The Science of Chaos and Careers: Finding the Order that Dwells Within the Turbulence
Chaos Theory represents the paragon of optimistic thinking. Chaos Theory holds the basic premise that order, relentlessly and without fail, emerges from chaos. For our purposes here, we, the authors, believe that the myriad of traits and factors that make up our career experiences are not linear, but they are not random, either. The same principals that explain the order in the turbulence of a stream or a storm front can provide us with insight for helping those who seek our help with their career development and decision making.
The Chaos Theory sheds light on the way careers take shape because our career self-concept is a self-organizing, adaptive, complex system. Complex adaptive systems exchange and absorb information in order to grow as our career self-concept gathers information in order to grow and gain complexity. The more we understand the self-organizing process that drives complex adaptive systems, the better able we will be to influence the way we gather information and, subsequently, the development of our career self -concept. As we are better able to manage the development of our career self-concept, we will increase the frequency of satisfying career experiences. As our career self-concepts evolve, we can intentionally control the sort of information we feed into the complexity building process experienced by our career-self concept. Therefore, we should be intentional about the way we scan ourselves and our environment for information and the way we filter the information that becomes part of our career self-concept. The Chaos Theory helps us to understand how systems grow from a few simple elements to become the complex set of behaviors that make up our careers.
William Stone, in Applying the Science of Chaos to Career Counseling- A Primer, offers an overview of systems thinking and Chaos theory in order to build a foundation for exploring the other articles in this edition of the Career Planning and Adult Development Journal.
Grace M. Leonard, in From Chaos to Order: How a Human Service Degree Program Helped to Change a State Mental Health System, reviews the history of one mental health system and then discusses the programmatic implications for Chaos Theory and the counseling profession.
Tom Harrington and Joan Harrington-in Everyone Has Abilities, but Do Counselors Know How to Assess All Abilities and Use This Information ?~offer a new instrument for facilitating the self-organizing process among our clients. Focusing on abilities, the assessment offers the potential for a rich and productive dialogue between the client and the counselor, as they seek to define the patterns the client hopes to build for herself.
Robert Pryor and Jim Bright, in Chaotic Careers Assessment: How Constructivist Perspectives and Psychometric Techniques can be Integrated into Work and Life Decision Making, offer us an argument supporting the idea that Chaos Theory provides a vehicle for combining a variety of counseling approaches toward helping our clients better cope and plan for turbulent change in their careers. They promote the use of both quantitative and qualitative approaches as we help our clients make career decisions.
Jim Bright and Robert Pryor, in The Chaos Theory of Careers: Development, Application and Possibilities, points out that most career change models take a linear approach toward understanding career change, while ignoring that change is not linear or easily predicted. They offer an approach that takes into account the non-linear characteristics inherent in career development.
Lance Kahn, in The Chaos of Careers: A Contextual Approach to Career Development, relates the thinking about career systems and career decision making to chaos theory, beginning with the work of Super and Tiedeman. Kahn asserts that Chaos Theory helps us to understand careers and change in a global context, and helps to make a monumental flow of data and experiences manageable.
William Stone, in Organizing Serendipity: Four Tasks for Mastering Chaos, concludes this issue of the Journal with a very pragmatic approach for using Chaos Theory as an umbrella for other career theories and to help identify specific interventions for facilitating the self-organizing process.
Our authors demonstrate that understanding complex adaptive systems and their accompanying nomenclature can assist our understanding systems in general and the means to facilitate the development of the career self-concept in particular. Any information that is gathered and integrated into a system affects the development of the system. If the information that is gathered is done so intentionally, the self-organizing process will construct our client's career self-concept in a manner that will bring greater career satisfaction to them. Chaos theory is ultimately optimistic because it assures us that order, and a more efficacious career self-concept, must emerge!
[Author Affiliation]
by William Stone, Guest Editor
[Author Affiliation]
William Stone, Augusta, Maine
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