I heart chaos (in project management)

I'm nowhere near being done talking about <2008/11/02/what-im-reading-chaos/">Chaos: Making a New Science. Possibly because it offers infinite complexity...haha. Ahh. Yes. Jokes no one will get.Anyway, while thinking about phase shifting behavior in nature (which is really neat: matter behaves predictably when it's a solid, liquid, etc., but at that point when it's changing from one to the other--freezing, melting, what-have-you--it behaves completely unpredictably. Not only that, but its behavior is nothing like either a solid or a liquid. It's chaotic), it occurred to me that this is true for project management, too. We know what to do when we're in the strategy, creative, or engineering phases of a project. Chaos arises at the handoffs.Chaos was hard to study from a math/science perspective because our languages for discussing math and science were built around describing linear systems. We quite literally didn't have a way to talk about it. So, we viewed chaos as "noise" and just assumed it was randomness. We ignored it, and/or minimized its importance, because it was hard to talk about.It's the same with project management. In any agency, there's some sort of process around strategy, creative, and development. The handoffs are where it gets ugly. What do we do to cope with this? Maybe we write briefs to deliver from one department to another--the PM equivalent of defining input parameters and just hoping that the following process works as we believe it does. Maybe we have a handoff meeting where we bring two teams together, and we hope that the two systems can communicate (which doesn't usually happen...).The thing that seldom happens, and this is actually the part that I love, is that the same strategy is carried through the whole project. To do this, you'd need to keep a consistent strategy team on the project from the beginning to the end. The creative and development processes would have to keep circling back around and getting input from strategy (ooh ooh--just like turbulence, a chaotic system!). The strategy team would need to know enough about design and engineering to be able to converse intelligently about them with designers and engineers. But all of that is a tall order. Can we count on always having strategists on staff who understand the other parts of the process? So instead of dealing with the complex system, we usually default to the easy, linear systems with the handoffs.And in conclusion, I really like those chaotic parts. They're the most interesting. Anyone can set up a linear system and monitor it over time. Dealing with chaos is hard. And it's fascinating. It's where the magic happens.