Change and Challenge 201felt they got too much, which shows a bias towards too little
contact.
The contacts could be formal or informal – fax, e-mail,
memo or even an informal chat over coffee. The best mix-
ture of communication in the crucial 25–40 band was an
equal mixture of formal and informal communication. For-
mal communication was the official channels, giving the
bare information; the informal contacts were just as impor-
tant to give the context, the people’s feelings and subjective
analysis of the information, and often reasons and explana-
tions that could not go into the written and publicly available
report. Managers needed both parts of the message to make
the best sense of the situation, both the bare official bones
and the rich human context in which they were embedded,
Also, the informal meetings allowed the other managers to
ask questions to clarify the official information and apply it
better to their situation.
I find this research very suggestive. It shows the edge-of-
chaos effect in just one small part of an organization.
the power law
How much should an organization change? How often?
Complexity theory has some interesting suggestions. A com-
plex system is at the edge of chaos when there is a
relationship between the rate of change and the size of the
change. This relationship is called a ‘power law’. Changes
follow a power law when the average frequency of a change
is inversely proportional to some power of its size – in other
words, many small changes but very few large ones.
The power law is very common in nature. It is seen in the
behaviour of light from the sun, sunspots, the flow of water
in a river, and in the size and frequency of earthquakes.
Large tremors are rare, but there are many small tremors.
Stock prices and traffic flows in a city also follow a power law.
The Danish physicist Per Bak uses an excellent metaphor
to explain how a power law applies to a system in a critical