The Madman and the Butterfly

When I was a kid, I heard the story of the fish and the whale. It seems a fish swam up to a whale, angry about something the whale was doing. The fish kick the whale. The whale ate the fish, and that was the end of that. Meanwhile, a bacterium got inside to whale. It reproduced inside the whale and ultimately killed the whale. The moral of the story is supposed to be that if you want to make a change, you need to do it from the inside.

There are a few problems with this story. One is, why didn’t the whale’s immune system kill off the bacteria? Also, what if you want to change something big, but not kill it?

Thinking about this recently, I remember two other quotes. The first is attributed to Dag Hammarskjold: “The madman shouted in the market place. No one stopped to answer him. Thus it was confirmed that his thesis was incontrovertible.”

The second quote is:

The flapping of a single butterfly's wing today produces a tiny change in the state of the atmosphere. Over a period of time, what the atmosphere actually does diverges from what it would have done. So, in a month's time, a tornado that would have devastated the Indonesian coast doesn't happen. Or maybe one that wasn't going to happen, does.

(Ian Stewart, Does God Play Dice? The Mathematics of Chaos, pg. 141)

While the second quote really is about chaos theory, I’ve heard people talk about it in terms of grassroots organizing reminiscent of Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice's Restaurant
Anti-Massacre Movement”

Thinking about it from an organizing perspective, it raises the question, what is the difference between a madman and a butterfly? Why is it that one person can shout out in the market place and be disregarded and another person can start a series of events leading up to something as powerful as a devastating tornado?

I think there are two important concepts that come into play. One is that of the “influential”. From RoperASW: “The Influentials are a powerful group proven through 60 years of RoperASW research to be the 10% of the population that shapes the attitudes and behaviors of the other 90%.”

The question becomes, how do you influence The Influentials? For that matter, if you manage to become an influencer of The Influentials, who influences you?

The second concept is that of “connectors” and “boundary spanner” in social network analysis. Some networks end up being closed systems. Everyone may be well connected to everyone else in the system, but there is no way for the information to get out of the system. In junior high school, we referred to systems like this as ‘cliques’. In the blogosphere, we now call them echo chambers. What systems like this need are “boundary spanners”, people who connect to that system and to other systems so that the information flows between systems. Perhaps the most interesting boundary spanners right now are those who are on both Free Republic and Democratic Underground.

It seems as if the madman is the would-be influential without access to, or who is not trusted by, boundary spanners. The butterfly is the influential that manages to package the message in such away that boundary spanners can transport it across boundaries.

There is a delicate balance here. The influential needs to have a message that is worth repeating but not so different that it doesn’t get repeated. Butterflies have beautiful graceful balance and madmen don’t

Posted by Aldon Hynes at June 30, 2004 6:12 AM | TrackBack