THE MANAGEMENT OF CHAOTIC SYSTEMS

Previous papers have described the chaotic nature of nonlinear systems under some conditions: widely fluctuating and randomly appearing beha vior, high sensitivity to initial conditions, and ''attraction'' to a regular trajectory in transformed space. This work has served to demon strate for planners and policy analysts as well as physical scientists that attempting to forecast the precise future state of a chaotic sys tem may be futile. Yet if the real world is basically nonlinear, then problems of control and management must be faced. This article is an a ttempt to begin to address this issue. First, we construct a simple so cial model that can exhibit chaos under some conditions. Then we ask w hat can be done by a manager to reach hypothetical goals despite the f act that the system he or she is trying to control is in chaos. We fin d some rules of thumb that may have general applicability to managemen t and introduce some ideas for further study [1].