Problems that don't stay solved

A flame keeps its shape only while fuel and air flow through it. A hurricane holds together only while warm water feeds it. Ilya Prigogine won a Nobel Prize for studying order like this. He called it a dissipative structure: a pattern that exists far from equilibrium, and only while something keeps flowing through it.

Act one: turn up the flow

The field below is a chemical reaction, the Brusselator, a model Prigogine’s group in Brussels built in 1968. Two chemicals react and spread across the field. Right now only a little flows through it.

Slowly raise the flow and watch the field.

Nobody drew that pattern. The shimmer was always there. Past a threshold, the reaction turns those small fluctuations into a pattern. With more flow, the shapes change.

Act two: try to fix it

This field already has structure. First lower the flow until the field goes flat. Then press Bring it back: it puts back the exact labyrinth you started with, without touching the flow.

Even the perfect fix fades. The labyrinth holds only while the flow does. Raise the flow again and watch it come back.

Act three: your own problems

Some problems work like a broken pipe. You fix them and they stay fixed. Others work like the pattern above. They exist only while something keeps flowing, and no single fix holds them in place. Problems like these are called wicked problems: there’s no point where they’re done, and no right answer, only better or worse.

Engagement and productivity often get treated like broken pipes. They get a program, a survey, a target, and then the work moves on. Bring one issue from your own team and answer five questions about how it behaves. Only you know the answers, so there’s nothing to get right.

What's on your mind?

EngagementEngineer productivityTrust between two teamsA flaky test in the buildOnboarding docs

1. When you fixed it last time, did it stay fixed?

   yespartlyno

2. Could you tell when it was done?

   yespartlyno

3. Would two people you trust agree on what "fixed" means?

   yespartlyno

4. Does it depend on how people work day to day?

   yespartlyno

5. Did working on it show you it was a different problem than you thought?

   yespartlyno

Answer a question to see where it sits.

This is a metaphor, not physics. A team isn’t a chemical reaction. But it’s worth asking which of your issues need a fix, and which need a flow.

Sources

Ilya Prigogine and René Lefever, “Symmetry Breaking Instabilities in Dissipative Systems” (1968); Ilya Prigogine, “Time, Structure and Fluctuations”, Nobel lecture (1977); Alan Turing, “The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis” (1952); Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber, “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning” (1973).