One evening, after a keynote, an executive asks me the question I always half expect: “This is inspiring, but what does it actually rest on?” My answer is a name and a date: Ilya Prigogine, Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1977. For more than twenty-five years, his science has been the foundation of my deepest conviction, the one I repeat in almost every talk: chaos is not a mess. With Prigogine, order out of chaos stops being a slogan and becomes science.
Who Was Ilya Prigogine?
Ilya Prigogine was a Belgian chemist and physicist, born in Moscow in 1917 and died in 2003. In 1977 he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on the thermodynamics of systems far from equilibrium, and in particular on what he called dissipative structures.
With the philosopher Isabelle Stengers, he also wrote a book that became a classic, published in English under a title that says it all: “Order Out of Chaos.”
Dissipative Structures, or When Disorder Builds Order
Classical thermodynamics taught us something rather depressing for a long time: left to themselves, systems break down and drift toward disorder. That is the famous notion of entropy.
Prigogine looked elsewhere. He studied open systems, crossed by a flow of energy or matter, and kept far from their equilibrium. There he observed the opposite: under certain conditions, these systems do not decay, they spontaneously reorganize into new structures that are more complex and more ordered.
The mechanism has a beautiful name: order through fluctuations. Near a critical point, a tiny fluctuation can be amplified until it tips the whole system into a new organized state. Disorder is no longer only destruction. It becomes the matrix of a new order.
This is exactly what I mean when I say that within chaos there are hidden orders we can learn to use.
Bénard cells, a dissipative structure illustrating Prigogine’s order out of chaos
From Prigogine’s Science to Leadership Tools
This is where my work begins. Prigogine brought the science. My role, and what makes me distinctive as a keynote speaker, is to make it directly applicable to leadership and management, not as a metaphor, but as a toolbox.
Because an organization is precisely an open system, far from equilibrium. A reorganization, a crisis, a stretch of uncertainty: that is your system “far from equilibrium.” The right question is no longer only “how do we get back to the old order?”, but “what new order can emerge?”
Three tools drawn from this reading:
- The strange attractor: in a chaotic system, there is a hidden order around which everything organizes. For a leader, this means setting a direction and a shared sense of meaning, without micromanaging, and letting teams self-organize around it.
- Exponential routines: this is Prigogine’s order through fluctuations, brought down to daily life. Small, regular actions, amplified over time, produce immense transformations.
- Direction + Repetition: hold the course and repeat it, again and again, to move through chaos without getting lost in it.
Why This Changes Everything, Especially in a Crisis
Here is the most counterintuitive and most useful consequence. Prigogine showed that it is precisely when a system is far from equilibrium, in full turbulence, that reorganization and emergence become possible.
In other words, a crisis is not only a threat. It is also a window. The moment when a new order, sometimes a far better one, can be born. That is why I tell leaders that, in a world that has become chaotic, they have never had so much power to shape what comes next.
Prigogine taught us that chaos creates order. My job is to show you how to put that to work, starting tomorrow, inside your organization.
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.
