F r a c t a l s
Fractals are created by repeating a simple process over and over in an ongoing feedback loop. I see their growth as a metaphor on the effect our communication has on the relationships we are in!
Julia-set fractal pattern created by the FRAX app on my phone: mathematics made beautiful.
The ongoing feedback loops between people in relationship systems, are much like fractals, repeating the process of communication, yielding successes and tensions – sometimes chaos. For humans to become better at understanding, navigating and communicating in systems, we need to up-skill our perception of the systems we are a part of, repeating what works and discarding what does not.
A mathematician called Mandelbrot put fractals into words in the 1970-ies. Fractals are never-ending, infinitely complex patterns. A fractal is self-similar across different scales. They are created by repeating a simple process over and over in an ongoing feedback loop. Driven by recursion, fractals are images of dynamic systems – the image of Chaos. If you divide a fractal pattern into parts you get a nearly identical reduced-size copy of the whole.
The World Economic Forum, Future of Jobs reports, acknowledge the importance of the workforce learning together in systems to co-create solutions for the challenges of our times. The metaphor of fractal growth and how we grow our relational capability as humans, may inspire us in our understanding of skilling up our human intelligence acting in systems – and we can only really do that in the relationship systems we are a part of, whether at work or in private. We need to up-skill our learning capabilities.
Fractals are everywhere: clouds, snowflakes, mountains, river networks, cauliflower or broccoli, and many of the systems in physical bodies.
Natural objects, including humans, are composed of many different types of fractals woven into each other, each with parts that have different fractal dimensions: our lungs, our circulatory system, our brains – are like trees, all fractal structures.