March 2009, Forum 104, Paris
That morning, my friend Michel Saloff-Coste and I were hosting the 4th session of our Université Intégrale. The theme: “How can we respond in a positive, sustainable, and integral way to the contemporary systemic crisis?” On stage, three speakers I had invited: Edgar Morin, Patrick Viveret, and Thierry Gaudin.
I was expecting a landmark debate. I witnessed a spectacle.
Three men, all past 80, tossing ideas back and forth with the energy of kids in a sandbox. They interrupted each other, teased, rebounded, marveled. I wrote an entire article about that moment, it struck me so deeply.
A few months later, I contributed to the collective book Prospective d’un monde en mutation (L’Harmattan, 2010), edited by Carine Dartiguepeyrou, which also featured Edgar Morin, Thierry Gaudin, and several other speakers from that day. My chapter was titled “Navigating a chaotic world.”
So for fifteen years, I have been “in dialogue” in my own way with Morin’s thinking. And for fifteen years, I have been observing a striking gap between the power of his work and the difficulty leaders face in turning it into something they can use on Monday morning.
This article is my attempt to close that gap.
What Morin Gave the World
It is difficult to summarize in a few lines a body of work that spans seventy years and six volumes of La Méthode. But if I had to name three major contributions from Edgar Morin for understanding our time, I would choose these.
Complex thinking. Morin taught us that a phenomenon cannot be understood by slicing it into pieces. An economic crisis is never only economic: it is also social, ecological, anthropological, even spiritual. Reality is woven — complexus, in Latin, means “woven together.” To think in a complex way is to accept holding several threads at once, without dropping any of them for the sake of a simpler grip.
The polycrisis. Long before the word became fashionable (the World Economic Forum picked it up in 2023), Morin was warning that our crises no longer follow each other — they nest into one another and feed each other. A health crisis becomes economic, which becomes social, which becomes political, which becomes democratic. He called it “the crisis of humanity.”
The way and the metamorphosis. Morin was never a pessimist. He always maintained a tension between clear-eyed awareness of possible collapses and hope in a metamorphosis — that shift the caterpillar sometimes makes to become a butterfly, without anyone being able to predict exactly when or how.
My entire body of work stands on these foundations. I do not extend them; I use them.
The Question That Haunted Me for Fifteen Years
Here is what drove me to write two books on chaos, and to make it the heart of my keynotes.
When I speak in front of an executive committee, a leader sometimes comes to me at the end. They say something like this: “I understand your point about complexity intellectually. I read it in Morin twenty years ago. But Monday morning, when I go back to my office, what do I actually do?“
That is the question that changes everything.
Morin offered a brilliant diagnosis. He named complexity, the polycrisis, metamorphosis. But he left open a question his readers cannot close on their own: how do a leader, a team, an organization move from understanding complexity to a daily practice that takes it into account?
This question is hard because our management tools were all designed for a linear world: five-year plans, top-down KPIs, stable roadmaps, fixed budgets. Applying those tools in a chaotic world is like navigating a storm with a road map.
We need other instruments.
What Chaos Theory Applied to Management Adds
When the world becomes chaotic in the scientific sense — sensitive to initial conditions, non-linear, shaped by amplification effects — then certain scientific concepts, long confined to meteorology or finance, suddenly become useful to leaders.
Here are the three tools I use daily with the organizations I work with.
The strange attractor. In a chaotic system, you cannot plan linearly. But you can create a strong direction, a point of attraction around which the system will “organize itself without being controlled.” For a company, that is a clear, embodied purpose. Not a mission statement framed on the wall: a strange attractor that orients without constraining. Morin spoke of a “politics of civilization.” The strange attractor is its operational translation at the scale of an organization.
The bifurcation. Complex systems do not change through gradual shifts: they tip. There is a “before” and an “after.” A leader’s real job, then, is not to manage averages — it is to spot the signs of an imminent bifurcation and position on the right side of it. This completely changes how you read a market, a team, an industry.
Exponential routines. This is probably the most counter-intuitive contribution. In a chaotic world, it is small, repeated actions that create large emergences — far more than grand strategic plans. It is the butterfly effect turned inward: you deliberately choose a few micro-behaviors, repeat them every day, and let amplification do its work.
Clear direction (strange attractor) + daily repetition (exponential routines): these are the two keys to breakthroughs in complex environments.
A Concrete Example
An industrial SME leader reaches out to me after a keynote. His company, 180 people, is coming out of a difficult period. He has read Morin, he has read Taleb. He agrees with all of it. And he does not know what to do on Monday.
We worked on three things, in this order.
First, clarifying his strange attractor: what is the real purpose of the company, the one that, if it disappeared, would make nothing else make sense anymore? Not the one on the website — the one you feel in your gut. It took him three weeks and several conversations with his teams to name it.
Next, identifying three exponential routines, tiny ones, practiced daily by the leadership team. Nothing spectacular — a four-minute check-in at the start of every meeting, a weekly customer call from each exec, a shared reading moment on Friday. Ridiculous gestures in isolation, powerful when repeated over six months.
Finally, mapping the possible bifurcations in his sector over the next eighteen months and asking, for each one: which side do we want to be on?
Eighteen months later, the company is in a dynamic even he struggles to believe. Not thanks to a grand transformation plan. Thanks to a clear direction and a few routines held.
From Complex Thinking to Complex Action
This, for me, is what continues Edgar Morin’s work rather than reproducing it: taking complex thinking seriously all the way down to its most practical implication — if the world is complex, then action must be complex too.
Complex action is not complicated action. It is often very simple. But it gives up the fantasy of total control and bets on direction and repetition. It accepts that great transformations cannot be decreed — they emerge.
This is exactly what Morin, Viveret, and Gaudin embodied that morning in March 2009 at Forum 104: three men who were not trying to control the debate, but who created, through their presence, their listening, and their joy, a strange attractor the entire room began to follow.
I listened to them that day. Fifteen years later, I am trying to make something useful out of it for the leaders who trust me.
We have never had so little control. But we have never had so much power to influence things.
Bruno Marion is an expert in chaos theory applied to leadership and management. He has delivered more than 1,000 keynotes in 40 countries, in French and English. He is the author of Chaos, a User’s Guide and Not Everyone Will End Up with an Axe in the Forest.
