How to read your organization with fractal glasses
Benoit Mandelbrot once asked a question that sounds like a child’s: how long is the coast of Brittany? The answer is unsettling. A few hundred kilometers seen from a satellite. Several thousand if you measure it with a ruler, cove after cove. And if you come closer still, rock after rock, grain of sand after grain of sand, the length keeps growing, almost without end.
The coast has no single length. Its length depends on the scale at which you look at it.
Behind that small paradox hides one of the most useful ideas for leading an organization today.
What Benoit Mandelbrot revealed
A French-American mathematician, Mandelbrot coined the word fractal, in 1975, to name a family of objects that classical geometry could not describe.
He defined them this way: objects, mathematical, natural or man-made, that we call irregular, rough, porous or fragmented, and that hold these properties to the same degree at every scale.
In other words, they have the same shape whether you see them up close or from far away.
The geometry we learned at school knows only the smooth and the whole: the point, the line, the plane, the volume. It describes a knife blade or a marble beautifully. But it has nothing to say about a cloud, a fern, a Romanesco cauliflower, the branches of a tree, a coastline, a galaxy. Those shapes are neither smooth nor whole. They are rough, and each part resembles the whole. We call this self-similarity. Mandelbrot showed that you could assign them a dimension that is not a whole number, a fraction, hence the word fractal, both fractured and fraction at once.
This is the diagnosis, and it is immense. What we take for disorder is not disorder. It is another form of order, richer, that our geometry of the smooth simply could not see. Nature is not a badly filed accident. It is fractal, and its roughness obeys rules.
Mandelbrot made measurable what seemed shapeless.
From mathematics to a pair of glasses
This is where my work begins, and it is of a different nature than his. Mandelbrot was a mathematician: he described the hidden geometry of the world. I do not extend his equations, I use them to build a tool for seeing.
I call it fractal glasses.
Our old scientific glasses are cut for a stable world, close to equilibrium, and binary: true or false, good or bad, work or holidays, headquarters or subsidiary. They work as long as the world stays smooth. But it no longer is. It has become turbulent, fast, interconnected, and in many areas frankly chaotic.
Keeping on looking at it with glasses made for the smooth means seeing disorder everywhere and enduring it. Fractal glasses do the opposite: they teach you to recognize the order that emerges from disorder.
That is exactly what I sum up in a phrase I have been repeating for years, and which is the direct managerial translation of Mandelbrot’s discovery: chaos is not a mess. If you first want to understand clearly what a fractal is, I wrote a whole article about it, Fractals for Dummies.
Why smoothing everything and stacking it into a pyramid no longer works
Look through these glasses and you will see that it is not only nature that is fractal. Our world has become fractal too.
Our identity, first. We are no longer the son of so-and-so or the villager with a nearly single personality. We are not the same at work, with our friends, with our children, online. We play multiple roles that shift with the audience and the moment. Our self has become fractal, in constant recomposition. Our careers too: the long sequence of study, then work, then retirement fragments into periods that interlock, where you learn while working and work while training. Markets are just as fractal: the same customer flies business class on Monday and economy on Saturday, and the airlines that understood this stopped sorting their clients into two watertight boxes.
Our organizations, meanwhile, have often stayed pyramidal, smooth, cut into neat boxes. That is a geometry of the world before.
In an environment that has become fractal, it makes the company rigid where it would need flexibility, blind where it would need to see things coming. Wanting to predict and control everything from the top of a pyramid is like wanting to measure the coast of Brittany with a single ruler: you get a number, but you miss the real thing.
The answer: the fractal organization, Direction plus Repetition
That leaves the question a leader cares about: concretely, what do we do? Glasses are only useful if they lead to tools. Chaos theory applied to management provides them.
The first principle is the fractal organization. Rather than a pyramid where information rises and orders come down, a structure where each team, each unit organizes itself along the same principles as the whole, at its own scale, with real autonomy.
Mandelbrot’s self-similarity becomes a principle of organization: the whole is found in the part, which makes the whole far more adaptive and resilient than a rigid hierarchy. I developed these less pyramidal organizations in my book Chaos, A User’s Guide.
But a structure is not enough. It still has to be set in motion in the right direction, without micromanaging the path. For that, two simple and immediately usable tools.
First, the strange attractor: in a chaotic system, you do not control the trajectories, but you can set a clear bearing, a fixed point the whole system moves toward, and let everyone find their own way.
Second, exponential routines: small actions repeated every day that, through the butterfly effect, compound over time and end up producing large changes. Direction without repetition stays a wish. Repetition without direction burns out.
The two together, what I sum up as Direction plus Repetition, are how you act in a fractal world.
One point matters here. Mandelbrot comes from mathematics. Ilya Prigogine, whose dissipative structures illuminate emergence, comes from chemistry and physics. Edward Lorenz comes from meteorology. I do not extend any of them and I inherit from none: I start from the same scientific sources to draw, independently, management and leadership tools that none of them set out to build.
They described the world. I propose using it to steer it. Or rather, to influence it.
From a world you endure to a world you read
Mandelbrot taught us that disorder hides a geometry, and that once you know how to read it, the most jagged coast stops being a shapeless chaos and becomes a form you can understand.
That is true of a coastline. It is true of an organization, a career, a market, an era. Putting on fractal glasses means moving from a world you endure to a world you read, and then steer.
We have never had so little control, and never so much power to influence things.
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.
