence?