I was speaking one day to a group of executives in Belgium. The feedback forms at the end of the conference were, with all due modesty, excellent. Except one. Its score was lower than the rest, and the comment said roughly this:
“Once you’ve read every Yuval Noah Harari book, you don’t really learn much from Bruno Marion.”
It was meant as a criticism. I took it as one of the greatest compliments I’ve ever received. Because looking at it closely, this participant had read every Harari book, and he was still learning things by listening to me. Otherwise, why would he have bothered writing that comment? I went home that night thinking: if someone who has read all of Harari is still learning things from me, then there must be something specific in what I bring. Something that isn’t in Harari. This article is my attempt to put words on it.
I have also read every Harari book. Sapiens, Homo Deus, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Nexus. And I share with that Belgian participant a real admiration for Harari’s work. But what I understood that evening is that my keynote does not replace Harari, it takes over where he leaves off. And the difference between the two is precisely the subject of this article.
Why Harari fascinates executives
Harari is probably the contemporary thinker who has most profoundly shifted how executives look at humanity. He has pulled off something rare: making 70,000 years of human history accessible in a few hundred pages, and then projecting that trajectory into the decades ahead.
His strength is the altitude. Harari zooms out, way out. Where we struggle with quarterly emergencies, he looks at our era from orbit. And from that orbit, one thing becomes obvious: we are living through a transition of unprecedented scale.
In Sapiens, he identifies the great ruptures that reshaped humanity, the cognitive revolution, the agricultural revolution, the scientific revolution. In Homo Deus, he projects the next one, where humans meet artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and possibly their own obsolescence. In Nexus, his most recent book, he pushes further still, exploring how information networks, now populated by AI, transform the very nature of our societies.
Each time, the same implicit question: how will humanity navigate its greatest transition?
That is exactly my question. But we arrive at it through different doors.
Two paths to the same transition
Harari arrives through history and biology. I arrive through the sciences of chaos.
When Harari talks about a “cognitive revolution” or a “biotechnological rupture”, he is describing a phenomenon. When I talk about bifurcation, strange attractor, or phase transition, I am describing exactly the same phenomenon, with a different scientific vocabulary, drawn from chaos theory and complex systems.
The sciences of chaos identified, several decades ago, a fundamental reality: complex systems (a climate, an economy, a civilization) do not evolve linearly. They go through long periods of relative stability, then tip abruptly into a new state. These tipping moments are called bifurcations. And what Harari describes across 70,000 years of human history is precisely a succession of bifurcations, with a dizzying acceleration over the past two centuries.
On this, Harari and chaos theory say exactly the same thing. The map he draws and the one drawn by Mandelbrot, Prigogine, or Lorenz overlap almost perfectly.
So where is the difference? It lies in what comes after the diagnosis.
Harari diagnoses. Chaos theory equips.
Here is what I have observed in many executives who have read Harari: they come out fascinated. And often paralyzed. Because the map is masterful, but it says little, if anything, about what to actually do on Monday morning when leading a team, a department, or a company through this transition.
This is not a reproach to Harari: it is simply not his job. He is a historian and a philosopher. His role is to make us see what we don’t see. Mine is to provide the tools to act, once we have seen.
It is precisely this gap between understanding and acting that chaos theory applied to management fills. Not with simplistic recipes, but with three tools drawn directly from the sciences of complexity.
The strange attractor. In a chaotic system, you cannot predict the exact trajectory, but you can identify the zone within which the system will evolve. For a leader, this means letting go of the illusion of micro-control, and instead defining a clear direction. Not a detailed five-year plan (which will be obsolete in six months), but a strong intention, an attraction zone toward which your team will converge, even through unpredictable paths.
Exponential routines. Complex systems are governed by what is called sensitivity to initial conditions, the famous butterfly effect. Very small actions, repeated, can produce disproportionate effects. For a leader, this means stopping the search for the great heroic decision, and putting in place daily micro-rituals that, through compounding, radically transform the trajectory.
Direction + Repetition. The strange attractor provides the direction. Exponential routines provide the repetition. Together, they form the simplest and most powerful equation for moving through a chaotic transition without burning out.
From dizzying reading to daily action
The Belgian executive who had read every Harari book probably came out of those readings with a feeling I know well: the world is changing at an insane pace, I can see the map, but what do I do with my team tomorrow morning?
This is the question that chaos theory applied to management answers. Not by contradicting Harari. Not by simplifying his work. But by taking over where, by nature, he stops.
Reading Harari means rising up. Applying chaos theory means coming back down, with tools, and acting.
Both are necessary. Diagnosis without tools leads to paralysis. Tools without diagnosis lead to agitation. Together, they enable something far rarer: thriving in uncertainty.
We have never had less control over the trajectory of our era. But we have never had more power to influence things, provided we know where to look, and with which tools to act.
Bruno Marion is an expert in chaos theory applied to leadership and management. An international bilingual English-French keynote speaker, he works with executives and organizations in more than 40 countries. He is the author of Chaos, A User’s Guide and Not Everyone Will End Up with an Axe in the Forest.
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Photo credit
Photo: Martin Kraft, Yuval Noah Harari at the 2024 Frankfurt Book Fair, via Wikimedia Commons, licence CC BY-SA 4.0.
